Spectre in Octopussy?

Revelator

I was reading a review of Octopussy (https://iansadler.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/musings-on-bond-at-50-octopussy/) when I came across the following:

McClory’s continuing legal claims to the character of Ernst Stavro Blofeld and the SPECTRE organisation scuppered Broccoli’s early plans for the plot of Octopussy. The eponymous character was originally conceived as a villain using research into the death of Tracy Bond to manipulate Bond into joining her vendetta against SPECTRE.

I was intrigued enough to try a bit of research, and while looking through my copy of The Making of On Her Majesty's Secret Service I found a passage I'd completely forgotten about: it mentions that in an early draft of Octopussy there's a scene of Octopussy's girls raiding a Spectre factory that prints counterfeit money. Apparently an earlier draft portrayed Octopussy as an Asian woman who ran a nightclub in Tokyo and had teamed up with Goldfinger's diamond-obsessed brother, a certain Monsieur Diamont (Goldfinger's brother was a gimmick Richard Maibaum had toyed with since 1964).

I also asked about this topic on the Commander Bond forum and received the following response from a user named Pierceuhhh:

I don't have my copy with me so I may have some details wrong, but the Taschen James Bond Archives book explains it:

SPECTRE attacks MI6 and kills M. Bond is framed as an inside man and goes on the run, and Moneypenny is sacked. SPECTRE then replaces M with their own man, so they can run the secret... Octopussy runs a spy outfit of her own that's at war with SPECTRE, and Bond teams up with her and an Afghan freedom fighter called Kamal Khan. The villains are Blofeld and the head of his SPECTRE army, Smythe. The pre-titles [sequence] was in the Netherlands.
Kamal Khan's name later turned up as the villain's, the character of Kamal Khan later turned up in TLD as Kamran Shah, and it looks like literally the...rest of the plot was recycled for BOND 24!
The Taschen book actually relates a lot of original plot ideas that I've never head of before, and no sources are cited! But it's fun!

So...does anyone here have further information to add to this topic? Your contributions would be most welcome.

James Suzuki

I've never heard of any of this stuff before reading your post. Sounds really interesting. However the whole Goldfinger's brother plot point sounds really ridiculous.

Revelator

James Suzuki wrote:

I've never heard of any of this stuff before reading your post. Sounds really interesting. However the whole Goldfinger's brother plot point sounds really ridiculous.

I agree, yet Goldfinger's brother pops up in the early drafts of OHMSS (where Blofeld is revealed as Goldfinger's twin), DAF, and OP. I think it shows how avid (or desperate?) the filmmakers were to recreate the success of Goldfinger, the film that set the template of the series.

James Suzuki

Revelator wrote:

James Suzuki wrote:

I've never heard of any of this stuff before reading your post. Sounds really interesting. However the whole Goldfinger's brother plot point sounds really ridiculous.

I agree, yet Goldfinger's brother pops up in the early drafts of OHMSS (where Blofeld is revealed as Goldfinger's twin), DAF, and OP. I think it shows how avid (or desperate?) the filmmakers were to recreate the success of Goldfinger, the film that set the template of the series.

Never thought of it like that. I never really liked Goldfinger as a villain much anyway. I felt the script had too much telling not showing. 'Goldfinger is really bad" 'Goldfinger is evil' But he doesn't really come across as a threat.

MilleniumForce

If they had gone with what I believe was their original plan (Frobe would return as his twin brother) it would never have worked. But if they had gone with someone else, I think I would have liked it. After all, I love the fact Hans Gruber's brother is the villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance.

James Suzuki

MilleniumForce wrote:

If they had gone with what I believe was their original plan (Frobe would return as his twin brother) it would never have worked. But if they had gone with someone else, I think I would have liked it. After all, I love the fact Hans Gruber's brother is the villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance.

It would only work if Connery was in both.

Virgil37

Doesn't Oberhauser appear in OP?

Reading the James Bond archives book I realised that the stories of the movies are just the tip of the iceberg. They must have tons of stories from the past that they never used.

Now, with the reboot and free from legal contraints, they are able to use material, characters, situations from the past.

Barbel

Virgil37 wrote:

Doesn't Oberhauser appear in OP?

Yes, very much so- in the short story of course but not the film.

AlphaOmegaSin

Cheers for sharing that -{

Silhouette Man

Yes, thanks for bringing this to the boards, Revelator. I'm currently writing an article about this for the blog.

Quist

This all sounds very interesting and I am definitely with thinking that bringing Goldfinger's brother back would have been a bad idea. However back in the day SPECTRE definitely needed some sort of closure so the original Octopussy idea doesn't seem that bad. It's such a shame that the original ending of DAF did not get filmed with Bond finally killing Blofeld in a salt mine.
Does anybody know of a good site where you can find original Bond movie scripts?

Thunderpussy

Sadly, I have no information on this, but it's fantastically
Entertaining reading, some amazing script ideas. -{