• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 8 hours ago

A recent PrizePicks commercial that used a shoe phone had me wondering if the spot was inspired by “Get Smart.” 

“Get Smart” was the well-remembered 1960s comedy series created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry about a bumbling secret agent, Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams.

Smart's most famous gadget was his shoe phone (photo above) -- an obvious precursor of the mobile phones that later came to transform the world.

Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone was a wireless telephone with a receiver in the heel and mouthpiece in the sole. It was used in an estimated 60-70 episodes of the show.

But according to a Google search, the shoe phone was just one of literally hundreds of gadgets used in the show that satirized the gadgetry of the James Bond movies.

In “Get Smart,” all of the gadgets are ridiculous. However, I studied a comprehensive list I found on-ine to see if I could unearth any that were eerily prescient about technology that came afterward.

The TV Blog covered similar territory in 2023 in an exploration of “The Jetsons,” the great 1960s animated comedy series about a typical family living in the year 2062.

The list of innovations seen on “The Jetsons” is long. Here is a partial list: Flying cars, personal computers, tablets, flatscreen TVs, smartwatches, virtual doctor visits, drones, robotic vacuum cleaners and others.

With all due respect to “Star Trek,” “The Jetsons” is widely considered to be the most prescient TV series of all in its predictions of technology to come and how family life would be impacted.

So how does “Get Smart” stack up? If it is not nearly as successful as “The Jetsons” in predicting the future, some of its gadgets reflected potential technologies that would crop up in the future, some of which coincide with “The Jetsons.”

According to a comprehensive list of all the “Get Smart” gadgets on the indispensable website WouldYouBelieve.com, there were more than 50 other phone devices on the show.

Other places where “Get Smart” mobile phones were embedded included a cheese sandwich, a bar of soap, a daisy and a sunflower.

But there was also a phone in a watch, and even more intriguingly, there was a phone in a pair of eyeglasses.

While today’s smart glasses such as Ray-Ban Meta need to be Bluetoothed to a smart phone to make and end calls, it is basically the same thing -- users talk through their glasses.

Smartphones, smart watches, smart glasses … it seems we are all getting “smart” these days.

Two other gadgets foreshadowed today's exterior home-surveillance technology. One was Maxwell Smart's periscope rainspout, through which he could see the whole neighborhood.

Even more similar to the way we keep an eye on our front doors and the people outside of them was a “Get Smart” device called the Door Zipper, which allowed Smart to see who was at the door.

Among other benefits in today’s world, Ring doorbells equipped with cameras have protected families from intruders, and provided free or very low-cost video clips for TV shows, including “Ridiculousness” on MTV and “Neighborhood Watch” on HGTV.

The other gadget in the “Get Smart” pantheon that is likely as famous as Maxwell Smart's shoe phone was the device known at the Cone of Silence.

<>This was a large sheltering device made of glass or clear plastic that was lowered onto a pair of people in order to protect the privacy of their conversation.

The device was not a cone, but it was said to have been invented by a Professor Cone.

Today, the Cone of Silence of “Get Smart” is comparable to soundproof office pods. The pods can also be likened to another “Get Smart” gadget that appeared only once, the Closet of Silence.

Meanwhile, the shoe phone commercial for PrizePicks features comedian/actor Sam Richardson giving NBA great Allan Iverson a giant sneaker with a cellphone embedded in its sole.

The presentation is inspired by a locker-room moment in 2000 in which Iverson picked up a teammate's huge sneaker and pretended to talk on it like a phone.

Photo courtesy of Catchy Comedy, a diginet channel specializing in classic sitcoms.