"There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets, he stays a stranger
With every move he makes, another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow
Secret Agent Man! Secret Agent Man!
They've given you a number.... and taken away your name!"
To everyone he meets, he stays a stranger
With every move he makes, another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow
Secret Agent Man! Secret Agent Man!
They've given you a number.... and taken away your name!"
— Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"
Related to the Action Series, although not necessarily a series, and not necessarily even action-heavy, it's any work in which the main character or characters are spies, secret agents, double agents, or some other form of espionage professional. Spy Fiction tends to fall along a spectrum of what we've dubbed "flavours": From "Martini" to "Stale Beer".
- Martini Flavored (shaken, not stirred) Spy Fiction is what you might call the Tuxedo Approach. This involves glamorous parties, fast cars, hot women in Spy Catsuits, Sex-Face Turns, high-risk casino games, cool gadgets, and brutal fights involving guns, fists, and big explosions (swap those adjectives around as you wish). This is the Hotter and Sexier spy game, with a more glamorized and idealistic approach, clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys" and more of an action movie feel, sometimes to the point where nobody ever actually spies on anyone. Despite the glamour, spying is not for the faint of heart, as it is fraught with danger and the stakes are massive. A Death Trap is par for the course. The main example here is, of course, James Bond, particularly the movies. Also known as the Eurospy style, after the many low-budget European spy movies in The '60s that tried to cash in on the success of Bond.
- Stale Beer Flavored Spy Fiction could also be called the Trenchcoat Approach. Predating the Martini approach, this is the Darker and Edgier spy game in that it does not romanticize the profession. It involves Dead Drops, brush-pasts, blackmail, and morally iffy things. Spying is stressful, and you may end up a paranoid alcoholic or worse. The plots are more gritty and morally ambiguous, spying reflects power politics between whichever nations or organizations are involved, and other nations and people are caught in the crossfire. Consequently, the stakes tend to be a lot lower: rather than dealing with plots to Take Over the World or completely destroy the rival, Stale Beer plots typically involve seemingly minor plans for the possibility of incremental gain—or which might not in the end significantly change the state of play among the powers. This is the approach taken by Len Deighton and The Bourne Series, John le Carré, and by Callan, the classic counterpoint to James Bond. Ironically, the original James Bond novels by Ian Fleming are like this, and both Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig played the character this way.
And within these two poles, we have various mixes and flavours:
- Dirty Martini Spy Fiction (also referred to as "Stale Beer Served in a Martini Glass") is the gritty style of espionage taking place in glamorous international or domestic locations, such as Japan, Italy, Spain, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Hawaii, etc. I Spy and the Daniel Craig James Bond films exemplify this trope.
- Bathtub Gin Flavored Spy Fiction applies to civilians drawn knowingly or unwittingly into the world of espionage that is either "martini flavored," "stale beer flavored," or a "dirty martini." They may have or not have transferable skills to help them survive, and they may or may not become realized agents at some point. Examples include: Mrs. Peel (The Avengers (1960s), in the opening voiceover intro, she is introduced as a "talented amateur"), Chuck (Chuck); Amanda King (Scarecrow and Mrs. King), Mrs. Polifax (The Mrs. Pollifax series) or some Bond girlfriends (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Goldeneye, Spectre); the show Masquerade
(where civilians with special occupational or avocational expertise are drafted to help the government on one-off missions; and Tom Hank's character in The Man with One Red Shoe. Alfred Hitchcock also exemplified this to a tee in his earlier films, especially in such stories as North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The 39 Steps (1935). A contemporary example of this is the TV series The Night Manager starring Tom Hiddleston.
- Layered Drink Flavored Spy Fiction applies to a Byzantine-style of espionage full of intrigue, twists, misdirection, etc. Example: The novels of John le Carré, such as: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Russia House, and The Tailor of Panama to name a few.
- Absinthe Flavored Spy Fiction applies to those missions that are in- or touch on- the realm of Speculative Fiction, defined by Wikipedia as: "A broad category of fiction encompassing genres with certain elements that are nonexistent in terms of reality, recorded history, or nature and the present universe, covering various themes in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics." Examples of Speculative Fiction in Spy Fiction: The James Bond Films: Live and Let Die, Bond encounters: Solitaire, a psychic who uses tarot cards, and in the film's tag, the Voodoo God Baron Samedi; in Die Another Day, Bond encountered genetic manipulation so advanced that actual physical changes could be brought about in a subject. Television series: In The Wild Wild West, James West was once shrunk to doll-size, was imprisoned in an alternate reality inside a painting, entered the dimension of Limbo, and even encountered the Philosopher's Stone of alchemic lore; in The Avengers, Steed was once shrunk to doll-size; and in Alias, the “Rambaldi Devices”. The Prisoner (1967) is probably the codifier for this subgenre, with surrealist science fiction elements and social allegory taking precedence over literal plot. In literature, the writings of William S. Burroughs offer a particularly Mind Screw-y form of this.
- Bleach and Ammonia Flavored A common variant of this genre full of Government Conspiracy plots in which Anyone Can Die, often filled with disposable henchmen - a situation in which even the protagonist may even find himself/herself. Naturally Darker and Edgier than other versions of this genre. Examples include films such as Safe House and Three Days of the Condor.
In other words, the Tuxedo Approach would have a Soviet defector be a gorgeous, aloof Slavic beauty with whom the hero will probably elope at some point; the Stale Beer Approach would have a Soviet defector be a shaken, morally gray individual looking more for personal profit or some other material benefit (e.g. trying to get out of the way of an impending purge) than for any virtues of right or wrong. The "Dirty Martini" would be set in a glamourous location from the former but the defector would be from the latter; the Bathtub Gin variant would have the defector be an innocent civilian who's gotten mixed up in events over their head; the "Layered Drink" would have twists and turns leaving us unable to trust whether hero or defector are who they say they are; "Bleach and Ammonia" would probably kill off both hero and defector at some point; and "Absinthe" would have the defector be a sorcerer battling the Eldritch Abominations who are really in charge of the Soviets.
The Martini Flavored and Stale Beer Flavored tropes as well as the various trope permutations (Dirty Martini and Bathtub Gin) may involve a Cloak and Dagger agency, Agents Dating, or any of the full gamut of Espionage Tropes.
Spy Fiction can often overlap with some other genres. Any stories which concern international espionage, military intelligence, geopolitical conflicts (both hot and cold wars), will obviously overlap with Military and Warfare Works. Stories about (undercover) police detectives or law enforcement agents investigating domestic criminal activity tend to fall under Mystery Fiction and Police Procedural, though they're not always classified as being in the spy genre. Conspiracy Thrillers are very closely related, as they also tend to revolve around people who work for (or have close encounters with) secretive organizations pursuing their own political agendas. There's also Ninja Fiction, which may sometimes feature ninjas conducting espionage for intelligence purposes in addition to covert assassinations.
In the US, it was the subject of Cyclic National Fascination during The '60s.
Spy Stories:
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Animation
- Agent Ali: Bathtub Gin with Dirty Martini and Absinthe mixed in - Ali is a middle-schooler who gets recruited by MATA, an agency founded by Cyberaya's mayor to protect the city. Some of Ali's family are part of MATA already, other agents in training are below or above Ali's age, with various reasons for joining MATA. Futuristic gadgets and destructive power sources make the Martini and Absinthe, the grittiness is apparent in conflicting loyalties and the long-lasting consequences the missions have on some agents. In the movie, Grey-and-Gray Morality is more at play, as the mayor is responsible for shaping the antagonist's destructive, but initially well-meaning, cause.
Anime & Manga
- 009-1: Technicolor Ninja cyborg spy girls with miniskirts and machinegun breasts, traveling the world and looking great doing it... while taking part in stories about betrayal, tragedy, and moral ambiguity, with happy endings virtually nowhere to be found.
- From Eroica with Love — Stale Beer with occasional Martini flavoring. Specifically, the spy character enjoys stale beer while the thief he's after drinks his martinis from diamond glasses.
- High Card — contains a bit of Martini and Stale Beer. High Card's an agency tasked by the Fourlandian government to pursue special cards taken from the royal castle. The team does their work by fighting while looking good and by being a Badass in a Nice Suit.
- Lycoris Recoil — A dark and dangerous Dirty Martini world with Chisato thinking (or at least acting like) she's the protagonist of an idealistic and fun Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan Tuxedo and Martini Bond Film, whereas Takina and the rest of the organization (tries) to embrace the cruel and dark Stale Beer cynicism of a Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig Bond Film in spite of Chisato trying her darned best to make everyone look on the bright side of life.
- Mission: Yozakura Family: A rather zany (but no less dangerous) Bathtub Gin Flavored world that our protagonist Taiyo Asano finds himself in. Starting out as a regular (if not traumatized due to losing his family) high school student, he discovers that his Childhood Friend is the heiress to the famous family of spies. Having his life threatened by her Knight Templar of a brother, he ends up married to his friend in order to survive and to protect her. While he slowly begins to become a more accomplished spy, he is still rather baffled by the antics of this world of spies.
- Najica Blitz Tactics — Martini, complete with a soundtrack straight out of a '60s spy TV series.
- Night Raid 1931: The first half (most especially the first episode) started out as Martini due to the protagonists using their Psychic Powers (in place of tech and gadgets) and the setting being in Shanghai which in Real Life is the City of Spies. Then the second half went to Stale Beer, particularly the episodes detailing historical events such as the Mukden Incident which leads to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and Emperor Puyi's coronation. The epilogue episode deals with the February 26 incident, which paves the way to the Second Sino-Japanese War.
- Princess Principal — Dirty Martini. The Principal Team's adventures are outwardly glamorous, with car chases, Fancy Steampunk gadgets and a very stylish (Elegant Gothic Lolita) wardrobe. On the other hand, they're teenage killers who will Shoot the Dog if the mission requires it, and there are quite a few hints at the psychological issues their life brings with it.
- Release the Spyce — Martini with a Ninja Fiction fruit twist.
- Spy X Family — Dirty Martini with an Absinthe-infused cherry(maybe two). At a glance, we have a super-spy tasked to infiltrate the high society where his target resides. Look deeper, and we see an exhausted man being worked like a dog, so traumatized by his past experience of war that he'd do anything to prevent it, in the service of an agency staffed with people broken in their own ways from the spy business.such as But there are also many genuinely sweet moments with Loid's cover family; that is to say his wifenote , adopted daughternote , and dognote .
Comic Books
- Action Man — Martini
- Asterix and the Black Gold is a parody of James Bond, with the expy even named Doubleosix.
- Batwoman (Rebirth) has the Martini elements of cool gadgets, exotic locales, and even a character who's a rough Q analogue, but has Stale Beer characteristics like moral grayness, a Wretched Hive setting, and the title character having to face her dark past. Kate Kane's operations also lean more toward black-ops than black-tie.
- Bigfoot & Gray on the Run — Parodied Martini, mainly through the comical evil agent duo formed by Agents Daye and Knight.
- Casanova is Martini and Absinthe. Psychic duels, paratime shenanigans, hidden ultra-advanced civilizations and helicasinos for the win.
- Dominatrix - Bathtub gin flavored mostly.
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen seems to be of the opinion that all spies are Stale Beer flavored, and the ones who play at being Martinis are deluded thugs dressing up their work with fancy toys.
- Men in Black
- Mortadelo y Filemón — Very parodied Martini after it began as a parody of the detective genre.
- Nick Fury — Started out closer to Stale Beer (the character debuted as a WWII Sergeant Rock then reappeared in Marvel's "modern day" as a CIA operative) but rapidly took a turn towards Martini when Jack Kirby got involved and he got a Helicarrier and clones of Adolf Hitler started taking over the world. Then Jim Steranko came on the scene, Nick shaved his scruffy beard and the comic became some kind of radioactive psychic martini/mescaline cocktail.
- Fury (MAX) — The grimiest, nastiest, volatile, stale beer you will ever find.
- Fury: My War Gone By — the dirtiest, grittiest, darkest most Stale beer imaginable.
- Queen and Country
- The Secret Service, a comic written by Mark Millar with art by Dave Gibbons. A street-tough kid from East London is recruited into a version of MI6 straight out of the Bond movies, with all the culture clash one would expect. In short, it's a Martini made with drinks you nicked from the liquor store.
- Sleeper (WildStorm) - Black Martini. Takes all the tropes of Martini (flying cars, cool gadgets, alien technology, superpowers) and runs them through a blender full of Chambord.
- SpyBoy — Teen Superspy does James Bond at its most high tech, combined with puns and a lot of flat out weirdness.
- Super Agent Jon Le Bon — A Children's Comic Book about a bumbling-but-successful spy in a World of Funny Animals.
- Wonder Woman: Black and Gold: A story in the series called "Espionage" is a throwback to the "Mod Era" of Wonder Woman where Diana was an Emma Peel knock-off but with more a Darker and Edgier tone and art style.
Fan Works
- Flutterspy — A comic My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic that uses the Bathtub Gin approach, as gentle, timid Fluttershy is dragged into a Lighter and Softer version of a Martini story.
Films — Animation
- Barbie Spy Squad is a lighthearted take on the genre, with ace gymnasts foiling a cat burglar's plot as spies.
- Cars 2 — Martini-style bathtub gin, though the first film wasn't even a spy film at all.
- Despicable Me 2 - Martini (Parodied).
- The Incredibles - Actually, it's a deconstruction of superhero movies, but it has some elements of Martini, like gadgets or hot girls.
- Spies in Disguise - Martini. Soft, but with a smack of Stale Beer.
Films — Live-Action
- The Adventures of Tartu (1943) - It's a little Stale with a dash of Bath Tub — there's humor, intrigue, but fear due to the real threat of brutal Nazis.
- Agent for H.A.R.M. — Martini
- American Ultra — a rare Stale Beer parody, specifically The Bourne Identity as a slacker comedy. In other words, Dirt Weed. Also crosses over into Bleach & Ammonia.
- Asia Pol - Shaw Brothers attempts to spoof the Bond films with this Affectionate Parody, involving Jimmy Wang Yu. And it's NOT the first of its kind...
- Atomic Blonde features a synth-heavy '80s soundtrack, fancy hotel rooms and nightclubs, and a gorgeous, stylish, ass-kicking female superspy as its heroine, presented with just a bit too much glamour to fall into Stale Beer. However, this goes hand-in-hand with brutal fight scenes, a gritty, morally cloudy story about the onset of Soviet collapse in divided Berlin, and a heavy aversion of Beauty Is Never Tarnished on the part of said heroine.
- Austin Powers — Martini (parodied)
- Les Barbouzes — 1964 French spy Black Comedy
- Barely Lethal — Combining Teen Superspy with high school drama.
- Black Butler
- The Bourne Series — Stale Beer
- Body of Lies - Goes for the Dirty Martini route.
- Burn After Reading - Every character seems to think they're in a different type of spy movie. They are all wrong; they are in fact in a really, really dark farce.
- Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe: Less stale beer or martini, more Sam Axe trying to make a Cuba Libre with aguardiente because rural Colombia in the early 2000s (FARC was still a thing then).
- Carry On Spying — Martini (parodied) and Stale Beer.
- Cats & Dogs is a Martini parody where the cat is the villain instead of the villain's mascot. The first film can be read as a parody or a straight example, in that it's not actually any sillier than a straight example of the Martini genre except for the Talking Animal part, but the second film is a much more direct Bond spoof.
- Code Name: Diamond Head — Martini
- The Courier (2021) is Bathtub Gin combined with Stale Beer; an ordinary British salesman is recruited to pass intel to MI-6 from a Russian spy - there's a running risk of them both being caught by the KGB and the threat of nuclear war looming over them, which takes a personal toll on both of them. Based on a True Story.
- Darling Lili — Martini made with Bathtub Gin, as the main character was not a professional spy before the war.
- D.E.B.S. — Malt, in 1950s Sweetheart Sipping style, perfect for the romance that eventually develops between the heroine and her supposed archnemesis. (In fact, they do exactly that in one scene. Though ironically enough, they also have a few beers together in an earlier scene.)
- The Debt —Focuses on the mental challenges of operating undercover, and the emotional scars left by making the morally ambiguous decisions spy work demands.
- Espion, lève-toi — Bleach and Ammonia Flavored
- The Fast and the Furious: Later films entered this territory due to Sequel Escalation as the Family started doing jobs for the government stopping supervillains and terrorists. Between the glamour, exotic locales, gorgeous women, and the series’ trademark bevy of Cool Cars, it falls squarely into Martini territory, even if the series’ working-class street protagonists ironically prefer a nice cold Corona beer.
- Firefox — Stale Beer until the plane takes off, when it becomes Martini very quickly.
- Film: 5 Fingers (1952): Based on a True Story. James Mason's gentlemanly portrayal of the spy involved give it martini highlights, but the real life events it is based on tend be stale beer.
- G-Force — Martini parody with talking animals.
- Ghosted — Martini parody. The trailer presents an exotic adventure with romcom elements.
- The Good Shepherd — Stale Beer. It chronicles the life and career of an OSS and CIA agent, with his work depicted as particularly unglamorous and the main character being downright apathetic in general.
- The Gray Man (2022) — Stale Beer in the vein of the Bourne series.
- The Guest — Stale Beer Played for Horror, in which an unsuspecting family gets dragged into the mess after an evil version of Jason Bourne shows up at their door.
- Hamossad Hasagur
- Hanna — Stale Beer in the way of The Bourne Series, but with a teenage girl as the protagonist. (Hey, if she's old enough to fight, she's old enough to have a beer.)
- The Human Factor — Graham Greene, who wrote the source novel, later said that he wanted to write a story that showed spies as mundane office workers, civil servants who just happen to work for a spy agency. In the movie Nicol Willamson plays a dull office drone in MI6, who also happens to be passing intelligence along to the Soviets.
- If Looks Could Kill: Martini through and through, playing with the "Bathtub Gin" variety by the means of a serious case of Mistaken Identity.
- The Ipcress File — Probably the Ur-Example for Stale Beer, but it's significantly less stale than the beer served by Le Carre. Later works by Deighton (e.g. Funeral in Berlin) aren't so much Stale Beer as rather What Gets Wrung Out Of The Bar Mat (which has occasionally been used as well to wipe the boots of this or the other spy coming in from the cold).
- Jack Ryan — Stale Beer
- Jack Strong
- James Bond — Vodka Martini, shaken not stirred. In the Daniel Craig films, it isn't shaken quite as much, and some elements of Stale Beer has found its way in to make Dirty Martini, but there is still no doubt it is overall Martini.
- Eon Productions series:
- Dr. No
- From Russia with Love
- Goldfinger
- Thunderball
- You Only Live Twice
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service
- Diamonds Are Forever
- Live and Let Die
- The Man with the Golden Gun
- The Spy Who Loved Me
- Moonraker
- For Your Eyes Only
- Octopussy
- A View to a Kill
- The Living Daylights
- Licence to Kill
- GoldenEye
- Tomorrow Never Dies
- The World Is Not Enough
- Die Another Day
- Casino Royale (2006)
- Quantum of Solace
- Skyfall
- Spectre
- No Time to Die
- Non-Eon films:
- Casino Royale (1954)
- Casino Royale (1967): Parody Martini with a sugar cube laced with LSD substituting for the olive. And maybe a pot-brownie chaser. Yeah...
- Never Say Never Again
- Eon Productions series:
- Johnny English — Martini, parodied.
- Journey into Fear - Bathtub Gin flavored, as an American Everyman runs afoul of Nazi assassins.
- The Kingsman series:
- Kingsman: The Secret Service, a film adaptation of the comic book written and directed by Matthew Vaughn, was more of an Affectionate Parody / Homage to the most far-fetched Bond movies, but with enough serious elements and style to never fall into straight parody.
- Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a sequel to the above.
- The King's Man, a prequel set in The Second Boer War and World War I.
- Le Lion — A detainee of a mental hospital pretends to be a spy. The girlfriend of a psychiatrist working there is kidnapped, so the shrink eventually buys the story of his patient and releases him.
- The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) - As a Reconstruction of 60s spy-fi, it presents the Cold War, CIA-KGB conflict as very Stale Beer, but the agents tasked with the biggest cases are Martini flavored. Think of a bar where everyone orders beer, and one patron comes in and gets a perfect martini.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier plays up the Stale Beer approach, complete with morally gray conspiracies, a government agency that may have sinister agendas, and a hero who is forced to confront his idealism against the cynical world he has found himself in. Being a superhero film, it naturally also comes with some Martini flavorings, especially in regards to the tech.
- Black Widow (2021) is similarly Stale Beer with some superhero Martini elements, but its Beer is even staler than Winter Soldier's. Three of the four main characters are women who were raised as TykeBombs, and very few punches are pulled as to the abuse they suffered — trafficked as young girls, forcibly sterilized, underwent psychological conditioning, and their organization has since escalated to using mind control drugs. And they're among the 5% who even survive the training.
- Mata Hari — A Very Loosely Based on a True Story film about the famous dancer/spy, here played by Greta Garbo
- Men in Black - A sci-fi cocktail of Martini and Absinthe. The titular MIB are basically a Secret Police agency responsible for maintaining the masquerade of extraterrestrials secretly living on Earth. They do their jobs by using all sorts of high-tech gadgets and weaponry, while wearing fancy black suits.
- Mile 22— Betrayals and secret agendas, mixed along with the action.
- Ministry of Fear — Ray Milland chased by Nazis who want his MacGuffin
- Miss Mend
- Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident
- The Mission: Impossible Film Series falls into the Dirty Martini variety compared to the Martini-flavored TV series that it's based on. The action feels more visceral and the otherwise Nice Guy Ethan Hunt risks his reputation by deliberately disobeying orders and committing treason to save the world. Furthermore, the CIA, IMF, and MI6 aren't above backstabbing each other to cover their own tracks. That said, the films don't shy away from glamorous parties, fast cars, and hot women one would expect from a Martini-flavored spy fic. Also, the fanciful gadgets and elaborate disguises from the TV series are still here and seen favorably.
- Momentum (2015) - Action Genre movie that crosses into Bleach and Ammonia territory. Olga Kurylenko plays a CIA trained infilitration specialist up against a professional Cleanup Crew backed by a corrupt US senator.
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) features a dueling between the types; John is Stale Beer, Jane is Martini.
- Nikita
- The November Man — Stale Beer, which is surprising because Pierce Brosnan plays the lead agent.
- The Numbers Station
- Once Upon a Spy — Martini. A Failed Pilot Episode that was trying very hard to cash in on the James Bond films of the late 70s, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.
- L'Opération Corned-Beef — parody of Stale Beer.
- Operation Double 007 — The Poor Man's Substitute for Sean Connery as James Bond.
- Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre — Martini
- Operation Lovebirds — Martini, parodied.
- OSS 117 — The older films are Martini. The 21st century films with Jean Dujardin are Margaritas (parodies).
- Older films:
- Jean Dujardin films
- The Osterman Weekend — A messy stale beer with something floating in it.
- Our Man Flint— So over the top martini that it becomes a parody.
- Le Professionnel — A French agent who was betrayed by his superiors and sold out to an African dictator comes back with a vengeance.
- Red (2010). Beer, Beer, Martini, Beer, Beer, Martini, Martini ... Frank, Sarah and Marvin are definitely beer. Cooper, the Fed after them, is so martini his eyes should be pimento stuffed olives. Victoria and Ivan are the champagne.
- Red Notice. Layered Drink Flavored, plenty of misdirection and plot twists.
- Red Sparrow, The Film of the Book, has Dirty Martini glamour and exotic locations mixed with the unvarnished brutality of Bleach & Ammonia.
- Ronin (1998) — The film was largely responsible for making Stale Beer popular again (and possibly revitalizing Spy Fiction in general at the time). No heroes, no flashy technology (there is some high-technology monitoring involved, mostly during a car ambush, but that's it) the two main protagonists are easily approaching retirement age, tons of moral ambiguity.
- The Rookies - a Chinese spy parody film where a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits have to save the world from a killer virus that turns people into plants. It's as ridiculous as it's action-packed.
- The Saint Lies in Wait - Margaritas (comedy).
- The Scarlet Coat, about a Patriot agent in the American Revolution investigating a treasonous plot to turn over the fort at West Point to the British
- The Soldier — stale beer.
- Spies — silent film directed by Fritz Lang.
- Spies Like Us — Stale Margarita Beer, in that two bumbling slackers caught cheating on the final test to become Stale Beer agents are secretly selected to be decoys for a real team, ending up in one comical situation after another. But they end up saving the day when one of the real agents gets killed and they stop a General Ripper from starting World War III.
- Spy — Martini, done in a comedic fashion with plenty of Lampshade Hanging but not necessarily a parody, as Susan Cooper's heroics are played straight. Rick Ford, though, is a parody of a Jason Bourne-esque Stale Beer spy, and of his actor Jason Statham's characters in general.
- Spy Game — Scotch, and never less than 12 years old.
- Spy Hard
- 'The Spy in Black is a 1939 film with a German spy infiltrating a Scottish island to destroy the British fleet.
- Spy Kids — Martini, non-alcoholic of course (let's call it Kool-Aid or Fruit Punch).
- Stormbreaker: A film adaptation of the first novel.
- Survivor (2015)
- The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe — parody of Stale Beer.
- Telefon: Charles Bronson has to stop a Renegade Russian from activating the Manchurian Agents in the United States!
- Tenet - acid. A science fiction spy film, The Protagonist (he really is called the Protagonist in the film) journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. This involves inversion, which is progressing backwards in time.
- The Thin Man (book and movies) — Nora is from a Martini background, but happily follows Nick into the private eye's Stale Beer life.
- Three Days of the Condor — thriller with Robert Redford as a CIA analyst.
- Topaz: Described by Alfred Hitchcock as a "realistic James Bond film", it has an intricate plot involving characters from the US, the USSR, France and Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, based on real events. But the lead character is an Antihero Bond Expy, complete with globetrotting and womanizing, and using everyday gadgets (and food items) to conceal cameras and microfilm figures heavily into the story.
- Triple Agent: A very dry depiction of a man with conflicting loyalties in France on the eve of World War II, and, since it's written and directed by Éric Rohmer, very Speech-Centric.
- True Lies — Martini all the way, by way of Affectionate Parody. The heroine wants to be in a glamorous spy movie and falls for a used car salesman who poses as a secret agent, without realizing that her seemingly boring salesman husband actually is a secret agent, which gives her more than she bargained for.
- Undercover Brother — Cristal or Ciroc. Specifically, it's Martini meets Blaxploitation Parody.
- X-Men: First Class: The film incorporates many Spy Fiction tropes. For instance, the proto X-Men work for the CIA for Cold War business and Shaw's plan is reminiscent of The Spy Who Loved Me. Flavor-wise, it's Martini mixed with Absinthe, with mutant powers factoring heavily into the action.
- xXx: Four Loko. Or a Jägerbomb. Specifically, it's Martini by way of what the Y2K-era extreme sports culture considered cool, keeping the gorgeous women, gadgets, cool cars, and explosions but swapping out the suits and ties for muscle shirts and tribal tattoos, the jazzy Bond theme for heavy metal and hip-hop, and the Aston Martin for a motocross bike, a snowboard, and a Pontiac GTO. The opening scene contains a Take That! at Bond, as an expy of the spy gets killed at a Rammstein concert due to how he stuck out in the crowd.
Literature
See Spy Literature.
Live-Action TV
- 24 — Stale Beer
- Adam Adamant Lives! — Martini
- The Agency
- Agent X - Mixture of Stale, Bathtub Gin and Bleach.
- Alex Rider
- Alias — Martini
- The Americans focuses on the dangers and stresses of living a double life as KGB agents in 1980s USA and how far one can go for one's country.
- Andor — Set in the Star Wars universe and follows Rebel spy Cassian Andor (from Rogue One).
- The Assets is a Based on a True Story miniseries about Aldrich Ames.
- The Avengers (1960s) — Martini, or rather Champagne.
- Barbary Coast - Tequila and Bolo Tie (Martini and Tuxedo in The Wild West)
- Berlin Station — Stale Beer
- The Blacklist — Stale Beer
- The Blacklist: Redemption - Unlike its parent series, it's a lot more fun and glamorous, leaning more on Dirty Martini.
- Blindspot — Stale Beer
- Born to Spy — Martini, non-alcoholic of course (let's call it Kool-Aid or Fruit Punch).
- Burke's Law — In its incarnation as Amos Burke, Secret Agent.
- Burn Notice — An odd Dirty Martini blend. Michael Westen's fashion sense and the Miami setting suggest martini, and his skill level is definitely Tuxedo. But the work he gets is more or less stale beer (Westen emphasizes the boredom a lot in his voiceover narration) with a few flashy scenes/explosions per episode. A good description might be "Stale Beer in a Martini Glass." On the other hand, the work Michael was doing before he was burned was distinctly Stale Beer, and (patriot that he is), he wants to go back to that life.
- Callan — Extremely bitter Stale Beer.
- The Champions (1968) — Spies with Psychic Powers.
- Chuck — Martini and Bathtub Gin (Affectionate Parody)
- Citadel (2023) — Martini.
- The Company You Keep
- Condor
- Counterpart (2018) — Stale Beer. The show is very much a classic Cold War espionage thriller — spies working under the noses of diplomats, sleeper agents and intelligence sources, dead drops and covert assassinations — but with a Science Fiction twist: the "other side" isn't a foreign government, but an Alternate Universe.
- Covert Affairs — Dirty Martini. It looks like regular Martini, but a lot of emphasis is placed on how hard the job is and the stresses it places on the agent's personal life.
- Crisis (2017) — Stale Beer. The Public Security Mobile Investigation Unit Special Investigation Team gets involved in meeting up with informants, setting up sting ops and surveillance in arresting high-profile criminals/terrorists.
- Danger 5 — Parody of Martini-flavoured thrillers from The '60s.
- Danger Man aka Secret Agent — Mostly Stale Beer, at the insistence of star and co-producer Patrick McGoohan; he found the Martini style both unrealistic and ethically questionable.
- Department S — Most definitely martini
- Deutschland 83
- Diplomat Kuroda Kousaku - Stale Beer. This involves a career diplomat who uses his diplomat status and his foreign affairs ministry reputation to get things done by using his language skills, his wits and knowledge on political matters. He has help from a friend of his in the CIA and a female Dojikko detective.
- The Equalizer
- Fauda
- La Femme Nikita — Martini with hints of Stale Beer.
- Nikita — Martini with hints of Stale Beer.
- Fortune Hunter — Martini
- The Game (2014): Realistic spy drama set in 1970's Britain.
- Get Smart — spoof of Martini. Arguably celery soda. Or an egg cream. Mmm, egg cream.
- Homeland a gritty and dramatic post-9/11 thriller series.
- I Spy — Stale Beer Served In a Martini Glass. The "Stale Beer" element comes from the grittiness of espionage work coupled with the main characters often discussing and wrestling with their consciences regarding the moral ambiguity and the ethics of their profession. The "Served In a Martini Glass" element is that the assignments occur in glamorous international and domestic locations: Tokyo, Italy, Spain, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, etc.
- Intelligence (2006)
- Intelligence (2014)
- Iris
- It Takes a Thief (1968)- Whatever's in the fridge.
- Jack Ryan
- JAG swung in its depiction of the espionage business. While CIA officer Clayton Webb often is portrayed as a martini spy on the superficial level, there's also a whole lot of morally ambigious stale beer stuff in his line of work as well, and often used story-wise as a stark contrast to the morally superior JAG officers (and the U.S. military in general). Other than Webb and a couple of other exceptions, people in the spy business tends not to be trustworthy at all. Webb himself is morally ambiguous being something of a Well-Intentioned Extremist. His main saving graces are that he is not personally corrupt, is devoted to his country and is usually loyal to his friends at least at the end of the episode.
- NCIS varies in its depiction of spying. Sometimes it's the martini approach - Ziva described it as "It's not all fast cars and sex...Well, there was a lot of sex." One of her flashbacks is shooting someone from the back of a motorbike. Later, the series seems to favor the stale-beer approach a lot more, with plenty of extremely boring stakeouts featuring.
- Jean-Claude Van Johnson - Dirty Martini.
- Jericho (1966) — Short-lived martini series about a multinational trio of Allied spies behind enemy lines during World War II.
- Killing Eve
- London Spy - Bleach and Ammonia Variety with a dash of Bathtub Gin, as the main character is a civilian who falls in love with a programmer who works for MI6. When the MI6 programmer is ruthlessly murdered by his own handlers in an effort to destroy the technology he created, his civilian lover gets pursued by the ruthless and unscrupless agents of these various shadowy organisations who all seem intent on ruining his life.
- MacGyver (2016) — A Mix of Stale and Martini.
- The Man from U.N.C.L.E. — Martini, mixed with Bathtub Gin in that civilians often get mixed up in the heroes' adventures.
- The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. — Martini
- Man in a Suitcase — Stale beer, served in anything from a martini glass to an unwashed ashtray (depending on the episode).
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — Martini
- Agent Carter — Largely Martini, but Stale Beer seeps in since Peggy regularly has to deal with institutionalized sexism.
- Secret Invasion (2023)
- M.I. High — Lemonade flavoured, with a group of James Bond style teen superspies operating out of an Elaborate Underground Base under their high school. And their handler is a retired top field agent posing as the school caretaker.
- Mission: Impossible — Definitely Martini.
- Mossad 101: Alternates between gritty and smooth.
- Murder, She Wrote episodes featuring Michael Haggerty of MI6 are Stale Beer in a Martini Glass, or as stale as you can get while also being a Cozy Mystery. (Stale beer with a pot of tea?) The episodes where Jessica gets involved are also Bathtub Gin.
- My Spy Family
- My Own Worst Enemy — Swings between Martini and Stale Beer every episode. For example, the missions JANUS performs (protecting a foreign political candidate from assasination, thwarting a bomb plot, interrogating targets, retrieving a government employee from enemy hands) fall under Stale Beer, their workplace and its equipment are clearly Martini; in addition to all of Edward's stuff.
- The New Adventures of Beans Baxter — Lemonade
- The Night Manager: The spying takes place in glamorous locations (Switzerland, Majorca, Cairo) among people of wealth and taste, but back in London, the spymaster works out of a distinctly unglamorous warehouse office and constantly has to deal with bureaucracy and politics. Made with Bathtub Gin because the hero Jonathan Pine is a civilian hotel manager who is recruited to the spy trade.
- The Old Man — Dirty Martini. The protagonist is a gritty CIA operative who conducted guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan. However, he's also wealthy enough to afford luxury housing and travel when needed.
- Once A Thief: 1990s Canadian spy action TV series following a group of three spies who work for a mysterious agency. The show was a parody of media often taken seriously, and mocked tropes and action scenes in spy thrillers.
- Person of Interest often crosses over into the Bleach and Ammonia flavor.
- The Prisoner (1967) — Starts off like it's going to be a Martini (albeit if not Dirty then at least somewhat smudged), but someone keeps adding increasing amounts of Absinthe into the mix as the show goes on. And maybe some LSD as well. Either way, the ride's crazy but watch out for that hangover.
- The Professionals: The protagonists, Bodie and Doyle, are visibly working-class, street smart and prepared to bend the rules on their assignments - particularly in comparison to the polished style of John Steed and Emma Peel of The Avengers (1960s), Brian Clemens' earlier series. And they drove Ford coupés rather than Aston Martins or Ferraris.
- Reilly, Ace of Spies — There are touches of Martini, as Reilly was a playboy on his off hours, but the series is based on Sidney Reilly's real life during the early 1900s naval arms race and features plenty of sordid betrayal and real politics.
- Rubicon — Primarily focuses on a group of analysts digging through piles of intelligence with one supporting character bitterly bored while another has taken to partying and drug use to cope.
- The Sandbaggers — extremely Stale Beer (characters often comment, "this isn't James Bond.")
- Scarecrow and Mrs. King - Affectionate Parody of 80s Cold War Martini-flavoured, and its clash with suburbia. A spiritual predecessor of Chuck in many ways.
- The Secret Service — Absinthe
- Seventeen Moments of Spring — 1970s Soviet Union miniseries about a Russian spy who has spent years as a Deep Cover Agent in Nazi Germany, conducting The Infiltration and rising to the rank of colonel in SS intelligence.
- The Six Million Dollar Man — as Martini as the 70s TV series budget allowed.
- The Bionic Woman comes closer to stale beer than martini as Jamie Sommers eschews glamor for working in her non-spy hours as a schoolteacher and living in a loft above a farmhouse. But when she is sent on missions the stakes are often of the "save the world" level, and she does get to put on fancy clothes when the mission calls for it.
- Slow Horses — Based on the Jackson Lamb novels by Mick Herron about a Jaded Washout (but far from incompetent) agent in charge of a department where the British secret services send their embarrassments, screw-ups and dregs. Decidedly Stale Beer. The cheap, nasty kind, with a few fag-ends floating on top.
- Spooks — Martini, but with major Stale Beer elements.
- The Spy is based on the real life Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who posed as a wealthy Arab playboy to ingratiate himself into the highest levels of the Syrian government.
- Stranger Things — Eleven's backstory mixes the glamour of Psychic Powers and parallel dimensions with the inhumanity of the secret government program (based on the real-life MKUltra program) that tried to weaponize them and turn her into a Teen Superspy. The third season also introduces a group of villainous Soviet spies trying to steal and copy the research done at Hawkins National Laboratory. The Absinthe elements of their story include the Elaborate Underground Base, the sci-fi technology they use to open a portal to the Upside Down, and the Upside Down itself and its inhabitants, while the Stale Beer elements include the ruthless hitman they send to cover it up, the tragic defector Alexei, and the fact that it all takes place in a (seemingly) ordinary, boring American small town.
- Tehran: It involves a female Mossad agent of Israeli-Iranian heritage to infiltrate Tehran and take out Iranian military defenses. It shows the problems of how something unexpected can potentially ruin an entire op. It also shows Mossad's cooperation with the rest of the Israeli military in conducting joint operations.
- The Time In Between and the novel on which it's based: Bathtub Gin, as it revolves around a seamstress whose closeness to the elite gets her drawn in as a spy for the British in pre-World War II Spain.
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — A seven-part miniseries based on the first book in John le Carré's The Quest for Karla trilogy. Stale Beer, like its source matterial.
- Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters — A sentai spy fiction series with Bleach and Ammonia properties applied.
- Treadstone — A prequel to The Bourne Series.
- True Lies (2023) — Like the film, a parody of the Martini-based property
- Turn is set during the American Revolution and focuses on the Culper Spy Ring in New York City, Long Island, and North Jersey, spying on the British for George Washington's army (which spent a lot of time on Long Island at first, but later spent most of its time in the upper reaches of the Passaic Valley in what is now Morris and Passaic Counties, New Jersey). The intelligence work is distinctly unglamorous.
- Ultraseven X, while having some franchise-traditional elements, is this, having trenchcoat agents investigating some alien incidents in Cyberpunk setting.
- The Unit - Partially stale beer since the Unit sometimes helps the CIA and sometimes get tangled up with operations they think are a bad idea.
- Vagabond (2019)
- A Very Secret Service
- Whiskey Cavalier deals with international espionage in both glamorous and grimy situations.
- The Wild Wild West — Martini all the way. Don't let the Western setting fool you.
- X Company
- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles has a sub-arc within the overall World War I storyline, in which Indiana Jones (who was already volunteering for the Belgian Army) gets recruited by a French intelligence agency to conduct undercover missions around Europe. While one episode where Indy travels to neutral Spain is a relatively comedic Martini story, other episodes set in wartorn countries are (usually) Stale Beer, not shying away from the overall War Is Hell theme of the WWI episodes. Especially the one where he visits Petrograd during the onset of the Russian Revolution, which ultimately concludes with a tragic Downer Ending.
Music
- The "Genghis Khan" music video by Miike Snow — Martini with a tiny rainbow paper umbrella in it.
Pinball
- The Secret Service pinball game zigzags between playing it straight and doing a lighthearted parody of the Martini genre.
Roleplays
- Alpha Team: Mission Deep Freeze RPG is based upon LEGO Alpha Team, listed above under Martini, so naturally it shares many of its Martini characteristics. However, compared its source material, the RPG is considerably Darker and Edgier, tackling more serious themes such as death (a subject avoided entirely by the LEGO toyline) which causes it to dip into Stale Beer on occasion.
Tabletop Games
- Delta Green — This Call of Cthulhu campaign mixes Stale Beer and Absinthe with the Cthulhu Mythos in a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink.
- World War Cthulhu (the The Darkest Hour and Cold War settings) — As spies, the player characters are in incredible danger, paranoid in case the Gestapo, KGB or cultists have uncovered them, always aware that capture or worse could be right around the next corner.
- Demon: The Descent, a 'Techgnostic Espionage' game under Chronicles of Darkness, where the player characters can lie so well even magical truth detector would be ineffective, the conspiracy theorists are the ones properly paranoid, revealing your true identity will result in the enemy's agents zeroing on you immediately, and the opposition is literally godlike mechanical intelligence existing across the universe and different planes of existence.
- Night's Black Agents: Bloody Martini. The player characters are elite secret agents being hunted down for discovering that a secret society of vampires controls the world. Exotic spy gadgets, high-octane chases, and exciting combat scenes abound.
- Ninjas And Superspies thrusts the player characters into a world of espionage and action in the far east where they can take on the role of a stealthly ninja... or a deadly super spy. It's one of Palladium's lesser known works but still has some pretty interesting mechanics and is definately worth checking out for fans of old kung-fu movies and spy films.
- Pandemic Legacy Season 0 offers Bathtub Gin Made with Rubbing Alcohol. The premise is that you're a medical graduate recruited via the CIA through an unassuming classified ad, tasked with saving the world from a Soviet Synthetic Plague called Project MEDUSA. There's a bit of both Stale Beer and Martini mixed in; on one hand, you've cool gadgets, high stakes, and glamorous (and occasionally ridiculous) outfits, but on the other hand, you're eliminating Soviet agents, infiltrating dangerous places, and eventually have to find a way to deal with a murderous Rogue Agent who's been utterly broken by torture.
- Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution: A Bleach and Ammonia Bathtub Gin Jägerbomb. It's self-consciously punk as all get-out, with the default PCs as terrorists cum ravers fighting against The Agency, in a world where Anyone Can Die, evil conspiracies fight to control the world, and people's heads explode from out-of-control psychic powers. Tradecraft is de-emphasized for the protagonists (who are kids with serious emotional problems and powers that make them living weapons), but highly important to their enemies.
Theatre
- Spies Are Forever — Parody
- Spy Festigal — Parody
Toys
- LEGO Agents — Martini
- LEGO Alpha Team — Martini
Video Games
- Alpha Protocol takes the action, gadgets, explosions and sexy women of the Martini genre, but mixes in the moral ambiguity, power politics, betrayal, and some of the gritty combat of the Stale Beer genre. In particular, it starts out more Stale Beer-flavored (with Saudi Arabia being the kind of mission you might expect MI6 or Delta Force to be sent on in the real world) and adopts more Martini characteristics later on. Oh, and Steven Heck is spiking the drink with something really weird.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops, oddly for a Call of Duty game, took a Stale Beer approach, as it had a plot about secret, morally nasty operations done in secret by both the US and Russia. Much of the game really took place in a dingy torture room, along with a very gritty atmosphere and secret story underlying the game. The game did have some Martini flavoring, in the vein of a James Bond-esque attempt at destroying the US and some gadgets — but due to just how dark the plot is, it dives right back into stale beer.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops II is, for the most part, significantly less gritty, focusing more on a Bond-esque hi-tech plot to destroy the superpowers of the world, and done with gadgets and a super-villain that's very reminiscent of a Bond villain, but the flashbacks still contain much of the grittiness and moral grayness of the first game.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
- Cold Winter — you're ex-M16, recruited into a secret spy ring and have to stop a terrorist plot to instigate a nuclear attack and reset civilization.
- Confidential Mission — Being an arcade Light Gun Game, there's not much actual spywork being done, but elements such as the protagonist being a tux-wearing James Bond Captain Ersatz, the soundtrack and the campy plot invoke this flavour.
- Covert Action - Stale Beer Microbrew from Sid Meier, which almost tastes more like a Police Procedural. There is a heavy emphasis on good ol' fashioned investigation, and in the combat sections, it's better to lay traps or sneak past enemies than shoot them.
- Deceive Inc. is a Martini-flavored Social Deduction Hero Shooter. You play as one of several spies sent on a mission to retrieve a MacGuffin, competing with your fellow spies to escape with the payload first.
- Destroy All Humans! 2 heavily homages and parodies the Martini spy movies and shows of The '60s. Natalya Ivanova is a drop-dead gorgeous KGB agent who teams up with the protagonist Cryptosporidium-137. Reginald Ponsonby-Smythe is a British Agent Peacock super-spy who does the same until he reveals that he's actually working for The Men in Black trying to stop him, the Big Bad, Soviet Premier Milenkov, is framed as a Diabolical Mastermind in the mold of any number of classic Bond supervillains, and the plot is a globe-trotting adventure set in exotic locales like San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Siberia, and finally, Milenkov's Supervillain Lair on the moon.
- Dragon Age II - Mark of the Assassin: Wyvern poison. Hawke and co. think they're taking part in The Caper, until it turns out the "thief" they're helping is Qunari (the local super-determinist religion). She's there to stop a defector from giving the Orlesian Empire military secrets that could hurt her people and get plenty of civilians killed in the crossfire. The result: a Cold War story with wyverns, giants and elves.
- Evil Genius, except you play as the villain and must fend off attempts at the Forces of Justice infiltrating or attacking your island base. Enemy superagents are (more or less) expies of James Bond, Rambo, Bruce Lee, Honey Ryder, and Natasha Romanoff.
- Fallout 4 gives us Stale irradiated Beer mixed in with Bleach and Ammonia, if a certain path is taken. The Stale Beer is the Railroad faction, which uses a lot of spy tradecraft including dead drops, code names, signs and counter signs, covert speak, disguises etc. The beer is considered irradiated, as the setting is in a post-apocalyptic death world with horribly mutated creatures coming out of the woodwork everywhere and trying to kill you, and radiation poisoning being a constant threat. Although, you can try to Martini it up by walking around in a nice suit or dress, the post apocalyptic setting makes that Martini very dirty. There is also an unhealthy dose of bleach, what with the Institute kidnapping people to replace them with synth doppelgängers and conducting experiments to turn those kidnapped people into Ax-Crazy super mutants. For added measure, you can even find bottles of actual 200-year-old stale beer everywhere.
- Fox Hunt - Martini-flavored Stale Beer. A Full Motion Video parody where a pop culture buff is hired to hunt down a disgruntled movie director threatening Hollywood with nuclear missiles.
- Fur Fighters
- The Hitman games certainly have some trappings of classic spy fiction, starring an elite assassin with a nice suit whose job entails going on globe-trotting secret missions to kill people; but his motives boil down to his own greed and bloodlust, rather than politics, ideology, or fighting evil. Superficially resembles Martini, but dark and gritty enough to be closer to Stale Beer.
- KGB aka Conspiracy - extremely stale beer produced in state-owned Soviet brewery struggling with constant shortages of raw materials.
- The Mass Effect trilogy has you play as a SPECTRE super-agent who is given unlimited authority to preserve galactic security. For most of the game, you just go to places in Powered Armor and shoot people. But two instances where you actually have to do some covert intelligence gathering become very Martini, with you infiltrating a party at a swanky upscale locale in either a futuristic tuxedo, or a Little Black Dress.
- Metal Gear — friggin' Absinthe. To elaborate:
- Metal Gear
- Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
- Metal Gear Solid is pure Stale Beer, with a few fantastic elements.
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty amped up the fantastic elements to Magic Realism levels, while pushing the Stale Beer elements to breaking point.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was far more straightforward, deliberately using Martini tropes in the style of Stale Beer.
- Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is much more solidly Stale Beer than the others, and it rejects most of the fantastical elements in favor of amping up the science-fiction elements, becoming more of a techno-thriller (albeit a very mind-screwy one).
- Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
- Metal Gear Solid V
- MySims Agents
- No One Lives Forever — An Affectionate Parody of '60s Martini spy movies in the manner of Austin Powers, the protagonist being a glamorous Distaff Counterpart to Bond who wields a ton of gadgets and battles over-the-top villains and their outrageous henchmen.
- Perfect Dark
- Phantom Doctrine: Stale beer with a touch of bleach and ammonia. Anyone Can Die, brainwashing, torture and suicide bombing are on the menu for everyone including the good guys, anyone and everyone could be a double agent, and there are no indications that your best efforts actually make anything better.
- Prime Target: You're a Secret Service agent investigating a Senator's murder.
- The Psychonauts franchise is overall an Absinthe example; the premise involves an international espionage organization composed entirely of people with Psychic Powers, all missions either being done as research into the mental world or averting disaster caused by paranormal terrorism, their exploits made public in the form of a Science Fiction comic book. The first game has the plot of Bathtub Gin, its protagonist Raz being a fan of the Psychonauts who aspires to be one and winds up uncovering an internal conspiracy where one of its agents had gone rogue and aspires for world domination.
- Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is a more conventional Martini-plot (including a Bond-style Title Theme Tune) where they try to rescue the head of the psychonauts from a supervillain in an underwater layer.
- Psychonauts 2 adds Bleach and Ammonia into the mix, the plot less concerned with the typical Psychonauts mission and more of a conspiracy surrounding its founding and the presence of a mole out to undermine them.
- Rolling Thunder
- Secret Agent Clank — Martini Parody Spin-Off (of Ratchet & Clank) IN SPACE!
- Sensory Overload — you're an amnesiac CIA spy investigating a Mad Scientist's Mind Control tech, but then you're caught in it and must find a way out
- Shadow the Hedgehog may to be this if you choose to be a G.U.N. agent. Game trying to be Stale Beer, but the elements from other Sonic the Hedgehog games make it closer to Martini.
- Soldier of Fortune — Extremely bloody Stale Beer
- Special Project Y — Bond meets The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
- Sly Spy — Blatant Americanization of James Bond.
- Sniper: Path of Vengeance
- Spider and Web
- The Splinter Cell series of video games are stale beer spy fiction, and every installment gets progressively darker and grittier as time goes on. It should be no surprise it's a Tom Clancy property.
- Spy Fiction — A Deconstructed Martini that didn't quite do well in foreign bars due to mistranslations with the recipe. A Deconstruction Game for the classic spy genre that unfortunately got a bad English translation.
- SPY Fox
- Star Wars: The Old Republic — The Imperial Agent's base storyline has on the surface Martini action, infiltration, flirtation, taking on The Conspiracy etc. But it becomes apparent that Imperial Intelligence is literally the only thing enabling The Empire to function. Officers and Sith kill each other for promotion, Fantastic Racism results in short term alliances, the list goes on. And then it turns out Imperial Intelligence does secret brainwashing on all agents, the player included, to ensure they follow orders, driving them to the brink of insanity. Finding all this crap leads the frustrated agent's best ending to be where they make themselves Un-person just so they can help The Empire however they see best.
- The Super Spy - you're a spy In Name Only however, instead of espisionage you went straight to kicking and punching
- Syphon Filter
- ThunderJaws
- Time Crisis
- Watch Dogs: Legion: The big hook of the game is that you can play as anybody you see on the streets of London, and among the character types you can recruit are spies, who each get a silenced pistol, a spy watch that lets them remotely jam enemies' weapons, a spy car (which resembles a classic Jaguar or Aston Martin) that comes equipped with missiles and an AR cloak, and a nice suit. The tutorial has you playing as one such spy, named Dalton Wolfe. Playing as anyone else, however, is closer to Dirty Martini with a shot of Bathtub Gin, with some Bleach and Ammonia thrown in if you have permadeath enabled, with other character types ranging from ordinary construction workers and nurses to professional killers to Football Hooligans. And when you add in the fact that every character is a hacker, you can throw in a side of Club-Mate.
Visual Novels
- Banshee's Last Cry — Stale Beer, involving Japanese spies working for various intelligence agencies in Nagano as they try to get the drop on the other rival spy.
- Queen's Gambit
Web Animation
- Pigeon: Impossible - No actual spying, but a CIA agent's eventful first day on the job.
- Princess Natasha — Lemonade flavoured.
Web Comics
- Necessary Monsters — Martini, though you really don't want to know what the hell they put in instead of an olive.
- Secret Agent Men — A fan-made spinoff of two breakout characters from Niels, one of whom started off as a Shallow Parody of James Bond, the other of whom was a Stale Beer spy from the start.
- Spying with Lana
Web Original
- SCP Foundation — Absinthe laced with every single hallucinogenic/psychoactive drug known to man. The titular SCP Foundation are an international secret society organized akin to a paramilitary intelligence agency, devoted to concealing the existence of every paranormal anomaly in the world at all costs. Stories focusing on the Foundation's undercover agents, and their interactions with various rival Groups of Interest, would otherwise fit very well with the Stale Beer flavor of spy fiction; were it not for the presence of cursed artifacts, strange monsters, and other supernatural elements.
Western Animation
- Agent Elvis — TBD.
- Archer — Martini (parodied).
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids is a nonalcoholic martini, where teen superspies solve international crimes while maintaining a cover identity of a hit pop band.
- Carmen Sandiego — This cartoon adaptation of the video game series is a more kid-friendly take on James Bond, though the title character is more of a highly stealthy professional thief rather than a spy. Though she does have frequent encounters with members of a SPECTRE-style criminal organization, and actual spies/detectives from an international police intelligence agency.
- Cool McCool — Martini meets Superhero
- Danger Mouse
- Darkwing Duck - Everything in the fridge plus the kitchen sink. While the show is mainly a superhero spoof, its origins lie in being a secret agent spoof of the margarita variety. A good portion of the episodes still are this whenever S.H.U.S.H is involved. Of particular note is episode "In Like Blunt" where Darkwing is partnered with his inspiration Derrick Blunt, the show's James Bond parody, who wrote stories of his adventures after he retired. However, Darkwing was more inspired by the movie versions of Blunt's stories, which are more martini based and gadget-oriented while the real Blunt hates the gadget aspect of the movies in particular since a "true spy only relies on their wits and what's around them" and is more of a stale beer in a martini glass type. Mixed in is the usual comedic, Loony Tunes type slapstick and the over the top comic/martini villainy.
- Delilah & Julius
- Get Ace - Bathtub Gin with drops of Martini and Absinthe.
- Jackie Chan Adventures — The titular protagonist is a martial-artist archaeologist who gets recruited as an unofficial agent of a secret police intelligence agency called Section 13, traveling on globe-trotting adventures to thwart various criminals and supernatural villains. However, the espionage elements of the story are heavily downplayed in favor of the far more prominent magical elements, although Jackie's friend Captain Black (the leader of the aforementioned Section 13) plays a consistent supporting role throughout the series.
- James Bond Jr. — This is a literal James Bond cartoon after all, so what else can be expected aesthetics-wise?
- Kim Possible — Spy by night, cheerleader by day. A bowdlerized James Bond. Cool gadgets, big explosions, no one dies.
- Men in Black: The Series — The Animated Adaptation of the first Men in Black movie.
- Q-Force — LGBTQ spies fight Camp threats in places ranging from gay bars to royal palaces.
- The Secret Show — Martini to the point of utter parody
- Secret Squirrel — Martini, although Secret does wear a trenchcoat.
- Spy Groove
- Spy Kids: Mission Critical
- Totally Spies! — Martini parody with teenage girls as the protagonists.
- The X's
- Young Justice (2010) — Bane Venom or Reach Soda. It's covert superheroics. After telling the Justice League that they are no longer content to play the role of sidekicks, the Team is formed under Batman's supervision. He sends them on covert missions around the world, usually intending them to observe, sabotage, escort, or rescue. More often than not, they come upon a villain's secret plans, which have to be dealt with right then and there. Their missions bring them into conflict with a mysterious supervillain group called "The Light".
