Your mission, trivia hounds, should you choose to accept it: Thoroughly read this dossier on the long-running Mission: Impossible movie franchise, set to end with the impending release of its final installment. 
 
Desilu Studios, the television production company co-founded by TV legend Lucille Ball, sold two shows to two different networks in 1966: Star Trek to NBC, and Mission: Impossible to CBS. Mission: Impossible was the bigger hit, running for seven seasons, and it would prove the former sitcom star had the skills to be a TV mogul.
 
Martin Landau turned down the role of Spock on Star Trek to play Rollin Hand on Mission: Impossible. Leonard Nimoy got the gig. When Landau left the show, a new character of Paris was created. The actor who got that part, and thus replaced Landau: Leonard Nimoy.
 
Peter Graves played spy team leader Jim Phelps on the series, replacing Steven Hill as Dan Briggs in Season One. Graves became so linked with the show that the first-season episodes with Hill weren’t shown in reruns for years, because syndicators worried it would confuse viewers. 
 
Mission: Impossible was revived by ABC in 1988, but it might more properly be called an ultra-faithful remake. Facing a TV industry-wide writers’ strike, the network planned to just use the scripts written for the original show two decades earlier. 
 
The first Mission: Impossible movie arrived in 1996, right in the middle of a Hollywood fad of reinventing live-action TV shows from the 1960s and 1970s as big-budget film spectaculars. Starring Tom Cruise as operative Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible became the highest-grossing movie of all time that was based on a primetime TV show. It’s since had the record beaten by a Star Trek movie and five more Mission: Impossible movies.
 

 
Spoiler alert for a 29-year-old movie: The original TV series’ hero, Jim Phelps, is the villain of the first Mission: Impossible movie. That upset the character’s original actor, Peter Graves. He was so upset that Phelps was made into a turncoat that he refused the chance to reprise the role. (Jon Voight got the part.) Original cast member Martin Landau publicly criticized the movie for violating the spirit of the series, and costar Greg Morris so hated the film that he walked out of the premiere.
 
The Mission: Impossible movie franchise attracts luminous screenwriters, generally the type that compose fare more acclaimed and cherished than spy movies. Among the series’ writers: David Koepp (Jurassic Park), Robert Towne (Chinatown), JJ. Abrams (Lost), and Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects).
 
Movie actors performing in front of completely computer-generated settings is commonplace in filmmaking today. The first major film to use totally invented computerized backgrounds: the first Mission: Impossible movie.
 
One hallmark of every Mission: Impossible TV show and movie: Its catchy, exciting, instrumental theme song written by Lalo Schifrin. He’d already composed another song for use in the credits sequence, but creator Bruce Geller didn’t like it. He instead took some action sequence music that Schifrin wrote for the pilot episode, and used it for the theme song instead.