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Fact and Fiction Behind Bond's Gadgets
bubblegoose writes "With the new 007 movie coming out soon MSNBC is running a story about some of the fact and fiction behind the Bond gadgets."
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John Cleese played Q's assistant in the last movie. I recall seeing him in trailers for this one. Doubtfull he'll do the funny walk though. :)
Trolling is a art,
John Cleese -- it's official. He's promoted from R (which I always figured was meant to be pronounced "Arrrrrr" like a pirate).
Design for Use, not Construction!
Q had fabricated this extremly useful hair gel. And if u mix it with your aftershave, guess what, instant C4.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
It was hosted by Maryam d'Abo of The Living Daylights. She went around searching for and interviewing women from Ursula Andress (of Dr. No) through Hally Berry.
It's probably not the show you were looking for (no pr0n here), but it was a good show.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Go read "The Spy Who Loved Me". It's a drastic departure for what you expect from Bond. For one thing, it takes place in upstate NY (Lake George area). For another, it is written from the perspective of a Canadian woman who was educated in England and was driving from Canada to Florida and got stuck...in Lake George.
For those of you that think Fleming wrote most of the movies, it WAS true for a little while. Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and most of Goldfinger were true to the novels. Even Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But most of the rest were either very different from the books, or were short enough to be reduced to the opening sequence (The Living Daylights). Go spend the time to hunt through E-Bay or your local used bookstore to find them. It's worth it.
Just be sure you don't end up with a book I picked up in a used bookstore a while ago because it looked amusing: the novelization of The Spy Who Loved Me, written by Maibaum's co-script-writer for that movie. Apparently the filmmakers were uncomfortable about the movie being so different from the book, so they wanted to put something on store shelves that people would at least recognize as similar. Quite bizarre.
Many people don't realize this, but the fact is, Fleming never intended to write the James Bond books just for the sake of writing them. From the very beginning, he had his eye on lucrative TV/movie adaptations. The very first adaptation was of Casino Royale in 1959, on an otherwise forgettable CBS anthology TV series. It made James Bond American and put him in the CIA. (I saw a tape of that episode in Best Buy years ago, before I knew what it was, and I'm still kicking myself for not buying it.) The rights issues surrounding this early sale led to the subsequent Casino Royale Woody Allen parody.
When interest arose in making movies from his books (largely because President Kennedy was seen reading Dr. No), Fleming told the Broccolis, in effect, "If you can use the plot, use it. If you can just use the title, use it. I don't care, as long as you pay me."
If you're wondering how I know this, I took an intersession course in James Bond a couple years ago at my local college (Southwest Missouri State University)'s media department. It was most informative.
(Did you know that Ian Fleming also did the concept development work for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? Or that all three leads from the Bond-copycat series The Avengers ended up with roles in James Bond movies?)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
That would be South Africa, and it's called The Blaster.