Bare breast in Season 3's 'The Sound of Darkness'!

Your screen capture is inconclusive -it looks like any generic glimpse of topless shot in a hundred Something Weird Video reissues of "adults only" soft porn movies from the late 1960s. The lack of definition in the screen capture plus the "fleeting moment" aspect mastbradped alludes to means this was no big deal in 1969.

I was introduced to "adults only" movies back at that time in the form of Russ Meyer films, specifically Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers and later on Vixen. But you are right -this was verboten on American tv. We did get to see plenty of BBC-produced nude shots in shows like Elizabeth R, and Public Broadcasting also delivered the never-to-be-forgotten Valerie Perrine nudity in Steambath in 1973. It is an irony that pay-cable, stupidly not subject to the same rules as broadcast tv (thank our easily corrupted congressmen for that loophole), now insists on including nudity in every stinking series and every overrated award-winning one, too (Sopranos, etc.).

Anyway I congratulate you on your eagle-eyed catch. If it were just more blatant (I guess nipples standing out on the order of Playboy's Kathy Shower would do), this would be groundbreaking. In any event, tv has survived with the bait-and-switch approach, reaching its zenith in the mid-1970s, of "see-through" cheesecake shots, notably the late Farrah Fawcett's famous work on Charlie's Angels -no nudity, but better. As a kid, Sophia Loren's famous clinging see-through clothing when she emerges from the ocean in Boy on a Dolphin (plus a poster for sale, pre-Farrah; see the IMDb gallery showing the shot in a b&w version that doesn't do it justice) had me watching whenever that great Fox movie was broadcast, and nobody got into a puritanical censorship mood.

"Three quarters of what is said here can be completely discounted as the raving of imbeciles" - Donald Wolfit in Blood of the Vampire (1958)

Having just seen "The Sound of Darkness" today, I agree that while it may have been a "wardrobe malfunction," it clearly didn't trouble the producers enough to go back to edit the shot. Many people in 1969 still had black and white televisions, and even in color, the orange bikini top makes the fleeting glimpse hard to detect. During the scene, Joe and Peggy are walking on the beach from right to left across the screen, and the camera is following them as they walk. The audience's attention was directed at them, and the pan over the sunbathers is pretty quick. And as someone else pointed out, without VCRs or similar technology, home viewers would have had no chance to pause, reverse, or go back over the scene. But having said that, kudos to the person who caught this -- I agree that it appears to be something that slipped past the censors, though it's about the mildest such mistake that someone could have made at the time.

obviously watching the Mannix Marathon today on CLOO... This episode is on at 9pm tonight according to CLOO website.. The TWC online guide shows a different episode ... Since CLOO cuts episodes to add more commercials, I will be curious if the scene is dropped...

I'm glad the exposure was apparently missed. This is the kind of realism we hope for!

"No cheesecake [photos]." -- Hazel (Shirley Booth)