I only count characters that appear in the EON films, or IFP-sanctioned novels, as those are the sources that most others recognize as 'definitive.'
If I were to include characters from the Titan comics I would have to acknowledge Hannes Oberhauser's daughter as a real character, as she appears in the daily strip of Octopussy, and that would be too confusing.
But that's just me.
The truth about the Double-O's in MI6
Started by
tuttle300
, Jan 30 2012 10:05 PM
31 replies to this topic
#32
Gothamite
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Posted 15 October 2012 - 04:22 PM
For me, it all comes back to OHMSS and how much I care for Bond in that film. It would suck if that guy turned out to be just some other guy who was entirely unrelated to the other actors (WHO TALK ABOUT THAT MOVIE IN THEIR OWN MOVIES) and that they were just agents who knew each other. It dilutes it, makes it less important, less real, more of a churned-out product than an adventure. The general mythos of James Bond the man is far more endearing than James Bond the product, or the 'codename'.
That's why I have a HUGE problem with the 'codename theory'. That one movie (and the book on which it is based). I could care less if Pierce Brosnan ever met Goldfinger or if Timothy Dalton ever defused a bomb dressed as a clown. And besides, continuity isn't even a problem until The Living Daylights. Everything prior to that can be the same guy in the same continuity. And the whole beautiful thing about Casino Royale is that it's a pseudo-remake of OHMSS with the same beats, also turned into an origin story. So while Tracy is erased, Bond goes through the same set of emotions, with (arguably) a better tale of revenge afterward in QoS. The official material certainly doesn't corroborate it, because they didn't think they'd have to care about casual fans making sweeping assumptions like this, thirty years later. Mine is a meta-analysis of what was actually happening in the production side of things: changing attitudes and styles for different decades, all based around the same fictional anti/super/action hero.
The movies are beautifully of their time and they don't need to be Star Trekked into some great big Americanised Ultra-universe that unravels this great big Mi6 conspiracy. And the '007 Legends' videogame (exciting as it does look) is the antithesis of actual canon for me. Daniel Craig's Bond fighting Gustav Graves in an Electrosuit is ridiculous and an insult to what they've created in the 'rebooted' (for lack of a better word) Bond series. It is of course a pity that there are some annoyingly alarming cases IN FAVOUR of the codename theory in OHMSS, but I'm SURE they were just jokes for the sake of the popcorn-eating audience, not intended to be some grand-standing canonistic alteration.
Essentially, they're all the same guy in various different parallels of the same basic arc, in different time periods. All the important stuff is retained in some manner (so, some version of Tracy/Vesper, SPECTRE/Quantum, martinis-girls-and-guns) and the other films are more specific to their own actors (Goldfinger, Moonraker, GoldenEye, QoS).
It's the same way (as many people have already stated) Batman's origin and animosity with the Joker is the same in every version of the story, even if other stuff is adjusted for the passage of time, or omitted entirely.
If you want to fit everything into one grand Super-Package, then obviously the Codename Theory makes more sense, but I think it does a disservice to Bond as any kind of a three-dimensional character.
That's why I have a HUGE problem with the 'codename theory'. That one movie (and the book on which it is based). I could care less if Pierce Brosnan ever met Goldfinger or if Timothy Dalton ever defused a bomb dressed as a clown. And besides, continuity isn't even a problem until The Living Daylights. Everything prior to that can be the same guy in the same continuity. And the whole beautiful thing about Casino Royale is that it's a pseudo-remake of OHMSS with the same beats, also turned into an origin story. So while Tracy is erased, Bond goes through the same set of emotions, with (arguably) a better tale of revenge afterward in QoS. The official material certainly doesn't corroborate it, because they didn't think they'd have to care about casual fans making sweeping assumptions like this, thirty years later. Mine is a meta-analysis of what was actually happening in the production side of things: changing attitudes and styles for different decades, all based around the same fictional anti/super/action hero.
The movies are beautifully of their time and they don't need to be Star Trekked into some great big Americanised Ultra-universe that unravels this great big Mi6 conspiracy. And the '007 Legends' videogame (exciting as it does look) is the antithesis of actual canon for me. Daniel Craig's Bond fighting Gustav Graves in an Electrosuit is ridiculous and an insult to what they've created in the 'rebooted' (for lack of a better word) Bond series. It is of course a pity that there are some annoyingly alarming cases IN FAVOUR of the codename theory in OHMSS, but I'm SURE they were just jokes for the sake of the popcorn-eating audience, not intended to be some grand-standing canonistic alteration.
Essentially, they're all the same guy in various different parallels of the same basic arc, in different time periods. All the important stuff is retained in some manner (so, some version of Tracy/Vesper, SPECTRE/Quantum, martinis-girls-and-guns) and the other films are more specific to their own actors (Goldfinger, Moonraker, GoldenEye, QoS).
It's the same way (as many people have already stated) Batman's origin and animosity with the Joker is the same in every version of the story, even if other stuff is adjusted for the passage of time, or omitted entirely.
If you want to fit everything into one grand Super-Package, then obviously the Codename Theory makes more sense, but I think it does a disservice to Bond as any kind of a three-dimensional character.
Edited by Gothamite, 15 October 2012 - 04:26 PM.