Due to a late postponement of #PrisTweet because damn that life part getting in the way of Krissy’s live tweets… I’ve pulled an underseen TV favorite off the shelf and into spot-start duty. Say hello to Honey West. (embeds appear below…)
Honey West was an American crime series that aired on ABC during the 1965-66 season. The series starred Anne Francis as a female private detective. Though the show deals with domestic “disturbances,” Honey West is most certainly cut from the same cloth as the contemporary spy shows of its day. The original character was created by Gloria and Forrest E. “Skip” Fickling in the late 1950’s for a series of novels (under the pseudonym G.G. Fickling). Forrest once described the character as a mixture of Marilyn Monroe and Mike Hammer. Her television adaptation was intended to be a direct American equivalent of The Avengers‘ Emma Peel and Cathy Gale. (By the way, Archer fans, Honey West had a pet ocelot.)
Join #Bond_age_ and @007hertzrumbe as we live tweet the first two episodes of the TV series HONEY WEST starring the fabulous and fashionable Anne Francis. Tonight at 9pm EST. Follow #Bond_age_TV hashtag.
S1 E1 – The Swingin Mrs. Jones #Bond_age_TV
S1 E2 – The Owl and the Eye #Bond_age_TV
Honey West – S1 E3 – The Abominable Snowman #Bond_age_TV
It’s time to take a cold, hard, steely, Smolder-style look at the 24th Bond movie after months, nay, years of speculation. From a #Bond_age_ perspective the journey from #Bond24 to #Spectre felt like an interminable marathon. Remember when we did a whole podcast about the tactleneck in the first teaser poster?
Good times.
Daniel Craig’s fourth Bond film promised us many things in advance. Daniel Craig promised a lighter Bond. Mendes promised a continuation of the Skyfall narrative. The teaser trailer promised us snowbound Craigers! (Skiing, maybe?) The end to a decades long legal feud between EON and Kevin McClory (who most surely returned from the grave after the release of Spectre to sue someone) promised the return of the global shadow organization SPECTRE – and presumably at some point the man with the master plans and the original grumpy cat, Blofeld.
SPECTRE had been decommissioned Bond property since McClory successfully lobbied for the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld after Ian Fleming turned the screenplay he and McClory had penned for an early version of Thunderball (then called Longitude 78) into the Thunderball novel. In 1965 EON licensed the rights from McClory for 10 years. When the rights reverted back, Bond lost his long time nemesis. Consequently, in a grand symbolic gesture during the pre-titles of For Your Eyes Only, Bond dropped a Blofeld-type character down a smoke stack. The scene had no bearing on the narrative of the film and existed solely to raise a collective middle finger at Kevin McClory. “We don’t need no stinkin’ Blofelds!” it suggested.
And indeed, Blofeld had lost his utility. In the years that followed, Blofeld would even become representative of the campiest aspects of the Bond series, the most ripe for parody – as evidenced by Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. While there are elements from many Bond villains contained within the Dr. Evil character, the primary influence is unmistakably Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. I’ll save any further Blofeld editorialization for my full #Bond_age_ essay on Spectre. Suffice it to say that use of the original, farcical Blofeld character would be impossible in the gritty and grounded Craig era. A new Blofeld would require… innovation.
No more beating around the Blofeld. Let’s come right out with it. My one sentence review of Spectre and then we can all go send me disagreeable tweets. Spectre is not a good movie, but it is a good, hearty, old-fashioned Bond movie… until it isn’t. Spectre builds hope, and then burns it to the ground. Like when Halle Berry backdives into a sea of CGI in Die Another Day, I can pinpoint exactly when Spectre thumbs its nose at audiences. Your ultimate opinion on the film will depend on your ability to look the other way in that particular moment, to dare follow the rabbit down the rabbit hole… or more accurately, to follow Bond into yet another Fever Dream.
Guest programmer @d3sk has lined up a classic spy caper featuring some unknown schmoes named Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. I dunno. Maybe you’ve heard of them.
Director Stanley Donen followed up the smash Charade with Arabesque, a comedic thriller based on the 1961 The Cipher by Alex Gordon. Teamed again with composer Henry Mancini, Donen served up a free-form jazz version of Charade with Hitchockian devices and romance and a chase scene with a thresher. The bustling, busy, complicated shoot compelled Donen to tell his cinematographer Christopher Chellis that the next movie they make will be “something small, just two actors, and we’ll shoot and eat our way through France.” Donen’s next picture coincidentally was Two for the Road.
Join us as we give Arabesque the #Bond_age_ treatment on Wednesday, November 4th at 9pm EST. Follow #Bond_age_ hashtag.
Love erupts and cultures clash in this hilarious fish-out-of-water comedy about two boys and two girls lost in the Orient. Sean Connery is James, a dashing mild-mannered British importer/exporter who meets cute as a button Japanese tourist Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama), and embarks on a whiz bang romance. Now, on their way to meet Kissy’s large family back home in Japan, the pair is accompanied by James’ bumbling ugly ducking Oxford pal Ernst (Donald Pleasance) and Kissy’s traveling companion Aki. Can the quartet find happiness? Will James and Kissy tie the knot? And what’s the true story behind Ernst’s scar? The only certainty in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE is soy-flavored fun!
You Only Live Twice Opening Remixed w/ Pizzicato Five
#Bond_age_ programmed the middle bits of #TheFutureIsNow Live Tweet. It was a lively sort of evening — perhaps as the #Bond_age_ segment of the Back to the Future Trilogy happened on the actual Back to the Future Day on October 21. Or we just love Back to the Future 2. The numbers dwindled for the Time Bandits night cap, but it wasn’t Time Bandits Day. So…
Thanks to everyone that participated in one or all (Hi, @revmagdalen!) of the #TheFutureIsNow Live Tweets. Hopefully we can form like Voltron again sometime in the near future.
The evening began with a 10-minute intro bumper video with trailers from #Bond_age_Cinemas leading directly into Back to the Future 2 and then Time Bandits.
