Freddie as F.R.O.7. was a 1992 animated film about a frog that is a secret agent with a code name that has "07" at the end; I'll leave it to you to guess whether or not it was a James Bond parody. It was produced and made in the UK, and it was hoped that it would be successful enough to help build an ongoing feature animation studio in London. That didn't happen. In fact it was such a high-profile flop I'm pretty sure there wasn't another hand-drawn British animated film in mainstream theatres until Christmas Carol: The Movie 9 years later, and that one ensured there would never be any more. Despite it's Box Office failure at least one VHS copy of Freddie seems to be at every charity shop and car-boot sale in the UK. Whether this means it sold well on video (a sign of the paucity of feature length children's entertainment in the 90s if that is the case), or simply that everyone who finds a copy in the cupboard is disgusted and wants to get rid of it as soon as possible I don't know. I do recall watching it on TV once as a kid, and quite a few of my friends were fans, or at least had seen it.
Freddie came a bit before the celebrity voice-cast craze came into full swing, so it was perhaps a bit ahead of its time in having a voice cast of distinguished or at least known British actors like Brian Blessed, Nigel Hawthorne, Jenny Agutter, John Sessions and our own Jonathan Pryce (the re-edited U.S. version re-titled Freddy the Frog also featured narration by James Earl Jones). And Ben Kingsley (pre-"Sir Ben Kingsley") in the title role. He puts on a French accent. Yes, the eponymous frog was French. I guess P.C. hadn't reached British kid's entertainment by 92.
So with Ben Kingsley doing the voice of a talking-French-frog-come-UK-based secret agent the film certainly has novelty value. But is it any good? Well... it doesn't start too well. After a nifty credits sequence with Freddie driving around London we cut to a flashback prologue, explaining how a human-sized talking Frog came to be. As far as I remember there were no origin episodes explaining why Bugs and Mickey are so different from their real world animal counterparts, so I think feeling the need to explain a cartoon character's origin is a mistake, especially if you're not also going to explain why the normal-sized frogs can also talk, or why the Loch Ness Monster and her family can sing, or where Freddy's sentient, anthropomorphic, leap-frogging car came from. It's also a pretty tedious sequence which sadly takes up the bulk of the first twenty minutes.
If you can get past that it does get a little better... but not much. The rest of the film basically covers the usual Bondian cartoon tropes. Megalomaniac, hammy villain (Blessed, natch) trying to take over the world, Bond-esque "Freddie girl" and comic sidekick etc. While some of this is mildly amusing there's no getting away from the feeling that Danger Mouse had covered all of this on TV for about a decade at that point with better wit, funnier and more imaginative (and amazingly even more coherent) stories and more appealing characters and even character designs. It's a little less talky than Danger Mouse so maybe younger kids might like it a little more, I don't know.
As usual with these kind of things, the Bond parodies aren't very specific and generally only poke fun at tropes rather than particular movies. There is a scene at a horse race which might have been meant to be the Ascot, and given how long animated movies sometimes take to make AVTAK might have been the incumbent Bond movie when this started production. There are tanker ships and a slight TSWLM feel to the villain's lair I suppose. The "python had a crush on me" gag from MR is regurgitated but that's more theft than parody. One line I did like is when Hawthorne's character is talking about the location of his other, presumably non-amphibian agents; "005 is in India, 006 is in China and 007 is lost in Hollywood". A comment on the Americanisation of James Bond circa LTK? Almost certainly not, but it could have been.
There is a strange slightly nationalistic feel to the film. The villains plan involves "crushing British spirit" by destroying famous British monuments (e.g. Big Ben) and his plot also involved somehow draining the energy of British ancestors which I didn't really understand. Maybe they were hoping patiotism would be really big with British kids at that time and they'd strong-arm their parents into seeing this multiple times over Beauty and the Beast as a result.
The voice cast do a good job and the animation is decent. Not first class by any stretch of the imagination, but not TV level; probably better than, say, any of Ralph Bakshi's movies and with a few nice touches; the credit sequence is particularly good.
It's not hard to see why this didn't catch on, I suspect it would have seemed pretty dated even at the time. There was possibly no point in the last fifty years where James Bond was less relevant than 1992, and those few kids who did want a Bond cartoon at that time could probably just have stayed home and watched James Bond Jr.. And by 1992 no one, least of all kids, was going to be lured in by a soundtrack featuring Boy George, Asia (with only 50% of their original line-up), Barbara Dickson and Grace Jones. That's not to say the soundtrack is bad; I particularly liked the Bond theme parody by Holly Johnson that's played over the end credits. Basically, as far as this film goes I mostly just liked the opening and ending credits. The stuff in between I could take or leave. And if anyone in 2010 was going to like a British 1992 animated movie about a frog James Bond it's me.
A common complaint of kids movies is that the makers did a half-assed job because they thought "ah well, who cares, kids will see anything". I don't think that's true of Freddie as F.R.0.7.. I think they really, really tried here. It just wasn't very good.
