Pop quiz: what are the essential elements of a James Bond film? There are the Bond girls, right? Well, we’ve already given you our favorites. What next? The villains? Done and done! Then, of course, there’s whoever is playing Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007, and we just recently published our James Bond Actors Ranked list. But, what else is missing? Why the gadgets, of course! So, check out our list of the ten best James Bond Gadgets!
Just as essential to the James Bond series as a vodka martini and a tuxedo are the fantastic assortment of gadgets provided to James Bond through his erstwhile armourer, Q (the great Desmond Llewelyn and now Ben Whishaw. While the character was first introduced as Major Boothroyd in Dr. No (played by Peter Burton), Llewelyn himself only took on the role in From Russia With Love and proved to be an essential part of the franchise to his death in 1999 (for a short spell John Cleese would replace him as R).
In this James Bond Top 10 list, we count down some of the franchise’s greatest gadgets while also paying tribute to the legendary Llewelyn, who remains an essential part of the franchise who’ll never really be equaled. Until Whishaw came along, you had plenty of James Bonds, but only one man was considered the real deal as Q!
Coming in at number 10 is one that I think probably a lot of you aren’t necessarily going to remember, but it’s one that I definitely remember, and it’s the TV watch from Octopussy. So in this movie, Bond has basically got little cameras set up, and he can watch TV on his watch—which now is not a big deal. I mean, we can all watch TV on our smartphones, but back then, watching something on your watch was considered insane. A stylish watch you could watch TV on—why would you want to watch TV on your watch? I don’t know. In fact, Seiko put out a TV on a watch around the time that this movie came out, and in fact, it was a promo tie-in. But man, if you watch the TV spots for this, it was not the coolest TV in the world. I mean, it was this little black-and-white TV where you could barely see anything on screen. Technology was definitely not able to keep up with their imaginations at this point. Still, I think the TV watch was pretty neat because I used to watch Octopussy and dream of the day that I’d be able to watch TV on my watch.
Coming in at number nine is actually a villainous weapon—or a villain’s gadget—the garrote watch from From Russia with Love. So Robert Shaw’s character in the movie basically goes around with this really cool watch that, if you pull on it, piano wire comes out, and he uses it to strangle people. This is Red Grant’s trademark, of course—he strangles people with piano wire that comes from his watch. And, of course, like all evil villainous gadgets, it gets turned around on the bad guys at the end—because if anybody’s a master of gadgetry, it’s James Bond. So Red Grant ends up getting strangled with his own watch. And in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, you actually see George Lazenby going through his office as James Bond, and he actually has kept the garrote watch as a souvenir. I’m not surprised—because it’s pretty cool. I mean, if you want to kill somebody in close quarters, that’s the way to do it.
Number eight—so James Bond, up until the Pierce Brosnan era, was a pretty heavy smoker in films. Smoking was just always kind of associated with James Bond. It’s very un-PC these days, and I can understand why people are very reluctant to ever have James Bond smoke again, because smoking is actually terrible for you. I smoked for years—it was bad. I’m glad that I don’t smoke anymore. That said, the cigarettes did give them the opportunity to create a couple of really interesting gadgets. And You Only Live Twice has a couple of really cool ones.
So Bond basically goes to Tiger Tanaka’s ninja headquarters and sees all their weaponry, and what they’ve got are these little rocket cigarette guns. This is kind of perfectly designed for James Bond because he’s a heavy smoker, and there’s a really cool scene at the end of the movie where he’s got one of these little rockets, and he convinces SPECTRE to allow him to have one last cigarette before they kill him. Of course, it’s a rocket cigarette. Blofeld thinks he has the last laugh by basically telling James Bond, “It’s not the tobacco that’ll kill you.” But alas, they don’t realize that Bond has got this little mini gun—even though it looks totally fake. And he shoots it, escapes, and then saves the world—all thanks to smoking. So, I don’t know—maybe the early James Bond movies weren’t necessarily the best advertisement against smoking. “It can save your life!”
Moving in at number seven is another Sean Connery gadget—the underwater breather from Thunderball. So in this movie, whenever James Bond loses his aqualungs, he basically pulls out his little mini-breather and puts it in his mouth. It looks like a pen that he’s just sucking on, and it gives him an emergency supply of oxygen. Apparently, the Royal Engineers—the British Navy—actually thought this was a really cool gadget and contacted the producers to find out how they did it. Of course, it turned out that the prop really had no air in it at all, and all the actors were actually just holding their breath. So, it didn’t actually work. Man, if something like that did work to give you a little reserve oxygen, it’d be pretty cool. And Bond looks awesome with it in his mouth—I always really dug the way that looked. In fact, I used to often put pens in my mouth and pretend they were little mini re-breathers when I was a kid. Yes, that’s how cool I was.
The re-breather showed up again, many years later, in Die Another Day.
Number six is a gadget that actually showed up in two James Bond movies with varying degrees of success. So the first time X-ray glasses showed up was when Roger Moore tried to use them in A View to a Kill, and they looked terrible. I mean, he puts them on his face, they look so heavy, he’s trying to hold the lenses together—this is not fooling anyone. And it makes him probably the worst spy of all time. You know, my girlfriend has always told me that she thinks that James Bond, as amazing as he is, is actually a pretty terrible spy because he always gets his cover blown or always gets captured. And definitely, if you see him with the X-ray glasses in A View to a Kill, it doesn’t surprise you why he always gets captured, right?
But the X-ray glasses show up again in The World Is Not Enough, and man, are they ever cool. So they’re tinted blue, and I loved the look of the sunglasses so much that I tried to find them everywhere when The World Is Not Enough came out. And I was really excited because I think at the time, Oakley was doing these cool tie-in James Bond sunglasses, and they had a pair that was coming out for The World Is Not Enough. Of course, when I found them, it turned out they were just kind of the wraparound shades that were really popular at the time and that James Bond uses in the ski chase. So I was left disappointed by The World Is Not Enough in more ways than one. That said, I always really loved the blue-tinted lenses—I think they’re super cool, and Pierce Brosnan looks amazing in them.
Coming in at number five is another Pierce Brosnan gadget—the BMW from Tomorrow Never Dies. So it’s a BMW 750iL, and in it, James Bond is able to control it using his Sony Ericsson phone. It has a little LCD screen and a trackpad, which, in 1997, was really cool. I mean, now it looks old-fashioned as heck, but, you know, back then, it was pretty neat. And it’s an awesome car chase because he’s driving from the back seat on his phone, and they’ve got that great Propellerheads soundtrack song, Backseat Driver, which I used to love when I was younger.
Moving to number four is one of my favorite James Bond gadgets of all time—the wrist dart gun from Moonraker. So basically, Q gives James Bond what looks like a watch, but it’s got a little gun attached to it, and when he flicks up his wrist, it shoots a dart. There are two kinds of darts—steel-tipped and poison-tipped—and he uses both in the movie. At one point, Bond is trapped in a centrifuge, and he uses the steel-tipped darts to escape. At the end of the movie, when he faces off with Drax, he uses one of the poison-tipped darts—shoots him in the heart. So I always thought this was so cool. When I was a kid, I used to always wear a wristwatch, and I used to just attach a pen to it sometimes and flick my wrist around, thinking that I was James Bond. Yes, it’s true—when kids my age were all dressing up as Batman, I was dressing up as Roger Moore circa 1979, all disco’ed out in Moonraker. Yeah… that’s the kind of kid I was.
Number three is another really famous James Bond gadget—the Bell Aerostar jetpack from Thunderball, which is actually real. Yes, this jetpack worked, but only for about 20 seconds at a time. So in the movie, it’s used in a really lame way. Bond is basically on a balcony and uses the pack to fly away, and it’s just kind of up and down. It’s so clunky—it doesn’t exactly make him look like The Rocketeer. But hey, it’s a jetpack, and in 1965, a jetpack must have seemed like the coolest thing ever. Heck, I mean, I think that’s what kind of cinched it for me with the franchise because it was my first ever James Bond movie. I mean, he was wearing a jetpack like G.I. Joe—it was so cool.
Moving on to number two is a car—the Lotus Esprit. Now, everybody always debates what’s better, the Aston Martin DB5 or the Lotus, and, well, my answer is going to be apparent in a couple of seconds. But the Lotus, I think, is the perfect car for Roger Moore. I mean, in the 1970s, James Bond, he looks a lot different than Sean Connery did. I mean, he’s wearing bell-bottom pants, he wears kind of a leisure suit in one of his movies, and, you know, him driving a white Lotus Esprit that looks like it came out of Studio 54 is quite appropriate—especially with the Marvin Hamlisch disco-flavored Bond 77 on the soundtrack. And it’s a really cool little car. He’s able to use it as a submarine, it shoots missiles—I always thought it was amazing. I love when he drives out of the water and this guy is kind of looking at his wine because he can’t believe it. He’s wondering what he drank because the car has come out of the water, and Bond throws a fish out the window. It’s great, and it’s very Roger Moore. The Lotus does show up again in For Your Eyes Only, but it’s painted a disgusting shade of rust, which I absolutely hated. And, funny enough, when a friend of my mother’s visited the UK, she brought me back some James Bond model cars. But the only Lotus they could find was the rust-colored one from For Your Eyes Only, because, guess what? Nobody wanted that one.
Moving on to number one, however, is the James Bond gadget I think started it all and probably popularized the character as an action hero—the Aston Martin DB5, which, of course, showed up in Goldfinger during the first-ever extended Q-Branch sequence. So in this part, Q is showing Bond around his laboratory. It’s amazing—all kinds of crazy stuff is happening. And he gives him a rundown of the car, which includes an oil slick, machine guns, a bulletproof screen, and the thing that really blows James Bond away—an ejector seat.
The car chase in this movie, where he’s using all the gadgets, probably blew people away in 1964. I mean, I don’t think people give James Bond enough credit for the fact that he was the first-ever modern action star. I mean, if you think of guys that were known for action back in the early ’60s and late ’50s, who do you have? Humphrey Bogart? Gregory Peck? John Wayne? Do you ever see them driving around in cars with machine guns coming out of them and ejector seats? Not really, right? I mean, Sean Connery as James Bond was the action star that paved the way for all the modern action stars that we know these days. And without him, they just don’t exist. Even Indiana Jones would not exist without James Bond. And I think, in some ways, the Aston Martin DB5 is responsible for this.
So that, for me, definitely takes the position of number one for the greatest James Bond gadget of all time.
Of course, I’m sure that I’ve missed a lot of them. There are some really cool ones that I’ve missed, such as the whistling keychain from The Living Daylights. I used to always do that whistle when I was a kid. Another gadget that I was kind of thinking about putting on the list, but I didn’t because, in the end, it turned out to not be very useful, was the X-ray Polaroid gun that they use in Licence to Kill. So it shoots a laser beam, takes X-ray photographs… I mean, I suppose if you wanted to kill somebody by taking a Polaroid of them, if you missed them with the laser, you would probably kill them with the radiation. I mean, it’s an X-ray, right? Maybe not the coolest gadget of all time, but it is still kind of nifty.
And I love the James Bond series. I love all the gadgets—even the really stupid ones. They’re all amazing in their own way.
Do you agree with our list of the Best James Bond Gadgets? Let us know in the talkbacks!
