Ancient Web: Amanda Haverstick Unclassified Get Smart Fandom

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The television spy comedy Get Smart had CONTROL and KAOS. Its fans had something rather more labor-intensive: a homemade intelligence archive.

Visit The Unclassified Get Smart Site

Amanda Haverstick dates her unofficial fan website to July 6, 1999. Its front page keeps a filing-cabinet navigation system of character pages, show history, favorite episodes, cars, weapons, controversies, photographs, fan fiction, memorabilia, and interviews. Agent 86 has a page; Agent 99 has a page. Even the show's fictional spy gadgets get their own shelf.

The site was still displaying an update note in March 2023, explaining that its episode commentary was being moved to a blog. The long-lived homepage itself remains an artifact of the age when a person could build a reference guide because the official archive was not going to do it for them.

Intelligence gathered by fans

The most useful section is the Get Smart Reference Guide, which sorts clippings into 1959–1980 magazine articles, later press coverage, newspaper pieces, miscellaneous interviews, books, and comic books. The webmaster invites readers to suggest missing articles and jokes about how much effort it takes to identify minor characters and performers.

The guide is not simply a list of episodes. It documents the surrounding press life of the television program: magazine profiles, actor interviews, the careers of Don Adams and Barbara Feldon, the Nude Bomb movie, and the printed fiction that sprang from the show.

A separate show-history page explains how the television series was conceived and produced. Other homepage links lead to a fan gathering, a collection of lunchboxes, trading cards, soundtrack clips, and discussions of the difference between television continuity and later adaptations.

That sprawling navigation says something about early online fandom. Fans did more than post reactions. They scanned, indexed, transcribed, compared, argued, and assembled artifacts from newspaper clippings or shelves at home. A fan website could become a community reference library.

Haverstick is explicit that the clippings and images retain their copyrights. She also guards her own written material. Preservation and permission are not the same thing.

The Unclassified Get Smart Site is still useful because its eccentric organization reveals what one enthusiast thought deserved rescuing, down to the smallest secret file.

Explore the fan reference guide or the original homepage.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.