Where Smarts and intelligence part

FOR a card-carrying baby boomer, revisiting TV series from childhood on DVD -- especially comedies -- is something akin to curling up with a security blanket. Even when the source of the comedy is the Cold War, which didn’t seem so heartwarming at the time.

That particular show, of course, is “Get Smart,” the Emmy Award-winning, Mel Brooks-Buck Henry spy spoof that arrives on DVD Wednesday. “Get Smart,” which premiered on NBC in 1965 and continued until 1970 -- the final season was on CBS -- fed into the country’s insatiable interest in spies, their gadgets and the Cold War. (The 25-disc box set, available exclusively through Time Life until next fall, contains all 138 episodes, $199.96).

Don Adams, a stand-up comic who had been kicking around for years, was perfectly cast as Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, a dapper, well-meaning and utterly clueless secret agent for CONTROL. When he got into trouble -- which was continuously -- he would always tell his long-suffering boss (Edward Platt), “Sorry about that, chief.” Smart’s nasal delivery and famous catch phrases -- “Would you believe

Adams won the Emmy for best actor in a comedy series three years in a row; the series won the Emmy for best comedy twice.

With his brilliant and beautiful assistant, Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), Smart attempted to thwart the bad guys from KAOS, including Conrad Siegfried (Bernie Kopell). The series was filled with the silliest of gadgets, including Max’s shoe phone and the cone of silence, which always malfunctioned. Like so many comedies from years past, “Get Smart” has remained in the public consciousness. In fact, director Peter Segal is in preproduction on a feature version starring Steve Carell as Smart.

Feldon, who does poetry readings and has just written her first novel, says part of the reason for the longevity of “Get Smart” is that it is really art.

“It was a very original form, and it had a unity within itself -- all the pieces worked,” she explained recently. “We think of art as being very serious, but this is serious fun art.”

There is also the novelty aspect of the series, noted Feldon.

“I think when we were little, when we are kids, we remember our childhood so much more vividly than we remember our middle life,” she says.

Though the series was filled with painful puns and equally painful pratfalls, the actors took their work seriously and they rarely improvised.

“Don might have changed something because it may not quite work because the rhythms weren’t working,” she says. “But certainly anyone playing with Don, what lines we said, we said exactly as written. It was very disciplined.”

Thanks to the creative minds behind the series, “Smart” was so dumb it was brilliant. Though Brooks wasn’t that involved in the series, his lunacy is all over the show. Henry stayed on for the first two seasons. “We saw him every day,” Feldon says. “Of course, we adored him.”

One cast member on the show quickly outlived his welcome -- the big, furry dog Fang who played Agent K-13. Fang, recalled Feldon, “was not responsive to the time constraints of making a series.”

In one episode, she recalls, Fang was supposed to jump into a rowboat and untie Agent 99. “They couldn’t get him to do it,” Feldon says, laughing. “Then they threw him in the rowboat. But then he took no interest in me whatsoever.”

To encourage Fang, they put meat between Feldon’s wrists and ankles “so he would go for the meat.” But it just confused the mangy mutt. “He was searching me all over for meat,” she says.

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susan.king@latimes.com