Mike Post has interview/oral history stuff on YouTube. Fascinating guy. His career was a lot an accident. I wanted to be Mike Post when I grew up.

Yes; and Lalo's connection which led to him getting this gig is that the Mission: Impossible TV series was created by the same guy who created Mannix, Bruce Geller.

I've always thought the fly Theme Music to Mannix was the best thing about that show. The rest of the show's music (especially when diegetic) wasn't composed or chosen by Lalo, and it was almost always embarrassingly the opposite of "hip/cool." And that was also true of Mike Connor's character, who thought of himself as suave and irresistible to the babes, but who always came off like someone's dad trying lame moves and smarmy pick-up lines.

I've come to believe that Mannix might be the worst TV detective ever. He took forever to figure out what was going on, even when utterly obvious, he was caught off-guard and jumped almost every episode, he loses most of his fights, his secretary Peggy does most of the investigative heavy lifting, his physical acting always looked stiffly robotic, and he's terrible at trying to make the hard-boiled noir dialogue he's saddled-with sound convincing. Oddly, I've seen Connors in lots of other roles before he became Mannix, and he almost always played the heavy. And he was terrific as a bad guy. But it's leading man parts in a hit series that pay the bills.

A friend of mine had an old classic copy of Mad Magazine from the early '70s, when they parodied the show. They called it Mannuhx, because about the only acting trick Connors seemed to have was adding pauses punctuated by "uh" to give his line-readings some gravitas. Once I read that parody, I've never been able to watch the show without counting all his "uhs."