This Week In Bond (August 9th, 2022)

Feel his presence in the crowd

‘GoldenEye’ is back on the big screen in the UK this week, and on small screens too as ITV broadcast the film in prime time on Saturday. The combination led to #GoldenEye trending on Twitter yesterday. Not bad for a 27 year-old film. Now that the Daniel Craig era has officially wrapped up, most of the media is talking about who will be next. But perhaps the better question is, what will be next? It’s a quandary the franchise has faced before, perhaps none more so than in 1994.

‘GoldenEye’ was a gamble. The franchise had been dormant for 6 years in the public eye, with Timothy Dalton having failed to connect with US audiences in the late 1980s. ‘True Lies’ had shown how it could be done (with help from Bond production designer Peter Lamont). Bond’s traditional foes were no longer behind an iron curtain. His outdated womanizing ways were no longer as acceptable. Doubts about Bond’s place in the world were all over the media. The studio were not all-in on his return either, granting producers just $60m to relaunch with Pierce Brosnan, which was hedging their bets somewhat given they almost doubled that budget for ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ two years later once it had proven a success.

Brosnan himself, after having watched his chance back in 1986 evaporate, was nervous about how the ‘have gun, will travel’ character may work in the 1990s. He wanted to add layers. “It’s time to clean the slate and start again,” he told Cinescape before the film came out. “I hope to explore some of the demons inside of James Bond. I’m going to try and update him psychologically. In this film, the stakes have gone up for Bond in the sense that it’s a personal betrayal on behalf of the bad guy within the movie.”

“There are certain parameters you have to adhere to, but this is a Bond for the 1990s… We’re going to push the envelope on this and shake it up. I think you’d have to go right back to the beginning and find what Ian Fleming put on paper.”

‘GoldeneEye’ was, of course, where it all began - the house where Ian Fleming penned his first novel ‘Casino Royale.’ It was a fitting title for the rebirth of James Bond and, perhaps, what we can now look back on as the start of the second era of the series.

We won’t know until years to come whether the next actor to relaunch the series could be considered the start of a third era, or just an extension of this second era. But whoever they eventually cast will likely signal intent in their early interviews. Who will they reference as their Rosetta Stone for the character (now that Craig’s gone, nobody should be contractually obliged to say it’s him anymore), will they say it needs updating for audiences again, or will they lean back on the past with nostalgia? Chances are though, the next Bond will have grown up with ‘GoldenEye’ as the on-ramp to the franchise, not ‘Goldfinger.’

News

When is a PPK not a PPK? When it’s an exhaust manifold. We discovered this week that Lego has made a sneaky inclusion to the new Aston Martin DB5 ‘Speed Racers’ set (#76911) that solved the problem a lot of people were asking: why does the James Bond Minifig hold a wrench? Low and behold, there is a gun accessory in the box after all, but they did it in a clever way to avoid the licencing wrath of “not having Jamed Bond toys with guns.” Check out the Twitter thread here for the full story.

Congratulations to stunt supremo and action unit director Vic Armstrong who won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the London Action Festival last week. Pierce Brosnan, Harrison Ford, and John McTiernan paid tribute via video messages. Bond producer Michael G. Wilson capped it off saying that “nobody does it better” before Armstrong received a standing ovation from the audience.

Listen

To mark the film being back on the big screen, the James Bond & Friends podcast welcomed a panel of Phil Nobile Jr, Dr Lisa Funnell, and Sean Longmore to discuss the impactful elements of ‘GoldenEye,’ and also share a personal story or two. Who is compared to licked cookie? Who was named after a cast member? How can that score by Eric Serra be defended? Listen and find out…

Watch

TV spots for Bond films have been a bit all over the place. Some were just cut downs of the trailers, whilst others branched out with their own pitch. The creative juices have been a bit conservative in recent years during the Daniel Craig era. For ‘GoldenEye,’ United Artists began down the traditional path, but then went wild. In six minutes you can watch their campaign evolve from using shots of the trailer, pivoting to slow artistic cross-fades that look like an ‘in memorial’ video, to blasting heavy metal music, bringing back the ‘nobody does it better’ line, wrong footing audiences with classic black-tie invitation, and later strobing ‘0’ ‘0’ ‘7’ in a very 90s font. Either way, they wanted you to know that this was the return of James Bond, and he was coming back on November 17th.

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Originally issued in 1995 by Solo Publishing to tie into the publication of Dave Worrall’s ‘The Most Famous Car in the World’ book, these stunning lithograph prints feature original art by the English artist, Steven Massey. Each of the 850 original prints measured 510mm x 405mm and were printed on museum-quality acid-free stock. Each print was hand numbered by the artist. 20 years on, MI6 has secured the remaining limited numbers are made them available to order via the MI6 Confidential website.

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