007 #blogjune 2020 - Bond Age

007 #blogjune 2020

“I think 'The Spy Who Loved Me' was the best, or rather the one I enjoyed doing the most”
―Roger Moore


Song of the Blog:
"I wasn't lookin' but somehow you found me
It tried to hide from your love light
But like heaven above me
The spy who loved me
Is keepin' all my secrets safe tonight"
 - Carly Simon

I talked about Bond in last year's 007 blog entry, just like the many Bond films - this is like a sequel blog. This is the BIGGEST - THE BEST - it's a BLOG and B-E-Y-O-N-D!

At the age of seven in the seventies I already started to get into Bond. In 1974 there was THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN - the second film for Roger Moore in the role of "Agent 007" and Christopher Lee as a great villain  and Maud Adams as Andrea Anders (Fun Fact: It was the first James Bond movie to be shown at the Kremlin).
It took five years after that  before the THE SPY WHO LOVED ME came out - that film cemented my bond with this spy series forever. The Lotus Esprit car remains one of my favourite movie cars, besides the Delorean from Back to the Future. Some interesting facts:
The Lotus submersible (the Lotus Esprit underwater car or Lotus submarine car) was code named 'Esther Williams' in an early draft of the script and was also nicknamed by the crew as Wet Nellie (after the mini-helicopter in "You Only Live Twice" (1967)). It is called Wet Nellie in the novelization.

The actual chase sequence in Sardinia involving the Lotus Esprit runs for seven minutes. I loved that chase - I remember vividly when the car was chased by the helicopter into the water. After the film's release, demand for white Lotus Esprit cars surged to the point that new customers had to be placed on a three-year waiting list. The power of movie magic.

Maud Adams would pop up later in another Bond film that is dear to me - OCTOPUSSY. I even mentioned the movie in my second novel in the SHOCK trilogy, for its location in India. I loved that Bond film in 1983 and bought the comic book adaptation. The other day Michael Minneboo created a vlog about it, at that time I had already planned to do a blog on the same comic for #blogjune. It is one of my favourite movie adaption comics. It has aged pretty well for 37 years and sits among my James Bond collection of books and toys. For some reason the Dutch version has a black border, compared to the German one. The MARVEL super special was created by Paul Neery! I only have a PDF of this version - it's a completely different style than the adaptation I have  by the Spanish artist Frederico Maidagan, who also did a version of VIEW TO A KILL and did some of the old PHANTOM comics.

Left: Marvel's version - Right: A scan from the version I have.

Is it time to end the Bond franchise though, they have become cynical way to PC carbon copies of the charming excitement that we enjoyed in the 80s. The latest Bond has been postponed due to Covid-19. I feel the Bond series died in 1999, along with my father :( The 19th film THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH should have been enough for the world of Bond. But I guess it's no time to die, yet.

THE END?