For kids of the ’60s, it was a thrilling weekly ride and for adults revisiting it later, it became a time capsule of an era when television dared to mix earnest family drama with outlandish spectacle.

"Give me a child at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life." So the fanatical teacher of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969) liked to say. And so the TV networks have repeatedly proved.