62 replies to this topic

[AMC Hornet]

As for eras, Connery through Dalton is all the same Bond as each has a reference link to Tracy.  Brosnan is a different Bond, and Craig is yet another.

Could you imagine Dalton's version of Bond in MR or AVTAK - or even referencing those missions?

 

Okay, so "he was married once - but that was a long time ago." Fair enough, but in 1969 Dalton was in his mid-20s, and he wasn't playing Bond in LTK as if he was in his fifties. Just because his (and Brosnan's?) Bond was a widower doesn't mean his Switzerland mission happened twenty years earlier.

 

We accept CraigBond as a clean slate, with no Tracy trauma yet. Can't we accept that Dalton & Brosnan are a younger version of Bond with a different history from Connery/Moore? Did Connery or Moore ever seem so disgusted with the dirty world of shadow politics as Dalton was in TLD?

 

I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, I'm just explaining why I see Connery/Lazenby/Moore as one incarnation of Bond and Dalton/Brosnan as another.

 

And I notice that no one has mentioned the Q Branch scene in DAD as evidence that all the Bonds are one and the same - probably because no one wants to acknowledge DAD as canon at all. I would simply say that of all those devices are there more as a tribute to Desmond Llewellyn than to any one 00 agent.

[Professor Pi]

I go back and forth on this issue.  In another thread I argued that OHMSS is in a different universe than Goldfinger because the janitor humming the theme song implies that Goldfinger is a movie in Lazenby's Bond universe.  MR has Jaws from Spy which references Tracy, as did LTK, but no I can't imagine that that is Dalton's Bond going up against Drax.  But even Moore's FYEO Bond seems different than his Moonraker Bond.

 

I can see how Dalton/Brosnan is the same Bond (GE PTS, TLD-LTK, TND-DAD) and Pierce telling M about where her predecessor kept the cognac (?) is in line with that.

 

Years ago I posted that FYEO, LTK, and TWINE were all arguably sequels to OHMSS.  You make a good point about DAD.  While the gadgets in DAD shouldn't be taken too seriously, Lee Tamahori was the director who tried to advance the Codename Theory, which Skyfall completely refutes by going to Bond's childhood home.  And casting Judi Dench as M again further contradicts matters (I'm of the opinion she's a different M.)

 

There're enough conflicting contradictions to keep us debating for decades.

Edited by Professor Pi, 11 January 2014 - 12:46 AM.

[AMC Hornet]

  In another thread I argued that OHMSS is in a different universe than Goldfinger because the janitor humming the theme song implies that Goldfinger is a movie in Lazenby's Bond universe.

During the scoring of Goldfinger, someone at EON referred to the theme song as 'Moon Finger" because the tune for the title line sounds so similar to the title line of 'Moon River', the theme from 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'.

 

So perhaps the janitor is whistling Moon River?

 

Anyway, so what? Plenty of the films are self-referencing: B.J. Arnau performing 'Live and Let Die' at the Fillet of Soul; Q's keypad playing 'Nobody Does it Better'; Vijay playing the JB theme itself on his flute; the jazz band on the Paris wedding launch playing 'A View to a Kill' - and nobody in the film bats an eye. Those bits are in there for audience recognition and aren't intended to 'take you out of the film.'

 

As for the much-debated 'code-name theory', refuted by pointing out that every 007 is Tracy's widower - part of that cover would include being identified as such. Such references would not have occurred in the 'real' story being acted out on film - they would only be included in the film (or literary) telling to establish the new 007 in this deliberately confusing continuum.