James Bond in Biarritz?

During the summer, I took a road-trip from Le Touquet on the north French coast to Coppet in Switzerland, just north of Geneva, following the route that James Bond takes in the novel of Goldfinger (1959). At various points, James Bond consults a Michelin guide, and so to give me further insight into Bond's journey, I acquired a copy of a vintage edition of the guide, specifically the 1958 edition, the year in which Fleming wrote the novel.

When I returned to England, I watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), having also visited Piz Gloria while in Switzerland. It was then that I noticed for the first time that the book that Bond (George Lazenby) has on the passenger seat of his Aston Martin at the beginning of the film is the Michelin guide to France. Presumably, the edition used in the film is a more recent edition than mine, but it was nevertheless instantly recognisable. 

The Michelin guide, as seen on On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that the guide is open at a town plan that extends across two pages. Obviously, the map could not be of Estoril in Portugal, where the hotel scenes were shot and where Bond was presumably heading to in the film. Nor is the map that of Le Touquet or any other coastal town on the north French coast that inspired the fictional seaside resort of Royale-les-Eaux that appears in Casino Royale and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. So, what place does the map show?

After consulting my Michelin, carefully studying the maps that cover two facing pages and comparing them with a screenshot of the Aston's passenger seat, I can reveal that the map is of... Biarritz, the fashionable resort on France's south-western coast that has long been popular with the international jet-set. 

The plan of Biarritz, from the 1958 edition of the Michelin guide

While Biarritz the sort of place where James Bond would feel at home, it's unlikely that he's making his way there in the film. That said, Biarritz is not without a Bondian connection. In his biography of Ian Fleming, Andrew Lycett records that during a holiday there in the 1950s, Fleming decided to write a piece about casinos. The resulting article, 'How to win at roulette with only £10' was published in various forms, appearing, for example, along with references to James Bond, within the Monte Carlo chapter of Thrilling Cities.

Returning to OHMSS, I imagine that the set dressers simply required a town plan - any plan would do - that covered two pages and had relatively little text. They chose well. It's impossible to make out the name of the town on the screen and none of the other text is legible. And though film viewers can see that the book is open at a plan, the shot is gone in a blink of an eye. Details can only be made out after pausing the film.

Whether intentional or not, the appearance of the Michelin guide in the film provides a nice link to the literary 007, serving as a nod to James Bond's adventures in France in the novels. 

Bond memes in Action Team

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the cultural environment abhor the absence of a Bond film. In the two-and-a-bit years since Spectre, we have been treated to various Bond-like or Bond-inspired secret agents on both the big and small screen. Recently, for instance, there has been Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Atomic Blonde, and trailers for Johnny English Strikes Again and The Spy Who Dumped Me are currently doing the rounds. I’ve also been enjoying Action Team, a six-part comedy written by Tom Davis, James De Frond and Nico Tatarowicz, that’s just finished its run on ITV2.
 

Action Team, in action

Action Team follows a unit of MI6 comprising leader Logan Mann, sniper Graham Hooper, Monica Lang, who has a particular set of skills, and a kid on work experience called Huxley. The team is up against a Russian evil mastermind, Vladimir Schevchenko, who heads a criminal organisation called Abacus, and is overseen by the head of operations, Ruth Brooks. There is also the necessary assortment of henchmen and fellow MI6 officers who are not quite what they seem. 

The series parodies tropes from the world of screen spies – the unit of Action Team perhaps owes more to Mission: Impossible than Bond – but James Bond is the key reference. Logan Mann (played by Tom Davis), clearly the Bond figure, is dynamic, in control, suave and knowledgeable (or he thinks he is) and arrives at any situation armed with a gun and a quip. There are gadgets (though no Q-like character), big, gratuitious explosions, car chases, Mann on top of a moving train, femme fatales, and globe-trotting adventure. Then there’s the inside of the MI6 building, which looks much like the inside of headquarters as portrayed in Skyfall and Spectre – open plan with arrays of computers and screens – and a freestanding glass prison cell, the sort that held Silva in Skyfall, for captured enemy agents.

As for the villains, Vladimir Schevchenko (also played by Tom Davis) looks like the lovechild of Dr Evil and a Russian Hell’s Angel. He is, as usual for spy villains, capricious, childlike (in that he likes toys and throws tantrums) and psychopathic. In one scene, and in the best Spectre tradition, Schevchenko leads a meeting of his criminal partners. One of his Abacus agents, who, appropriately for a No. 2, wears an eyepatch, wants to walk away, having fallen in love. Schenchenko appears to allow him to leave with good grace, then shoots him in the back. The whole sequence reminded me of the meetings in Goldfinger’s rumpus room and Zorin’s blimp, where those who wish to pull out of the evil scheme come to a sticky end. Schevchenko knows the evil lingo, too, at one point practising the phrase, ‘I’ve been expecting you, Mr Mann’.

The music accompanying the series has familiar Bondian notes, and the music that plays over the end credits has the distinct ring of the Skyfall theme song. 

The series is funny and crude, rather like a British, live action Archer. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. Time for another series before Bond 25 hits the screen?

Some Bond memes in Archer

Better late than never, I’ve finally got round to watching Archer, the animated spoof espionage series featuring the suave, irresponsible, and misogynistic secret agent, Stirling Archer. Naturally, the whole series draws very heavily on the James Bond films for inspiration, and H Jon Benjamin, who voices Archer, reveals in an interview with MI6 Confidential that his performance is based to some extent on Sean Connery’s Bond. Apart from referencing Bond in a general sense, the series alludes more specifically to the films, and I noted a few of these references while watching season one.
 
The ninth episode, ‘Job Offer’, in which Archer takes a job with a rival agency, Archer and Lana, his colleague and former lover, are tied on a metal table and threatened by a laser beam, à la Goldfinger. ‘Skytanic’ (episode 7) has an airship that brought to my mind A View to a Kill. The sixth episode, ‘Skorpio’, in which Archer rescues Lana from an arms dealer, features Archer in frogman mode and involved in an underwater battle that could have been taken from the storyboards of Thunderball.
 

A scene from 'Skorpio', Archer, season 1

James Bond is name-checked a couple of times in the series, and the cover of the season one DVD clearly derives from the poster of Live and Let Die.

Fictional spies of earlier vintage are not forgotten either. In ‘Dial M for Mother’ (episode 10), Malory Archer, agency chief and Archer’s mother, has a copy of Greenmantle by John Buchan beside her on her bed. The episode title is especially interesting. It references a Hitchcock film, of course, but it takes on extra significance in the context of James Bond: M was Ian Fleming’s nickname for his mother, Eve, and according to Fleming’s biographer, John Pearson, Eve provided some of the inspiration for James Bond’s chief.
 

A scene from 'Dial M for Mother', Archer, season 1

Issue 25 of MI6 Confidential has an excellent article on Archer, which includes interviews with the cast and the creative team, and is well-worth reading. Meanwhile, I’ll get on with catching up on the remaining seven series.

Danger Mouse, Special Agent Oso and James Bond

A little while ago, I posted a tweet about a couple of Bond-inspired episode titles from the latest series of Danger Mouse, featuring the world's greatest secret agent. I was subsequently alerted to another children’s animated series, Special Agent Oso, whose episode titles are also Bond-inspired.
 

The title of episode 13 of series 2 (2017) of Danger Mouse

 
Special Agent Oso is a pre-school series about a bear who, in each episode, helps a child complete a task (for instance, flying a kite or setting the table). The series was originally broadcast on the Disney Channel in 2009. Series 1 was broadcast between 2009 and 2010, the second from 2010 to 2012. In total, 116 episodes were shown, each one with a title that plays on the names of the Bond films or, in two cases, the titles of Bond songs.
 
There is, for example, ‘From Grandma With Love’ (From Russia With Love), ‘A Zoo To A Thrill’ (A View To A Kill), ‘The Chairs Are Not Enough’ (The World Is Not Enough), and Dr Snow (Dr No). Some of the titles are unintentionally ironic. ‘License to Cheer Up’ is obviously based on Licence to Kill, which, until the Daniel Craig era, had been the most serious and humourless Bond film of the series. ‘Drink Another Day’ (Die Another Day), meanwhile, could be the very words Bond lives by.
 
Just for fun, I catalogued all the titles and did some basic analysis to see if any patterns emerged in the selection of Bond film titles. The most commonly used film name is Goldfinger with 11 occurrences. Octopussy, Tomorrow Never Dies, Moonraker, and Never Say Never Again are the least frequently used film names, with one occurrence each.
 

Frequency of Bond film titles used in Special Agent Oso

 
There is no clear difference in the choice of titles between the two series; generally, the most commonly used film names in series 1 remain common in series 2, but there are some interesting differences. Diamonds Are Forever, Licence to Kill and The World Is Not Enough are used less in series 2, while Dr No, The Man With The Golden Gun, and Thunderball increase in frequency in series 2. The most substantial increase is Quantum of Solace, which isn’t represented at all in series 1, but accounts for almost 6% of titles in series 2. Series 1 was broadcast in 2009, after Quantum of Solace had been released, but presumably planning of the series began before the film’s release date of 2008.
 

Comparative proportions of film titles used in series 1 and 2 of Special Agent Oso

 
What is mildly surprising is the middle ranking of From Russia With Love. The film title is a favourite of newspaper headline writers, but evidently the writers of Special Agent Oso haven’t been quite so keen. It seems that what is suitable for the press isn’t necessarily so suitable or amenable for children’s programming. The survey of Special Agent Oso titles also shows that Bond film names have varying levels of adaptability. Octopussy and Moonraker have poor adaptability and are little used, while Goldfinger has a high level of adaptability and is prolific.
 
Returning to Danger Mouse, since the cartoon was relaunched in 2015, there have been only ten episodes with Bond-inspired titles. While this is too small a dataset for comparison with Special Agent Oso, it is revealing that the only Bond film title to be used twice in Danger Mouse is Goldfinger – Greenfinger (also the name of a Special Agent Oso episode) and Gold Flinger.

Bond Vehicle Collectibles, and Corgi's DB5 as archaeological artefact

The other week a work colleague of mine brought in an old, rather play-worn Corgi Aston Martin DB5 to show me, knowing that I was a James Bond fan. I was delighted that he had done so, and I examined the car so that I could tell him more about it. I told him that the car was an early model, being gold painted, rather than silver, and that it had other features typical of the early model; the bullet-proof screen at the back, for instance, was raised by pressing the exhaust pipe, rather than the overriders extending from the rear bumper, as in later models.

Coincidentally, I had just read a new book about toy James Bond vehicles, so was able to give my colleague much more information about Corgi’s best known model. Bond Vehicle Collectibles (Amberley, 2017) by Paul Brent Adams is a guide to the Bond-related toy vehicles produced not only by Corgi, but other manufacturers, among them Hot Wheels and Johnny Lightning. The book is written from a collector’s point of view, and so contains a useful account of all the different models, their scales, and variations in design, and provides advice about filling gaps in a Bond car collection (for instance where official models of a car that featured in a Bond film don’t exist).
 

Bond Vehicle Collectibles (Amberley, 2017)

What’s best about the book, though, is its stunning colour photographs. Most of the images are of cars produced for the 'James Bond Car Collection', a part-work issued by Eaglemoss (in the UK, at least) in monthly instalments from 2007. The collection included many cars never produced by Corgi or other manufacturers. Coincidentally (again!), this series has just been relaunched by Eaglemoss as 'Bond in Motion: The Official James Bond Die-Cast Collection'.
 
The book is a slim one, and if you’re after more detail on the Corgi models, I recommend Dave Worrall’s 1996 book, The James Bond Diecasts of Corgi. However, for a good overview of all the toy vehicles and some great photography, then Paul Adams’ book is a must.

Returning to my colleague’s DB5, it occurred to me as I was turning it round in my hands and looking closely at the details, that I was seeing the car as an artefact (I am, after all, an archaeologist). There was a great deal one could tell just from that model, and many of the questions I’m looking to answer when I examine, say, Roman pottery, I could also ask of the DB5 – date, type, origin, condition, context, and so on, allowing me not just to catalogue aspects of its design and manufacture, but also form a picture of its use and history as an object. The model cars of James Bond may well yet be a future specialism in the study of material culture, with Bond Vehicle Collectables and other books providing much of the groundwork!

On location: Altaussee, Austria; or a visit to Mr White's house

A summer holiday to Salzburg in Austria allowed me to visit one of the locations used in the last James Bond film, Spectre. The edge of Lake Altaussee, by the alpine village of Altaussee and about one and a half hour’s drive from Salzburg, was the setting for the scene in which Bond visits Mr White. Werner Fischer, one of Eon’s local contacts during the filming of the sequence, was offering ‘In the footsteps of James Bond’ boat tours of the lake, and naturally I booked myself a place on one of them.

My fellow passengers and I had our first treat even before the boat left the jetty. Beside us, moored to another landing stage, was the thin wooden boat that Daniel Craig’s James Bond uses to motor across the lake to Mr White’s cabin.The boat is based on a traditional Austrian craft known as a Zille or Plätte.

Bond's boat in Spectre

As we pulled away from the shore and started to make our way across the lake, we heard some facts and figures about Altaussee. Unfortunately, my German was too poor to understand much, but I got the gist, and in any case, I didn’t need any translation to realise that we were heading towards a wooden building on the far side of the lake that looked rather familiar. In fact, we were following Bond’s course to Mr White’s house.
 

The view towards Mr White's house on the tour (top) and on screen

After a while, the boat pulled up to the jetty beside the building that normally serves as a bar and restaurant. This is presumably closed during the winter, allowing it to double as Mr White’s cabin in Spectre.
 

Mr White's house now (top) and as shown in Spectre

We wasted no time in disembarking and literally walking in James Bond’s footsteps towards the house. Apart from some superficial differences, the outside of the wooden building seemed little changed from its appearance on the big screen. Indeed, traces of the production still remain. The stone footings of the veranda are made of fibreglass and were fitted especially for the scene, and if I understood aright, the chimney was added too.
 

The veranda with the fake stone footings

Entering the building, I saw that the staircase seen in the film is a feature of the property (annoyingly, I didn’t take a photograph).
 

The staircase as shown in Spectre

And there is a further sign that the production crew had been there in the form of two displays of photographs and newspaper cuttings.
 

The displays inside the house

Just before Bond enters the house, we have a view back towards the lake. This shot shows the actual edge of the lake in front of the building.

The view from the house to the lake (not sure where the tree went)

Eventually, we all boarded the boat and returned across the lake back towards the village. As we approached the end of the tour, our guide let us into a secret. Bond alumnus Klaus Maria Brandauer has a house (and boathouse) here. We weren’t told whether he was there during filming, but it’s intriguing to imagine Bond’s reaction if he had bumped into Maximilian Largo, his old sparring partner in Never Say Never Again. 
 
The boat tour, organised by Altaussee-Schifffahrt, was excellent, although it would have been helpful to have some information at least in English. Nevertheless, if you happen to be in the area, the tour is essential.

James Bond films referenced in latest VW commercial

The latest Volkswagen TV advert for the Golf GTE looks to two classic James Bond films for inspiration. The ‘Button’ advert, created by adam&eveDDB, promotes the vehicle’s hybrid technology, which allows drivers to combine electric and petrol engines at the push of a button. The advert features a series of archetypal movie villains with their fingers poised over big red button ready to wreak destruction. We then see the car – and its all-important button – in action before the advert ends with the tagline, ‘a more responsible use of power’.

Viewers are treated to a pantheon of villains. There’s sci-fi supervillain on a spaceship who presses the button to fire a laser that blows up a planet, which is an obvious nod to Star Wars. We also see a mad professor straight out of a 1930/40s’ black-and-white horror film, who presses the button to animate his own Frankenstein’s monster. Then there are villains from a 1970s’ blaxploitation-type film, a Lethal Weapon-style buddy cop film, and a Indiana Jones-like adventure. 

Naturally, the film series that defined many of the standard tropes or memes of the movie villain is not forgotten. A man strapped to a near-vertical table is looking at the wrong end of a large laser weapon. A woman in a military uniform is at the control panel and laughs maniacally as she presses the button to fire the laser.

What’s interesting is that the scene draws on two Bond films. The laser and the set clearly derives from Goldfinger (1964). There are shades of Ken Adam’s designs, as the set in the advert replicates the little office, complete with employees and a small set of steps, at the back of the laser room in Goldfinger, the golden-brown colour scheme, and the angular walls and metal supports. The laser weapons are also similar in design, albeit that one has green elements, the other blue.
 

The laser rooms in the VW ad (top) and Goldfinger

The villain is modelled on Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love (1963). She wears a Russian-style military jacket with gold buttons, a light brown or khaki shirt and a brown tie similar to the uniform that Rosa Klebb, played by Lotte Lenya, wears in the Bond film. Their hair is different, but it’s sufficiently close to reinforce the link.
 

A Rosa Klebb-style villain in the VW ad (top) and Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb

VW’s ‘The Button’ ad is the latest in a long line of commercials that reference the James Bond films, despite the products having no connection to them. Back in the 1980s, PG Tips advertised its tea bags with the help of a chimpanzee spy called Bond, Brooke Bond. More recently, Sky Sports enlisted David Beckham to advertise its services in a Bond-style advert, and Jaguar evoked Spectre in its advert for the Jaguar XE. Coincidentally, the Sky and Jaguar campaigns, like that for VW, also focused on the villain, demonstrating that the Bond villain is every bit as enduring in popular culture as Bond himself, and is especially appealing to advert writers.

Bond 25 - some speculation

The announcement that the next James Bond film will be released in November 2019 was both exciting and frustrating. On the one hand, at last we have solid news about Bond’s next screen adventure. On the other hand, it’s over two years away. When it finally comes out, it’ll be four years since the last film, Spectre, representing the longest gap between films since Licence to Kill (1989) and GoldenEye (1995). Still, looking on the bright side, the anticipation for the new film will be massive and doubtless the film will be a bigger success because of it.
 
The long wait also means that there is plenty of time to speculate wildly about the new film. So, I thought I’d kick my speculation off with some thoughts about what we might expect from Bond 25.
 
We have precious few details to go on, but there are some factors that might be relevant. In my review of Spectre, I suggested that the film had escaped the tag of being Daniel Craig’s Moonraker or Die Another Day. In retrospect, I’m not so sure. I rather think now that the film does represent the end of a cycle, meaning that the next film will recalibrate the series and be more down to earth.

That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that the film may be Daniel Craig’s last film. Or it’ll be the first film of a new Bond actor. Either way, the film will be a reaffirmation and celebration of Bond, and so will attempt to meet audience expectation of what constitutes a Bond film. Putting those two factors together, Bond 25 could well be a good, solid adventure, which exotic locations, jaw-dropping stunts and so on, but built around a plausible espionage plot. Think From Russia with Love or For Your Eyes Only, rather than You Only Live Twice or The Spy Who Loved Me. 

I don’t think the humour level will be any greater than the level in Spectre, but I do make one plea. Whatever happens, please don’t make it personal for Bond. We’ve had enough of him going rogue.
 
What about Blofeld? He’s too good a character to leave out, but I wouldn’t mind betting that the step-brother angle will be quietly dropped. I expect the story won't explicitly continue the story arc of Spectre either.
 
It's likely the script will once again mine unfilmed passages from the Fleming novels, and there is plenty still to film. But now that an element of continuation novel Colonel Sun has been used in a Bond film, could we see more use of continuation novels? I don’t think so, but an exception could be made for Trigger Mortis, which featured a plot outline and dialogue written by Ian Fleming.
 
As for title, there’s been no urgency to use Fleming’s unused titles, but I’ve always thought that some of his chapter titles would make good film titles. But I have another idea. The trend these days has been for eponymous titles, such as Jack Reacher, Rambo, John Wick, and of course a whole host of superhero films. I have started to wonder, especially in an increasingly competitive market, whether we might eventually see a Bond film called, simply, James Bond, or perhaps Bond, James Bond. Maybe Bond 25 will be that film (but I hope I'm wrong!). Remember, you read it here first.   

Where is James Bond's big gun?

The poster for Live and Let Die, created by Robert McGinnis, is iconic and a classic piece of Bond art, but there’s something on the poster that’s been puzzling me. In the centre of the artwork, a woman sits on top of the barrel of a field gun or anti-aircraft gun, which is being fired by James Bond.

I’ve watched Live and Let Die countless times, but I can’t remember ever seeing James Bond wield a gun of that sort. Unless it’s a case of blink and you miss it, the gun doesn’t appear in the film. What’s surprising, though, is quite how central the image is to the publicity of the film.

Apart from the poster, a large image of the gun is shown in the gatefold of the soundtrack album. Interestingly, the image here is a photograph. This rules out artistic licence, and means that Roger Moore filmed a scene featuring the gun or posed with it. It’s reasonable to conclude that the gun was used for publicity only or the scene ended on the cutting-room floor.

If the latter, the photograph may offer a clue about the gun’s intended placement in the film. Roger Moore is shown wearing a pale open-necked shirt, possibly the same shirt he wears for his scenes in Mr Big’s poppy field. Had Mr Big installed the gun in the poppy field to protect his crop? Perhaps there was a scene in which Bond discovers the gun and uses it to destroy the helicopter that’s attacking him. (That's another puzzler - what happens to the helicopter?)

The gun itself is shown in more detail in the photograph. To me, it looks like a Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft gun, but I haven’t been able to identify it precisely. A photograph in the US edition of Roger Moore’s Live and Let Die diary shows Roger Moore being shown how to use a gun mounted on a US Coast Guard boat. It's hard to tell, but it could be the same gun as that in the poster (Roger Moore is also wearing a pale open-necked shirt), in which case, the photograph on the soundtrack album would appear to be a publicity shot.

If anyone knows more about James Bond’s missing gun, then post a comment at the end of this post. I’ll be glad to hear from you.

Find Your Fate and the GoldenEye connection

There's a fascinating article by Philip Poggiali in issue 36 of MI6 Confidential about the series of James Bond-themed 'Find Your Fate' books, which were published in 1985 to coincide with the release of A View to a Kill. In the books, the reader assumes the role of James Bond and chooses options along various narrative threads to save the world from the dastardly plans of an evil genius.

As I was reading the article, I was struck by a coincidence between one of the books and GoldenEye, released in 1995. I tweeted about it back in October last year, but I thought I'd post about it here as well.

In Programmed for Danger, by Jean M Favors, the reader once again becomes James Bond to search for the Z-Disc, a revolutionary energy device that's been stolen from Zorin's base in the French Riviera.

The cover, drawn by Cliff Spohn, of Programmed for Danger by Jean M Favors

The cover of the book, by Cliff Spohn, gives a hint of the adventures within, with scenes of the southern French landscape, the circuitry of the Z-Disc, and depictions of Roger Moore's Bond that appear to be based on images from earlier films; the image of the beshirted Bond could come from the scene in Mr Big's poppy field in Live and Let Die. 

In the best Bond tradition, there's a car chase: a speeding Aston Martin and a Ferrari in hot pursuit is shown in the corner of the cover image. If this seems a familiar, it's because a speeding Aston Martin and a Ferrari in hot pursuit also feature in GoldenEye. The vehicle models are different – the Aston on the front cover seems to be the V8 Vantage that Bond would drive two years later in The Living Daylights – but the scene is otherwise closely replicated in the 1995 film. We can even find a scene in the film with the cars at almost the same relative position as shown on the cover. What's more, the car chases in both the book (as far as I can tell) and the film are set in the French Riviera.
 

Spot the difference: Programmed for Danger and GoldenEye

Coincidence or somehow prescient? It's pure coincidence, of course, but it's fun to think that the production team, when drafting GoldenEye, were flicking through the 'Find Your Fate' books for inspiration!

To read more about the 'Find Your Fate' series, see issue 36 of MI6 Confidential, which is available to buy here.

James Bond references in The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad

The animated shows Family Guy, American Dad and The Simpsons are well known for their pop-culture references, typically those relating to TV, films and music. The James Bond films have not been forgotten, and have provided the inspiration for episode plots, as well as for incidental gags.

For example, 'You Only Move Twice', an episode of The Simpsons, is a complete Bond parody, featuring a James Bond character that resembles Sean Connery and allusions to the films of Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice (and possibly the book of You Only Live Twice – Lisa finds that she is allergic to all the plants in the grounds of the community of Cypress Creek, owned by the evil Globex Corporation, a nod, perhaps, to Blofeld's Garden of Death). The episode even includes a Bondian song that could have been sung by Shirley Bassey.

In other episodes, the Bond references have been more incidental. I've always thought the Bond-related joke in the 'Bart Carny' episode - after Cooder and his son Spud, both carnival folk, ingratiate themselves into the Simpson's home, Cooder puts on Homer's clothes, and Spud says, 'Wow, Dad. You look like James Bond' - to be rather clever.

Given that its main character, Stan, is a CIA agent, it's inevitable that American Dad should have its own Bond parody. 'Tearjerker' features Stan as the James Bond character, Francine as a Bond girl called Sexpun T'Come, Steve as the Q character, here named 'S', and Roger as the eponymous villain. There is a sequel called 'For Black Eyes Only'.

There are plenty of Bond references to be found in Family Guy too. In the episode 'Mr and Mrs Stewie', Stewie meets Penelope, who shares his own psychopathic tendencies. When Stewie refuses to kill Brian for her, Penelope decides to do it herself, but is prevented from doing so by Stewie. They have a fight on the top of a train, when Penelope uses her Rosa Klebb-style shoes with blades in the toes. It's interesting to note that Penelope is voiced by Cate Blanchett, who also appears as Soviet agent Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Cate Blanchett has stated in interviews that her portrayal was inspired by Lotte Lenya's portrayal of Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love.

I'm not intending to list all the Bond references found in these shows – there are websites dedicated to the shows that do that – but it is probably fair to say that most of the references draw on the older films and classic moments – Sean Connery, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and so on. However, two allusions to Bond in American Dad and Family Guy show that the more recent films, Casino Royale in particular, are also making an impact on the scriptwriters.

We can see as much in 'Phantom of the Telethon', an episode of American Dad in which Stan hosts a telethon to raise money for the CIA torture programme. At one point, we see a blooper reel of comedy moments in the torture chamber. In one of these moments, a man holding a rope with a ball at the end stands by a naked man tied to a seat-less chair, which is obviously a nod to the torture scene in Casino Royale. (If I remember aright, the blooper occurs when the torturer accidentally hits himself with the rope.)
 

The Casino Royale moment from American Dad

Coincidentally (although maybe not, considering that Seth MacFarlane is responsible for both shows), the torture scene is also referenced in Family Guy. In 'The Peter Principal', Peter is appointed principal of James Woods High, and begins meting out punishments to the bullies. The punishments get progressively more severe, and at one point Peter places a seat-less chair in the school hall and swings a knotted rope.
 

The Casino Royale moment from Family Guy

Animated shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy play an important role in keeping the classic elements and traits or memes of the Bond films, such as Rosa Klebb's shoes, current in popular culture. Each subsequent film creates new memes, and a sign of how successful they are in the cultural environment (that is, their longevity and the extent to which they are replicated and disseminated) is that they're referenced in shows like Family Guy. On that basis, Casino Royale is well on the way to being every bit as classic as Goldfinger and From Russia With Love.

Sir Roger Moore - an appreciation

Sir Roger Moore in 1973 (By Allan Warren (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Sir Roger Moore was the James Bond of a generation. He was the James Bond of my generation. Some of my earliest Bond-related memories are of Roger Moore's Bond films, and unwittingly, he was responsible for my becoming a Bond fan. With his death, which was announced today, it's as if I've lost a childhood friend.

I grew up with Roger Moore's Bond in more ways than one. Live and Let Die, his first Bond film, was released in the same year that I was born. My earliest memory of Bond is watching Goldfinger on television, but I also have an early memory of The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore's third and best film as 007. The Egypt-set scenes particularly stick in the mind. Among my toys in my later years was, naturally, an Corgi Aston Martin DB5, but I also treasured my Lotus Esprit and Stromberg helicopter from The Spy Who Loved Me. When I was around 10 or 11, I began to have aspirations to be a cartoonist (which stayed with me for a while, but thankfully faded as the rejection slips started arriving in quantity). Anyway, I'd write and draw my own James Bond comic strip, and of course it was Roger Moore's Bond that I'd depict. Conversations with my schoolmates always eventually got round to Bond. Even now, I remember the lengthy discussions I had about tarot cards in Live and Let Die and the lyrics to the title song of A View to a Kill. 

Goldfinger set the Bond formula, but for me, The Spy Who Loved Me is every bit as archetypal. The film redefined the pre-title sequence; its triumphant ski-jump stunt brought well-deserved applause from cinema-goers and became the benchmark for every pre-title sequence that followed. Subsequent pre-title sequences have been bigger, but not necessarily better.

The Spy Who Loved Me contains plenty of Roger Moore's trademark charm and saucy seaside-postcard humour ('Sorry, something came up'), and I love it. But it also has its serious moments, and Roger Moore was equally adept at those. Watch the moment when he reveals to Anya that he killed her lover, himself a Russian agent, and tell me he can't play it straight.

Later films perhaps saw him sharing more screen time with his stunt double, but they remain perfect entertainment. Octopussy is another case where Roger Moore moved effortlessly between humour and seriousness. Anyone who can draw edge-of-your-seat tension from a scene while wearing a clown suit must be a brilliant actor.

Roger Moore was famously self-deprecating about his acting talent, and he often said that the only film in which he really flexed his acting muscles was The Man Who Haunted Himself. To my shame I've never seen the film, though I have seen Gold, his 1974 film based on a Wilbur Smith novel, where we perhaps see a similar side of him. That's not to dismiss the Bond films in any way. To make the Bond films look as good as they do takes real skill and dedication, and that's what Roger Moore had in abundance. 

I was lucky enough to have seen Roger Moore twice on stage, and was thrilled to have met him – sort of – after one of the shows for an autograph. They say never meet your heroes, but Roger Moore is one hero I would gladly have spent more time with.

So let me raise a vodka martini, shaken but not stirred (not something he ever stipulated himself, curiously), and thank Sir Roger Moore for introducing me to Bond, entertaining me enormously over the years, and keeping the British end up.

Eric and Ernie play Bond in The Intelligence Men

In 1965, top TV comedy duo Morecambe and Wise brought their brand of comedy antics to the big screen. Being the mid '60s when Bondmania was at its height, it seems inevitable that their first film (they made a further two films, and there was also a TV movie in 1983) would be a spy film. While the film, The Intelligence Men (1965), is not overtly a Bond spoof - certainly not to the extent that Carry On Spying, say, parodied the Bond series - it nevertheless contains nods to the films.

The plot, for what it's worth, sees hapless MI5 agent Ernie Sage, played by Ernie Wise, recruit café owner Eric Morecambe (played by, er, Eric Morecambe) to the service. Eric's mission is to pose as a Major Cavendish, infiltrate the sinister Schlect organisation (or is that S.C.H.L.E.C.T.?), and foil a plot to assassinate a Russian ballerina on tour in London and destabilise Anglo-Soviet relations.

The story is a little weak, but the film is amusing enough, and for the Bond fan there is the added enjoyment of spotting the Bond references. For instance, the name of the criminal organisation has the ring of SPECTRE about it, and there's a running joke about the prevalence of beautiful female spies. At another point, Ernie refers to Eric having a licence to kill.

Then there's a rather funny scene, full of the characteristic Morecambe and Wise shtick that made them a national institution, in an MI5 office when Eric is briefed about the mission. Some of the dialogue clearly references the Bond films:

'Where are the special shoes?', Eric asks. 
'What special shoes?', Ernie replies. 
'Yes, the special shoes with knives in the toecaps.' 
'We don't have things like that.' 
'Yeah, and the fountain pens. They shoot bullets.' 
'No, we don't have things like that. We go around like perfectly normal people.'

The sequence highlights the immediate impact that Rosa Klebb's shoes, as featured in From Russia With Love (1963), made on popular culture. The fountain pen, on the other hand, doesn't reference the Bond films specifically, but is a more general spy-related trope. James Bond wouldn't be equipped with such a device until Moonraker (1979), and the tradition of the trick pen is rather older than Bond, going back at least to the Second World War. Nevertheless, the pen taps into the audience expectation for gadgets in a spy film, for which the Bond films were largely responsible, and cinema-goers may well have associated the pen with Bond all the same.

 

Eric Morecambe demonstrates the special shoes

 
Other points of interest in the film is that it features Richard Vernon, who was fresh from his appearance in Goldfinger (1964) as Smithers, and William Franklyn, who is said to have been considered for the role of James Bond.

If you have a chance to watch the film, I recommend you do so. It’s part of the wave of spy spoofs released during the period of Bondmania, but it also showcases the comedic talents of a legendary double act.

Kingsman returns with a very Bondian trailer

Judging by the trailer, released this week, Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Golden Circle looks likely to contain as many nods to the Bond films as the film it follows, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014).

In the sequel, the Kingsman headquarters are destroyed by some unknown enemy (who presumably got the idea from Raoul Silva and Blofeld, who were responsible for destroying MI6 headquarters in Skyfall and Spectre), and the Kingsman agents join forces with a spy organisation in the US to defeat the common foe.

Apart from the big explosion, the trailer promises all sorts of Bond-like thrills, including an underwater car (not so much Wet Nellie as Wet Taxi), gadgets galore, a henchman with a mechanical arm that doubles as a projectile (wasn't there something like that in a Young Bond novel?), London-set chases, and a snowy mountain-top lair, complete with cable car stunts.
 

The submersible taxi in Kingsman: The Golden Circle

This last aspect is of course highly redolent of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which evidently continues to inspire film-makers. Other films that have looked to the 1969 Bond film include Inception (2010) and Johnny English Reborn (2011), not to mention Spectre.
 

A mountain-top lair in Kingsman: The Golden Circle?

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is released on 29 September, and I shall be at the front of the queue to see it. Does the film hint at the direction of the next Bond film? I'm starting to wonder. Some may claim that this and the Fast and Furious series (reviews of the latest episode have alluded to the film's Bondian qualities) are beginning to out-Bond Bond, and it wouldn't surprise me if the producers of Bond 25 are keeping a weather eye on such releases.

Bond references galore in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

I don’t know if you’ve seen Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010), but when I watched it the other day (in the interest of research, you understand), I discovered that the film was packed with James Bond references. Of course, the title gives it away somewhat, but there is a lot more besides to tempt the curious Bond fan.

The essential premise of the film, following that of the first film in the series, Cats & Dogs (2001), is that cats are at war with dogs, and certain individuals, unbeknown to their owners, are agents of secret organisations set up to pursue the struggle. Unlike the first film, however, the spy cats and dogs join forces to stop a rogue agent (aren’t they all these days?).

The film begins with a Bondian pre-titles sequence. A spy infiltrates a military base. The agent is disguised, but once inside a top secret room removes the disguise as if taking off a suit (shades of the opening of Goldfinger here). The agent locates some secret codes and takes pictures of them with a spy camera. The agent then fires a piton gun into the ceiling, is hauled up to the room and escapes. Cue the titles and music.

Were it not for the dog and cat motifs, dog bones and paw prints among them, the title sequence could come straight out of a Bond film. It evokes the title sequences of GoldenEye and Casino Royale in particular, and is even accompanied by a song sung by the queen of the Bond themes, Shirley Bassey.
 

The title sequence from Cats & Dogs (top) and its inspirations below (Casino Royale, right, GoldenEye, left)

After the titles, we're introduced to Diggs, a police dog whose inability to follow orders is rewarded with frequent stints in the pound. His handler's chief is, incidentally, called Captain Flemming (sic), possibly a nod to Ian Fleming. Diggs's latest stay in the pound is, however, cut short when he's busted out by Butch, an agent of D.O.G.S. (the spy organisation for dogs, obviously) and recruited. Once at D.O.G.S. headquarters, Diggs meets the film's Q-like character, who has a workshop and a team of white-coated boffins.
 

The 'Q' scene in Cats & Dogs

In the briefing room, Diggs and others receive a video message from Kitty Galore, who in Blofeld-like manner swivels round on a high-backed chair and strokes a white mouse. The villainous cat is a hairless Sphinx, but according to her back story was originally a fluffy white cat. It's possible that the hairless element alludes to the bald heads of the Blofelds of You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Kitty Galore's scheme, hinted in her message, threatens both cats and dogs and so D.O.G.S. joins forces with the equivalent cat organisation, M.E.O.W.S., whose chief is voiced by none other than former Bond, Roger Moore. The cat chief is black and white and wears a bow tie, as if wearing a dinner suit, and his name, Tab Lazenby, must be inspired by another Bond actor.
 

Roger Moore as Tab Lazenby in Cats & Dogs

The action takes place in San Francisco. Though there's no fight on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, A View to a Kill seems to be referenced with images of the bridge incorporated into the title sequence and a scene at Fisherman's Wharf. Both locations feature in the 1985 Bond film. There's also a nod to The Spy Who Loved Me. Kitty Galore's henchman is Paws, a hulk of a cat with metal teeth and clearly influenced by Jaws.
 

Paws, the feline Jaws in Cats & Dogs

The denouement of the film is set on the roof of a fairground carousel, where Kitty Galore attempts to put her dastardly scheme into action. The carousel disguises a satellite dish which controls a satellite in space. This in turn is designed to send out a signal that drives dogs mad and turns them against their owners. Satellites feature fairly prominently in Bond films, but the struggle on top of the dish and the use of the satellite to send out a pulse to catastrophic effect in Cats & Dogs are not too dissimilar from the conclusion of GoldenEye.

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore is one of many children's films that express the tropes of memes of the James Bond films, and is worth watching for curiosity value, if nothing else. It’s doubtful that children would be aware of the references, but such allusions keep the parents interested, and perhaps serve to introduce the Bond films to children, which in turn ultimately helps keep Bond relevant for the next generation of film viewers.

Mightier than the sword: the trick pen in the Bond films and beyond

The humble pen makes an ideal gadget for the spy. It's small, it can be discreetly concealed in the pocket, but arouses no suspicion when taken out, and can be modified to house all sorts of devices. It's no wonder the pen-based gadget has been seen a few times in the James Bond films.

In Moonraker (1979), we learn that a deadly-tipped pen, which Bond finds on Holly Goodhead's hotel dressing table, is standard CIA issue. In Octopussy (1983), a fountain pen made by Mont Blanc is multi-functional, containing a highly concentrated mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid ('wonderful for poison pen letters') and an earpiece to a listening device. Coincidentally, Never Say Never Again, the rival Bond film released in the same year, also includes a fountain pen among its gadgets; that one is able to release an explosive charge.

The explosive pen was reinvented for GoldenEye (1995) and used to great dramatic and comic effect. The film featured a Parker Jotter ballpoint, which contains a class-four grenade that is armed with three clicks of end button and disarmed with three more. (I've never looked at a ballpoint pen in quite the same way since, and on idly clicking the end of one, often wonder whether it's about to go off.)
 

Q demonstrates the 'pen grenade' in GoldenEye

Curiously, a very similar device featured in Wild Geese II, released ten years earlier. In that film, Michael (played by John Terry, who would become Felix Leiter in The Living Daylights), a member of the organisation that has hired mercenaries to spring Rudolf Hess from prison, is given an explosive ballpoint pen. Like GoldenEye's pen, it's armed by clicking the end, though has a longer fuse (40 seconds, as opposed to four seconds).
 

Mercenary John Haddad demonstrates the 'pen grenade' in Wild Geese II

These gadgets may seem fantastic, but there's a long tradition of adapting pens for secret use in the real world of espionage. The Second World War saw teams of boffins create an ingenious array of gadgets from ordinary objects. Charles Fraser-Smith, often claimed to be the inspiration for the character of Q (which seems fanciful, given that there was no such character in the Bond books), was responsible, among many other devices, for a fountain pen that could conceal documents.
 

One of Charles Fraser-Smith's gadgets

The use of trick pens continued into the Cold War. In an interview with Ian Fleming published in 1965, Bernard Hutton, an expert on Soviet espionage, revealed how Soviet spies used dynamite-filled fountain pens for the purpose of assassination.

The gadget-filled pen is so well established in espionage lore that today the idea might seem hackneyed. This may explain Q's comment to Bond in Skyfall (2012): 'Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that any more.'

And the idea of trick pens has been subverted in other films. During the tank sequence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Professor Henry Jones (Sean Connery) shakes off a German soldier – who then stumbles and knocks himself out – by squirting ink from his fountain pen into the soldier's face. More recently, in The Bourne Identity (2002), Jason Bourne uses a biro as a stabbing weapon.

In a way dismissing the notion of the sort of gadgets seen in the Bond films, both cases demonstrate that the ordinary can become extraordinary; you don't need to fill a pen with explosives to turn it into a deadly weapon.

Some classic James Bond helicopter scenes in Lego

There were some very thoughtful and exciting gifts waiting for me under the tree this Christmas, including Lego figures of James Bond and Skyfall's Raoul Silva, and a Lego helicopter to go with them. The presents got me thinking about some of the many scenes in the Bond films that featured helicopters, and, following my earlier attempts to build Bond vehicles, how I could recreate them in Lego.
 

James Bond and Raoul Silva as Lego figures

The helicopter set that I had been given was a gunship from the Ultra Agents range. It wasn't too dissimilar from the Tiger helicopter from GoldenEye, so I turned to that film first. The helicopter is a two-seater, so I simply put Bond in the front seat of the cockpit and a female figure in the back seat to represent Natalya Simonova and recreate the scene where both have been captured and bound to the cockpit seats. Here Natalya has just woken Bond up.
 

Inside the Tiger helicopter in GoldenEye

The pre-titles sequence of For Your Eyes Only is up there with the best of the opening sequences. Bond is picked up in a Universal Exports helicopter, which is then remotely hijacked by a Blofeld-like figure (now officially acknowledged to be Blofeld). With the pilot out of action, Bond clambers outside the aircraft, opens the pilot's door, climbs back inside, takes control and deals with Blofeld (declining the offer of a delicatessen in stainless steel). My Lego collection isn't that extensive, but I managed to find enough pieces to build something that resembled the helicopter. I had Bond dangle outside and used an image of Beckton Gas Works, where the scene was filmed, as background.
 

Spot the difference. The opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only

I was keen to recreate the scene in From Russia With Love where Bond is being pursued by a helicopter in the Scottish highlands standing in for Turkey, but the design of the helicopter was too much of a challenge for my limited resources. Instead, I looked to On Her Majesty's Secret Service (appropriately enough, being a Christmas film) and the helicopter attack on Piz Gloria.

As I was watching the sequence again, looking for a good action moment involving Bond and a helicopter, I realised that Bond isn't particularly visible during the arrival of the helicopters at Piz Gloria. The sequence focuses on the approach of the helicopters, long-distance shots of Draco's men jumping out, and Tracy's fight with Blofeld's goons, but Bond isn't seen in close-up until he's out of the helicopter and sliding towards the main building. That hasn't stopped me, however, from showing Bond more clearly jumping out of the helicopter – in Lego, at least.
 

The helicopter assault on Piz Gloria

The helicopter itself was fairly easily rendered in Lego, and I was especially lucky to have a brick with a Red Cross sticker. I found an image of Piz Gloria to use as the background. Bond is wearing Silva's white jacket, which I thought it went better with the snow-covered slopes.

I don't pretend that my models are particularly accurate, but I've certainly had fun making them. There are plenty more helicopter moments in the Bond films, so watch this space for more of them recreated in Lego!