Lawrence D'Oliveiro
2024-08-16 03:53:17 UTC
I was watching all the episodes of Patrick McGoohan’s “Danger Man” TV
series some years ago (being too young to have seen them when they first
came out), and came across something interesting in the last one.
If you haven’t seen this series (the first batch of episodes dates from
1959-1960, with some more made a few years later), it’s a secret-agent-
type thing, with a slight twist. McGoohan was considered for the part of
James Bond, but he disapproved of the character. And so he created John
Drake, sort of the anti-James-Bond: he never seduced the women (always
treated them with respect), didn’t even carry a gun (“they’re noisy and
they hurt people”), and instead of blowing up things, he would try to use
his wits and his charm to get out of sticky situations.
Yes, he would fight when he had to; but it took some provocation to get
him to that point.
Anyway, all but two of the episodes were filmed in black and white. (Yes,
they were shot on film, which is why after all this time they still look
good.) A new series was started in 1966, to be shot in colour, but after
just two episodes were made, McGoohan walked away from the whole
production, to work on another idea, that became “The Prisoner”, a
famously enigmatic TV series which continues to baffle and annoy people to
this day. But that’s another story.
Anyway, the last “Danger Man” episode of all was called “Shinda Shima”,
which I think translates as “Death Island”. Our hero Drake goes undercover
to infiltrate an organized crime operation, which hires him as an
electronics expert to help them break the “operations code of the United
Nations”, aka
the “Unicode”.
Of course, he is actually there to break them. And of course, help some
innocent villagers who are being victimized by the gangsters, while he’s
at it.
OK, so that was mainly an excuse for me to tell you something about
Patrick McGoohan ;). But have you come across any other uses of the term
“Unicode”, before its official adoption as the name of the universal
computer character encoding that we have all come to know and love?
series some years ago (being too young to have seen them when they first
came out), and came across something interesting in the last one.
If you haven’t seen this series (the first batch of episodes dates from
1959-1960, with some more made a few years later), it’s a secret-agent-
type thing, with a slight twist. McGoohan was considered for the part of
James Bond, but he disapproved of the character. And so he created John
Drake, sort of the anti-James-Bond: he never seduced the women (always
treated them with respect), didn’t even carry a gun (“they’re noisy and
they hurt people”), and instead of blowing up things, he would try to use
his wits and his charm to get out of sticky situations.
Yes, he would fight when he had to; but it took some provocation to get
him to that point.
Anyway, all but two of the episodes were filmed in black and white. (Yes,
they were shot on film, which is why after all this time they still look
good.) A new series was started in 1966, to be shot in colour, but after
just two episodes were made, McGoohan walked away from the whole
production, to work on another idea, that became “The Prisoner”, a
famously enigmatic TV series which continues to baffle and annoy people to
this day. But that’s another story.
Anyway, the last “Danger Man” episode of all was called “Shinda Shima”,
which I think translates as “Death Island”. Our hero Drake goes undercover
to infiltrate an organized crime operation, which hires him as an
electronics expert to help them break the “operations code of the United
Nations”, aka
the “Unicode”.
Of course, he is actually there to break them. And of course, help some
innocent villagers who are being victimized by the gangsters, while he’s
at it.
OK, so that was mainly an excuse for me to tell you something about
Patrick McGoohan ;). But have you come across any other uses of the term
“Unicode”, before its official adoption as the name of the universal
computer character encoding that we have all come to know and love?