The year is 1967 and both the big screen and small screen are jam-packed with super spy James Bond clones. Seemingly everyone’s in on it – even Fred Flintstone became a spy in A Man Called Flintstone. This was peak Bondmania, which reached it’s zenith when Columbia PIctures, who managed to buy the rights for Ian Fleming’s CASINO ROYALE, but out their own James Bond satire – which, unlike the others, was actually able to use some of the elements from the books thanks to a tricky rights situation that would take thirty plus years to clean up.
The resulting film was a hit, but it had a disastrous effect on the Bond franchise, in more ways than one. Not only would it take until the release of Skyfall in 2012 for the Bond franchise to once again hit the stratospheric heights of THUNDERBALL, but behind the scenes drama would throughly alienate star Sean Connery, who was fond of telling everyone that the next film -YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE – would be his last.
Join us as we take a look at this epic Bond-extravanganza, which gave us our first look at Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and stands as a prototypical sixties Bond film, with so many of the elements here being spoofed in Austin Powers, on The Simpsons (Scorpio!) and more.
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