Should under 20s be banned from watching classic Bond?

petelangers

So today I'm watching The Spy Who Loved Me and my teenage son walks in.

"What's this?" he enquires.
"Only one of the best Bond films ever" I scoff back, amazed at his sheer ignorance! "Why don't you sit in on it for a while?"
"Sure" he replies, hypnotized by the shapely silhouettes in the opening credits that weren't really meant for modern bluray and HD.

I'm never watching bond with him again!

When I watch a classic bond I do so with the belief that almost anything is possible and I am willing to overlook some obvious deficiencies to escape into the film. Not a chance...

Look at their clothes! )
Gunshots don't sound like that where are these sound effects from?
Ha, he punches him and listen to the drum sound effect!
What's this supposed to be a house in the ocean? You can see that's a model! X-(

Finally Jaws comes into shot, the most fearsome henchman of the lot. This will hook him for sure. He'll shut up now. Jaws bites through the chain at the pyramids and the teenager bursts into laughter. At this point I throw him out of the room in disgust.

Has anyone had a similar experience to this? I don't really want to show him reboot bond as it's not bond in my opinion but maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and accept that, just as Roger Moore is my Bond, Craig will be his...

superado

I guess in my home there’s been such a huge build-up about the legend of James Bond (think of the opening scene voice-overs of “Conan” and “The Road Warrior”) that when my kids finally had their opportunity to watch the classics, there was much deference and awe on their part...because they knew better lest their dad did good on his threat with the minivan ejector seats!

caractacus potts

I know when I was very young I couldnt appreciate Harryhausen when we already had Industrial Light and Magic. Couldnt buy into Doctor Who specifically because of that robot dog, when we already had R2D2.

I think when we are very young and still forming a sense of reality, whatever the current standard of popular culture is perceived as "real", and older evolutionary forms look artificial, so that all we can see is the artifice which distracts and we cannot buy into the story.

I was lucky when I was a lad, because my mother always encouraged me to watch old films when they were on television, and we had a very great television presenter in Toronto in the 1970s called Elwy Yost, who in his introductions would do much to set the context and make the history of a films production sound fascinating many decades after the fact.
I specifically remember watching the Maltese Falcon for the very first time on Yost's show, and appreciating Bogie was the epitomy of cool but didn't Lorre steal the film! It didn't look oldfashioned at all, but I did know to watch for the camera angles and contrasts of light and dark.

So, Pete, maybe you need to talk more with your son about film history in general, and how the magic is made, and how that didnt happen overnight it evolved over a century? Theres a lot of modern filmmaking that evolved out of the innovations in those early Bondfilms.

ToTheRight

Whenever I've shown any younger kids a classic Bond they've been riveted and enthralled. My buddy and I showed his pre-teen son DAF and he was hooked from the gun-barrel.

Golrush007

I would imagine that getting a modern teenager to accept some of the quirks of old school Bond could be quite challenging. The trick would be to hook them before they reach that troublesome age - "the age of not believing" as the old Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks put it.

I reckon my strategy would be to introduced a child to the likes of TSWLM and MR at around 9 or 10, and then slowly introduce the more serious and mature Bond films over the next few years. That was pretty much how my Bond film journey unfolded and it was great.