Bondlets: Doctor No

One of the reasons we were slow to start watching Godzilla films together was my daughter’s sudden interest in watching the James Bond franchise.  This started after she caught bits on the near constant marathons as the rights jumped from network to network.  There was no way I was going to discourage any leanings towards viewing the gold standard of Fun Action Adventure Franchises. 

Instead of doing full blown “Through a Kid’s Eyes” analysis on each one, I’m only going to hit the highlights. 

This is for several reasons:

1)  There’s a fair amount of repetition, due to the strong ties with popular culture and styles of the films’ times.  The Sixties can be difficult to explain, I’m expecting the Seventies and other decades to be similar.

2) I need short posts sometimes to fill in and allow me to finish longer rants. There are enough of these to fill that role quite nicely for a while.

Most Importantly:

3) Over analysis goes against the grain of these adrenaline juiced adventures.  Doing it this way makes it easier to kick back and enjoy the spectacle.

Time to go back to where it all began…

1962

The opening credits really hit her with the Sixties full force, and produced a lot of confusion.

She thought the girls in the movie were pretty, and interestingly preferred Sylvia Trench to Honey Rider. While calling any woman in an early Bond film “strong” is probably a stretch, it made me happy to notice Sylvia does come off as more self-sufficient. Finding out they were both voiced by the same person was as much of a surprise to her as it was to me when I first learned it.  Over ten years before Star Wars was mixing body types and vocal chords to get the perfect character, the Broccoli family was doing it regularly in the Bond universe.

As for the chief antagonist, she only rated Doctor No as, “Eh.”  This was because:

“He had fish, that’s not very villain like.”

Apparently, I’m going to be learning a bunch from this exercise as well.

She agreed whole heartedly with arachnophobe Sean Connery that the tarantula crawling on Bond was deees – gusting.  She wasn’t too happy with the guy getting “potty water” thrown on him either.

Overall she though there was too much kissing and too much killing. 

When I asked what she expected from a James Bond movie she said, “Gadgets and cool stuff.”

This is a pretty strong indication that she’s seen later ones on television.

I assured her the “Gadgets and Cool Stuff” amps up pretty rapidly as the films progress, and that made her happy and inclined to continue.

I did catch her singing, “Underneath the Mango Tree” later in the day though.

Bondlets Index