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| JAMES BOND copyright The Estate of IAN FLEMING & EON PRODUCTIONS |
It seems only fitting to end this present run of 'TV Tie- Ins of the Times' with the 'daddy' of them all - JAMES BOND. I hear what you're saying - 007 is a movie tie-in, not a TV one, but you're only half right. The broadcast rights to the Bond films were sold to ITV in 1974, and Dr. NO was first shown on TV in '75, so Bond has been a television staple for over 40 years. However, I admit it's a fine line, as the Annuals were issued while his movie incarnation yet appeared only in cinemas. (Programmes about James Bond had been televised though.)
Above is the 1969 JAMES BOND Annual, and the fact that it was the last of three before they were revived by another publisher (this time titled 'Special', not 'Annual') in 1979 (for '80), suggests that they weren't the best-sellers one would imagine they'd be. Collectors' items now for certain, but apparently not at the time they were originally published. Anyway, that's perhaps a subject for another post, but, for the moment, let's look back to 1969 when Bond's licence to star in Annuals was revoked (for a few years) after the very publication before you.
This Annual contained text stories, features, and picture strips (a collection of the LIVE & LET DIE newspaper strip). Incidentally, there's a page missing from my copy of this Annual - can anyone supply me with a scan of it? It'd be greatly appreciated. (Update: Thanks to BARRY PEARL for supplying scans of both sides of the missing page.)
4 comments:
I'd noticed that all the Bond films were on ITV and never on the BBC. Over the summer of 1999 ITV showed all the Bond films up to "Licence To Kill" from 1989. My father was a Bond fan and he died only three days after the last Bond film was broadcast on the August Bank Holiday - it was like they had been broadcast for him to watch one last time.
And I'm sure he enjoyed every last one of them, CJ. (Wasn't wild about the Dalton ones myself.)
I thought the Dalton films were OK, not great, but not bad. The plots were a little too complicated (IMHO), but that's sort of the nature of the beast with the spy-fi genre. Good guys turning out to be enemy spies, bad guys turning out to be good guy undercover agents, that kind of thing.
Also, plots involving drug smuggling were done to death in the 1980's. (I didn't mind it so much in Live and Let Die, but it had not yet become a cliche back then.) And having an MI6 agent chasing drug dealers is as inappropriate as having Miami Vice cops going to Istanbul to steal a decoding device from the Russian embassy.
It looked like the Dalton films were trying to tone down some of the politically incorrect elements of the series, as if they were trying to make James Bond movies for people who did not like Bond movies.
Anyway, I'm glad that Colin's dad got to see the films one more time.
I think the Dalton films, much like Connery's Never Say Never Again, work okay as TV fodder because there isn't the same sense of expectation from them on TV - especially if one has seen them before in the cinema. However, as new, big screen Bond movies where audience expectations are high, they're pretty much damp squibs, TC. Right up to For Your Eyes Only, there was something about Bond movies that made me want to see them again as soon as possible the moment I left the cinema. After that 'though, they seemed to lose that something special, despite good moments in each of them.
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