MY FAVORITE MARTIAN (1963-66) TV photo archive

My Favorite Martian. 1963-1966. Photos. New York: CBS-TV, 1963-66. Set of thirteen vintage original 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm) and 7 x 9″ (18 x 23 cm) black-and-white photos. Most have affixed descriptive text, one has a date stamp. In a few cases the text is loose but present. Also included is a 1/25/65 two-page press release from CBS about Ray Walston, who played the Martian. Overall near fine or better.

A sitcom that aired on CBS from September 29, 1963, to May 1, 1966, for 107 episodes. The show starred Ray Walston as Uncle Martin (the Martian) and Bill Bixby as Tim O’Hara. It was the first of the fantasy situation comedies prevalent on American television in the mid-1960s featuring characters who could do extraordinary things. Its premise was that a human-appearing extraterrestrial in a one-man spaceship nearly collides at high altitude with the U.S. Air Force’s rocket plane, the North American X-15.

The spaceship’s pilot is a 450-year-old anthropologist from Mars. Tim O’Hara, a young newspaper reporter for The Los Angeles Sun, is on his way home from Edwards Air Force Base, where he had gone to report on the flight of the X-15. Returning home to Los Angeles, O’Hara spots the same silver spaceship crash land nearby.

Tim takes in the Martian, saying to other people that he is Tim’s uncle Martin. The Martian refuses to reveal any of his special traits to humans, other than Tim, to avoid both publicity and human panic. Tim agrees to keep the Martian’s Earth identity a secret while he attempts to repair his spaceship.

Uncle Martin has various unusual powers: he can raise two retractable antennae from the back of his head and become invisible; he is telepathic and can read and influence minds; he can levitate objects with the motion of his index finger; he can communicate with animals; he can freeze people or objects; and he can speed himself (and other people) up to do any kind of work.

Also an inventor, Uncle Martin builds several advanced devices, such as a time machine that transports Tim and the Martian to England in the Middle Ages and other times and places, such as St. Louis in 1849 and the early days of Hollywood, and brings Leonardo da Vinci and Jesse James into the present. Another device he builds is a “molecular separator” that can take apart the molecules of a physical object, or rearrange them (making a squirrel into a human). Another device can take memories and store them in pill form to “relearn” them later. Other devices create temporary duplicates, or levitate Martin and others without the need of his index finger.