Smoking Lizard Media

© 2020 G.N. Jacobs

In keeping with the ongoing comic book store arms race of needing to come up with things to talk about every week, it is part of the mission of this site to unpack everything, including my favorite franchises. Sorry, Mr. Bond, it’s just your turn this week.

Where to start? Let’s go with the leap from page to screen. Book Bond generally reads like someone who almost could happen. He better, he was drawn from a multitude of guys that author Ian Fleming met while serving in Naval Intelligence during WW2. A rogues’ gallery of commandos, saboteurs and spies who unlike Mr. Fleming actually had to do the missions he dreamt up in London. Fleming was more like M than Bond.

Book Bond shot people in New York in the Japanese Consulate at Rockefeller Center as part of a codebreaking operation. The first time I learned about the technique of bring a second sniper to go through thick plate glass, by the way.

Book Bond might take a few days to shag the woman in the story, while training to make the big swim through shark infested waters. This, of course, meant Bond stopped smoking long enough to get back his stamina to stay under water for ten-fifteen minutes on approach to the villain’s highly defended beach.

Book Bond spent long hours in an office reading every report generated by the entirety of the Secret Intelligence Service. Characters recurred in the office and then appeared elsewhere in later books; case in point, Mary Goodnight, was set up as Bond’s secretary through several books until let into the field as the assistant in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Movie Bond necessarily jettisoned almost every single tether to what remained of reality. Not that we wanted a realistic Intelligence Officer. I’d watch/read something by John Le Carré for that. 

The cars and their gadgets went from – “Yeah, I had one of those on that job that never actually happened in Somalia.” – to – “How do you even still have an engine?”

Oil slicks? Bullet-resistant glass? Smokescreens? All pioneered I think by various ne’er-do-wells, shitheads that needed to evade the cops and other shitheads. Al Capone rolled in a veritable tank; those O’Bannion Northsiders were a lot of trouble…until they weren’t.

The average Bond car took these things to the very limit of engineering credibility. Where does a 1964 Aston-Martin DB5 have space for the machine guns, hydraulically operated rear armor shield, the smoke projectors, caltrops, oil slick and ejector seat? My completely untrustworthy (I hide certain math classes on my transcripts) napkin calculation has this vehicle pushing up against the almighty weight limit.

Can you bore out an Aston-Martin engine enough to overcome the extra mass? Do you follow Book Felix Leiter’s example of dropping a huge Cadillac engine into a Studebaker, despite voiding the warranty? Or do you just go with it and assume that, with the help of a time machine, a cross-fiction machine and writers busting out their best “because I said so” justifications that we may assume that George Lucas lent the Millennium Falcon’s back up engine to your choice of the Broccolis or Mr. Fleming?

Now there’s a fan fiction crossover with Leia as the wishbone between Han and Bond, but I digress.

The Aston-Martin may represent the plausible Bond car. Later cars were the epitome of implausible. We have many choices, the obvious one being the white Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me. Okay, converts to a submarine…maybe. In water mode the car has a squid ink emitter, a missile rack for small SAMs (I’m guessing about the size of a Stinger) good for wiping out helicopters hovering overhead and a minelayer that drops deadly hockey pucks to the sea floor for the unsuspecting bad guy swimmer delivery vehicles to float over just in time to go BOOM!

Here’s the thing, the car also has a fully functional land mode, which raises all kinds of Comic Book Store Geek Rumble questions. Would a car seen moments previously blasting full out on a winding Sardinian ocean view road be too much sports car to also be all that good at submarine? What is the sub’s propulsion unit if it isn’t the land mode’s high compression internal combustion engine that has to be fed air by the submarine snorkel we never saw onscreen?

Did Q unintentionally invent the world’s first hybrid car by putting a battery driven submarine electric motor next to that aforementioned gasoline engine? Why would it be a hybrid, you ask? I can think of few people who would fail to link the electric motor to the gasoline engine with a Prius style energy capture system where the gas engine charges the batteries constantly? Which then brings us back to the snorkel (works better with diesels, but…) for water mode.

And there are lots of tactical questions about the car’s employment at play here. Bond has a Stinger missile shoehorned into the Lotus’ mid-engine (rear) compartment. Presumably, the missiles are also available to wipe out the Stromberg helicopter while still driving? Bond has a license to kill (M bails Bond out of jail if he gets picked up in an Allied country and disavows everywhere else). He has just splattered a motorcycle sidecar rig all across that highway complete with the comedic twist of a blown-up feather bed truck as the Fruit Cart. He’s already made too much mess above the water; he could just fire the missile…the consequences are about the same.

 Anyway, I can obviously go on here. All you need to know about this car is that in the real world the production had to make a separate submarine based on the Lotus shell. And I both laughed and cringed seeing the car return two movies later in For Your Eyes Only go up in flames when the bad guys broke the door window setting off the security charges. 

Next Geek Rumble question, who feels safe driving a car that is that packed with high explosives…say, four Stingers, six mines, that should also be good for leaving on the road, and the, call it, pound and a half of C-4? If I’m Bond, I’m calling my pal Felix Leiter to get me a less hazardous job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I suppose I’ve made my point and don’t have to move on to the other cars with miniguns in the trunk.

Another thing that always had me screaming at the TV was a big moment in the filmed version of Goldfinger. The book had a big deal where SMERSH agent Goldfinger organized nearly every Mob goon not presently engaged in shaking down unions and fish markets, a train and a water delivered nerve agent to steal the gold from Fort Knox. Various know-it-alls wrote to Mr. Fleming explaining that with the actual mass of gold kept at the depository that it would take several days for Goldfinger to steal the gold before as Movie Bond put it – “You have perhaps twelve hours before the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines arrive to make you put it back.” Certainly, the forces stationed at the sort of nearby Fort Campbell would mobilize sooner.

Writers having long ago learned to tap dance around these logic flaws meant that steal becomes irradiate with a small yield dirty bomb provided by China. On the surface it seems like an adroit way to get out of the corner Mr. Fleming painted himself into. Enter a weirdo (I’m your huckleberry) with both a modestly traumatic past with certain conspiracy theorists as stepfathers and long before that a penchant for reading everybody else’s far more paranoid spy novels as well.

My question as Gert Frobe and Sean Connery enjoy mint julips discussing popping off a cobalt heavy nuke in Fort Knox was always, wouldn’t and shouldn’t the US Government go for the Big Lie about the nuclear event? 

“No, that wasn’t a small-scale nuclear event at Fort Knox, but a gas explosion.” 

“Well, even if there was a nuclear event that melted the gold, melted isn’t the same as vaporized. We still have the gold and this being 1963 with a changed global economy where we haven’t had to use our gold to actually buy things since the War, it means that we bury the gold slag in a tank of water and extend out all credit contracts past the half-life period. We take a hit, but continue on as before. Move along, nothing to see here.” Of course, Big Lies worthy of Joseph Goebbels really aren’t something for a Bond story, but that’s how I think.

While on the subject of my conspiracy theorist Evil Stepfather 2.0 and randomly tossing out fan fiction crossovers, do you see what’s coming? If you asked – “well, wouldn’t Goldfinger bust in only to find the Roswell aliens?” – well, now we’re cooking with gas. Actually, said stepfather really didn’t buy into aliens as part of any kind of conspiracy preferring a Christian themed – “the Catholic Church did it” – but I’m not above certain examples of character assassination now that he’s dead. Anyway, Bond v. Roswell Aliens and Men in Black…if you get to this one first, I completely understand, but ooh!

I was much surprised reading the books usually long after the movie how much more grounded in life Book Bond was. I mentioned above that during one of the many trips to Jamaica, Bahamas and the rest of the Caribbean that matched Mr. Fleming’s annual need to spend a few months at his Goldeneye estate to write and relax that Bond trained for several days which included no smoking until he got his lungs back for a big swim. So how much did Mr. Fleming know what his own smoking might do to him (dead at 56 in 1964)? But I digress.

One last major line of inquiry is to ask how much time Bond is able to devote to train to be the superman that does anything his writers ask him to? Bond can surf huge overhead waves infiltrating North Korea (Die Another Day). He can fly a teeny jet with a notoriously teeny gas tank in a VFR duel with a SAM all without anything remotely like a flare or chaff dispenser (Octopussy). The few times it’s mentioned on screen there’s a woman involved, like a certain Danish instructor at Oxford (Tomorrow Never Dies)?

I suppose I could go on and on. I’ll probably revisit this post with new observations as they occur to me.