James Bond

I do.

There's also another hiccup in that James Bond plays really fast and loose w/ continuity as well as James Bond himself in the films not really having personal stakes against all his enemeis w/ extremely few exceptions. W/ Daniel Craig, it acts as if Spectre was the 1st time he and Blofeld met and treated them like they have a personal connection but pre-Craig, their actual 1st meeting was in You Only Live Twice and they never had any connection before that. In fact, Bond never saw Blofeld as anything other than your garden variety evil mastermind until he made it personal by killing his newlywed wife in On Your Majesty's Secret Service and then Bond immediately decimated the whole organization and killed Blofeld twice in the next film Diamonds are Forever and then kill him once and for all in an even more humiliating fashion at the start of The Spy Who Loved Me (w/c by then the rights to Blofeld and SPECTRE got really tangled up and Roger Moore began fighting expies like Karl Stromberg and his Neo-Atlantis, Hugo Drax and his space program, etc.). And the only other villain whom Bond takes personally is Sanchez from License to Kill bec he permanently crippled his friend Felix and killed Felix's wife on their honeymoon. That's 1 of the criticisms of License to Kill in that the movie was a revenge flick starring James Bond instead of 1 of his grand save the world adventures.

You ever wonder why the hell all the Bond villains were all alive again?

Edited by RedHunter543 on Jan 29th 2024 at 5:03:46 PM

You mean For Your Eyes Only.

Oh ya you're right. It was For Your Eyes Only. The Spy Who Loved Me's opening was Bond being hunted by Soviet agents and killing 1 of them who happened to be that film's Bond Girl Soviet Agent Triple X's boyfriend. That was the 1 where he escaped by parachuting off a cliff to a Union Jacket chute. It was hilarious in For Your Eyes Only that 1 of Blofeld's bribes to Bond in order to spare his life was "A Delicatessen. In Stainless Steel!"

Speaking of For Your Eyes Only, it's not a controversy now but a bit of a controversy back then in 1977 was 1 of the poolgirl extras was transgender actress Caroline Cossey.

The only Bond villains who canonically survived their encounters w/ Bond and co are Bambi and Thumper, Jaws, Nick-Nack and Professor Joe Butcher, pretty much all henchmen. Baron Samedi doesn't count bec being Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane is his very appeal.

Edited by KRider on Jan 29th 2024 at 1:31:01 AM

I've always considered the Daniel Craig films their own separate thing pretty much. Thus why it's a rebooted continuity to myself and many others. As much as Bond either doesn't change age or gets older in the original continuity, I can believe for the most part that it’s been the same guy all along.

Interesting how Diane Warren's been nominated every years for Song since 2014 (excluding 2016), that two of those fifteen times she's gotten nominated competitively she lost to a Bond song (with those two being among the last three and they all won) and then that the writers of a Bond song doing a different song are about to win against her again. I bring this all up because she wrote a Bond song years ago herself ("If You Asked Me To" from Licence to Kill) and that tells me that I guess if she wants to actually win? She's gotta write another Bond song. Haha.

I'm writing my own for my own Bond movie ideas—or I have been.

Double Toasted during their Weekly Roast and Toast livestream this week is dropping a Bad Movie Roast for A View to a Kill as well. That'll be fun to see.

The Daniel Craig films always were a reboot like officially. Was there ever a question about that?

The Craig films were always a reboot, yes.

That's why we see Bond get promoted to Double 0 status at the beginning of Casino Royale.

The fact that it's all years after the Cold War ended too when Bond first gets started in Casino Royale 2006 also speaks to that.

I think at the time some were saying Casino Royale was a prequel - Sliding Time Scale issues notwithstanding.

Though I like the theory that the Craig films and the earlier Bond films have the same continuity, it's just that Craig's Bond is actually the Connery/Lazenby/Moore/Dalton/Brosnan Bond's nephew from the animated series: James Bond Jr.. Aside from tying continuities together, it has a couple side benefits:

1) Bond's foster brother dramatically saying their name is Ernst Stavro Blofeld is now much less random - it's them choosing to name themself after the previous Bond's archnemesis, for the added fuck-you factor.

2) It's just amusing to imagine the dour Daniel Craig Bond was, in their youth, the light-hearted quipster of the cartoon series, and that perhaps Bond's grumpy attitude is because the spy work they do now is so much more mundane than the adventures they went on as a kid.

Edited by RavenWilder on Jan 29th 2024 at 10:18:32 AM

That's still convoluted as hell.

convoluted and unnecessary, the original movies didn't care much about continuity and the Craig movies were explicitly a reboot. There isn't an elaborate series of hidden clues to tie the two timelines (and a mostly forgotten about animated spin off) together.

The original movies you either went with the idea it was the same guy for forty years with hardly any changes at all in age or persona or you didn't. It didn't have to make total sense.

There's obviously an arc though: a man so traumatized from an enemy getting the woman he loved killed—when he stopped sleeping around long enough TO actually fall in love to begin with—resulting in him seeing even more women in the years that follow to deal with the pain (or avoid it altogether).

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Jan 29th 2024 at 1:35:24 AM

It’s a floating timeline, like Marvel or DC.

You could almost split up the series by actor too, even the original films from Dr. No to Die Another Day.

I think the Connery and Moore eras could be considered the same Bond. (Lazenby too).

After that, it is three soft rebouts

Edited by jawal on Jan 29th 2024 at 1:57:31 PM

Dalton and Brosnan could be considered soft reboots, I suppose. But Daniel Craig's movies are an actual full on reboot.

James Bond's height was at a time when nobody paid any attention to comic book terms such as continuity or reboots. Brosnan's Bond was even being derided by Judi Dench's M as a "relic of the Cold War". Although the only times in the movies Bond dealt w/ Soviets were in Spy Who Loved Me (allies), For Your Eyes Only (rivals after the same Macguffin) and Living Daylights (antagonists).

In from Russia with love he steals a cipher machine from them, though the main enemy is Specter.

Edited by jawal on Jan 29th 2024 at 2:47:32 PM

Which was a change from the book. The main villains were the Soviet intelligence agency, SMERSH.

Flemming created SPECTRE in an attempt to not be dated on the assumption the Cold War might end soon, and so they stuck around as the primary villains.

The franchise is one of, if not the, biggest example of Adaptation Displacement w/ the films displacing the books in mass media. You could even say the parody film Casino Royale is more well known than the book Casino Royale even if it's all for the wrong reasons. What also helped is that the films became more fantastic that appealed to people in a way the more grounded spy thriller books didn't and it was also in an era when nobody really cared about "lore accuracy" to the point even Jesus Christ's robe got 2 spinoff movies that are in no way canonical to any version of the Bible.

Edited by KRider on Jan 29th 2024 at 6:01:30 AM

The general story of Casino Royal is not that different from the book; they replace Smirsh with "mysterious organization" French worker's syndicates with terrorist groups and added a lot of action scenes.

The book had a theme of Bond becoming tired from the espionage work, because he couldn't tell the difference between a hero and a villain

Edited by jawal on Jan 29th 2024 at 3:03:29 PM

The films are, on the whole, a lot better than the books too if you ask me; even the weaker films were based on already-weak books - like, in the book Diamonds Are Forever, the diamond smuggling ring is the entire plot, and it’s so boring. The film makes it into another of SPECTRE’s tendrils. Tiffany is way cooler in the book though.

The 21st century was around the time buzzwords like lore accuracy and continuity reboot was being thrown around the internet. That combined w/ the success of the more serious and grounded-spy thrillers like Bourne Identity and the last Bond Film Die Another Day flopping in comparison to Bourne got Eon Productions thinking that they needed to update James Bond to the more serious modern times that Jason Bourne represented and it just so happened they were able to hit 3 birds w/ one stone w/ the more serious and closer-to-the-book-lore-and-feel Daniel Craig era. What may also have helped a bit is the Austin Powers series becoming successful that nobody could take Old James Bond seriously much the same way the Airplane! movies hurt the previous Airport/Airplane Disaster Movie Subgenre.

Not to mention Mr Wint and Mr Kidd being far more famous and memorable in the movie to the point Codename Kids Next Door made a villain couple based on their movie versions.

In fact, where it not for the film franchise, James Bond and Ian Fleming would have most likely faded in the background noise of spy thriller literature and the genre itself wouldn't have become as popular as it became nor would we have gotten parodies like Flint and Austin Powers. In that same vein we probably wouldn't have gotten Vin Diesel's Triple X as part of its selling point was he was the Anti-Bond or more specifically the XTREEM!-Bond.

Edited by KRider on Jan 29th 2024 at 6:22:07 AM