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For me YOLT is the first proper mistep of the franchise. They could have toned down the sci-fi elements quite a bit, have something at least marginally closer to the source material, have a more menacing Blofeld closer to earlier incarnations (although I love Donald Pleasence as an actor)...
Yes good point. It's funny that he did kind of recycle the FYEO car/pin situation into Killifer's death then!
To be fair, once they decided to film YOLT, there wasn't much left for them to do than to go back to the TB well.
TB is the first real misstep in the series for me. The gadgets and runtime both get out of control...then you have YOLT with Q in the field which is "highly irregular."
I don't think you can take DN, FRWL, GF, or OHMSS out of the series. After that, the only essential one is CR and, arguably, TSWLM.
The other missed opportunity in YOLT is the casting of Blofeld. Miscasting and shooting some of the film with the miscast actor cost them any chance of getting someone for the role that would be able to continue into future adventures. To me Pleasance and his scar are a let down for the film and for the build up for the character. They really nailed setting him as the big baddie and then we get this short, skinny and rather non-threatening actor.
If my memory serves, based on reading several sources, the Producers gave Roald Dahl a chance to pick a Bond book for him to film, and he'd picked YOLT because he thought it's Fleming's worst Bond book, and so, he'd created a different story from the book, and the Producers also agreed since Bond was also growing more and more in terms of popularity in Japan.
And I don't know why Dahl thought of that.
Yes, I agree about Pleasance, he's not threatening nor menacing, he's iconic, but that's all, and it resulted in a negative way that his version of Blofeld was the most parodied of the lot, I wonder what Jan Werich could've done with the role.
Yes, Telly Savalas, Max Von Sydow are for me far better than Pleasance, while they're not the most iconic Blofeld (preferably so), but they've got the menace and the threatening factor of the character right.
I actually rank Pleasance right at the middle, he's far better than both Waltz and Grey (and the FYEO Blofeld, which I consider the worst Blofeld), but not as great as Savalas and Sydow, or if I'm including the hidden faced Blofelds of the early Bond films, then right up there as one of the greats too (although that incarnation reminds me of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget).
Agreed! You could watch DN, FRWL and TB in succession and it works. Yes TB is OTT but not to a crazy degree. GF is a bit of an outlier. I give some props to McClory because it would have been real easy to make TB more fantastical and OTT but he tried to strike a balance.
By the time of YOLT all restraint was thrown out the window.
You might be right @SIS_HQ I know there was plans for OHMSS to go after TB but the producers considered it TB on skis. I get what Dahl saw and why he picked YOTL. It is the least cinematic of any of the novels and wouldn't work as a direct adaptation, not that the producers were interested in that.
Thunderball was a huge let down to me, especially coming after the first three films. YOLT has its issues, but it also has this “magic” that TB sorely lacks.
Have you read any of the earlier drafts for Majesty’s? There was a few dated between 1964 and 1968, all of which had varying tones and ideas.
A future missed opportunity for EON arguably could be not adapting a continuation novel. Just for the sake of trying. Forever and a Day for an origin story, Carte Blanche for setting up supporting characters and possible futures. Towards the end of the run, Nobody Lives Forever and Solo could be a good finale.
I don't share the same view as TB but understand its a film that has generated quite a bit of discussion and dissension. I rather like it, sure it's a bloated film with much that a good edit would help. When you think of the effort to film DN, FRWL, GF and TB all in the span of 4 years it boggles the mind that they were able to sustain the quality.
Yes I agree; GF was a huge hit for a reason, and TB doesn’t try to hit the same notes, I’m not sure why. It’s odd. Maybe it was made too quickly.
Most likely not, considering how much the novel has to do with mortality and overcoming personal trauma (the former of which I know Fleming was likely grappling with at the time of writing the novel). That said in some weird way I think it's for the best that it wasn't adapted faithfully. I mean this in the sense that while we didn't see the conclusion of the original 'Blofeld trilogy' from the books play out onscreen (I'm not sure if YOLT could have been faithfully adapted at that point in time anyway) it's certainly a book that EON have come back to in recent years. Obviously minor aspects of it were adapted in SF and NTTD, but it's a very rich book that could yield some interesting ideas going forward if adapted loosely.
But if you took YOLT out of the series there would be no TSWLM(at least not the one that exists as it has since 1977) as this Dan Gale Bond Mysteries video illustrates:
Speaking of, I think a missed opportunity would've been EON's ability to use SPECTRE as the villains in TSWLM which they initially intended to do before Kevin McClory thwarted that idea. On the plus side it might've brought some proper closure to the events of OHMSS with Triple X's reference to Mrs. Bond. On the downside it probably would've made TSWLM seem more like a YOLT retread than it already is.
Yes, one can argue copying and pasting sequences into other films isn't the ideal way of adapting the remaining Fleming ideas. I think they did it best with SF in which the idea of Bond going AWOL, returning, and undergoing a sort of metaphorical rebirth came from YOLT but wasn't a direct adaptation. Still, it added a lot to that story.
I think it's fair to say that Mankiewicz (and perhaps Dahl) was fairly disinterested in Fleming, and I appreciate that later films picked up these sequences. I still think we'll see the barracuda swim someday.
I too think the Garden of Death could have been used much more dramatically in NTTD, either when Bond and Nomi were approaching the island, or perhaps when Mathilde escapes so that Bond could rescue her?
I think there's a decent amount of tension in seeing a child in the arms of a madman, reaching out to a plant we know would kill her. I don't know how much you could have got out of Bond & Nomi walking through it: it's not really a potential for a scene, it's more of a character reveal: it tells us something about the guy who built it and tends for it. Bond & Nomi would have just walked through it and avoided touching the plants: it's not an action scene.
Fleming's, I mean.
Maybe a giant squid or two?
(I do look forward to the day when we get something like this in a Bond film.... although I suppose we had giant lizards in SF which I always thought took some inspiration from the squid).
They were not giant lizards: they were Komodo dragons, and from what I understand normal sized for such creatures (a biologist corrects me if I'm wrong). There were complaints about them being too CGI looking, if I'm not mistaken. I thunk that's the issue with giant squids: the fear of looking fake and too fantastical. I always wondered how the inclusion of the squid in DN might have influenced the series on the long run.
I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand it's one element of Fleming that hasn't been used, on the other hand people would probably complain of the CGI quality and giant squids are already dated as a trope.