Do all Bond films get novelized.
The Sidekick
Posts: 19MI6 Agent
As you may know most of the james bond films use Ian Fleming Bond Books titles. A lot of them though are completely different stories and plots from the orignals.
So my question is, have all the James Bond Films be wrote into books using the story and plot from the actual films. (e.g.Octopussy Film comes out, and a book form is published.)
So my question is, have all the James Bond Films be wrote into books using the story and plot from the actual films. (e.g.Octopussy Film comes out, and a book form is published.)
Comments
The same can't be said of the novelisation of 'Moonraker'... In that one, Wood doesn't even try to explain how the literary Bond could meet a villain called Hugo Drax a second time around! That's too much of a coincidence to bear any scrutiny... so Wood wisely leaves it alone! (It's interesting - and a nice touch - that the physical appearance of Drax in Wood's novelisation isn't based on Michel Lonsdale but on Fleming's vision of the character: Drax is once again a red-headed ogre.)
In the 'License To Kill' novelisation, John Gardner's attempt to reconcile the plot of the film with the Ian Fleming continuity is simply silly: he makes an issue of the fact that it's the second time around that Felix Leiter has been thrown by a villain to predators from the sea and mutilated (the first time having been in Fleming's LALD)! As Bruce Willis put it, in 'Die Hard 2', "How can the same sh*t happen to the same guy twice?!"
This is from p.36 of the LTK novelisation, in a chapter called 'Lightning Sometimes Strikes Twice': "'Not again!' Bond heard his own voice and knew exactly what he meant. His near total recall of that terrible time in Miami, when Felix lost half a leg and an arm to Mr. Big's shark, came scurrying, like a pack of tarantulas into his head. This time, Felix had already lost his new bride and Bond began to face the probability of his old friend being dead also."
Gardner should have taken the same approach as Wood in the 'Moonraker' novelisation and not bothered with a pretence of flawless continuity between the sequence of Fleming novels and a story based on the screenplay... True, the 'License To Kill' movie served up an original story, but it also raided the Fleming archive for some interesting situations (the fate of Leiter in Fleming's LALD being the obvious case). So in the prose version of LTK, Gardner should have simply breezed over the situational circumlocutions and NOT made some lame acknowledgement of them in his narrative just for the sake of claiming an over-arching continuity with the Ian Fleming series! (Oh, and it's rather irritating that - having gone to all this trouble of insisting that 'lightning sometimes strikes twice' - Gardner should then just ignore the coincidence that the literary Bond has already encountered another character by the name of Milton Krest!)
By the way, Penguin's new collection of Fleming's James Bond short stories, published under the title of one of those stories, 'Quantum Of Solace' (in which Bond himself has only an incidental role), is perhaps an example of cynical marketing. Casual or careless purchasers thinking they're buying a novelisation of the new film of the same name will be highly disappointed. All but one of the Fleming short stories are already available in established paperback compilations, 'For Your Eyes Only' and 'Octopussy'. What the Penguin 'Quantum Of Solace' edition has to offer that will perhaps excite Fleming fans is the addition of the slight but fascinating '007 in New York'. But that's hardly going to give "solace" to the casual purchaser who was hoping they'd bought a solid tie-in with Daniel Craig!
Am I right in thinking that Wood's novelisations were called James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me and James Bond and Moonraker?
I assumed that as post-Moonraker the films borrowed more from Fleming's source material, it would be harder to utilise it into a 'book of the film' for copywrite reasons. But also, as they were short stories, to do the usual movie tie-in. FYEO had a painted pic of Moore on the front, with 'the inspiration for the new James Bond film' across it, while Octopussy had a Bondish fellow but not really Moore or Connery. AVTAK - had nothing.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks, Napoleon. Yes, these were the full titles of Wood's novelisations. It's not so hard to obtain copies even now, on eBay.
Incidently when FYEO was released I remember Marvel (or was it DC?) releasing a two edition comic strip version of the film, which was rather good, if somewhat short. Does anyone know if this was a one off or were there any more like it?
Yes, there was a Marvel comic strip version of OP as well, published as the James Bond Octopussy Special. It's got an interesting "Making Of" ection as well, like the FYEO comic strip.
Additionally,Eclipse Comics published the official comics adaptation of 1989's Licence to Kill in the graphic novel format.Mike Grell(who'd previously written and drawn an original 007 miniseries for Eclipse entitled Permission to Die)write the LTK script with Tom Yeates providing the artwork.
Interestingly,although all of the cast members' images were available for use in this book,Yeates chose to give 007 a face much closer to the one Grell had devised in his earlier 007 project rather than go with Timothy Dalton's.The face Grell came up with was an admixture of the young Hoagy Carmichael crossed with the young Sean Connery--with black hair,blue eyes and the long scar running down 007's cheek(as per Ian Fleming's descriptions in Casino Royale and From Russia With Love).That said,there are some frames in which Dalton's visage is clearly recognizable.But then,(in my opinion)with his lupine features,Dalton probably comes closer-overall-to matching Fleming's descriptions of 007 than any of the other actors who've played the role.;)
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(1) I wonder why they did not novelise the 80s era Bond films between ...Eyes... and License...?
FYEO was the closest Fleming adaptation since OHMSS, obviously no novelisation needed there.
But,
the elements of Octopussy and ...Daylights that came from Fleming were different enough, at least as much as Moonraker, that they were non-overlapping stories, really only sharing general setpieces. Magda was not Maria Freudenstein, the purpose of the auction was different, and I think the object being auctioned was different. Kara Milovy was not Trigger, the purpose of the attempted sniper attack was different, it was a different city. Even the auction expert, and the agent who threatened to report Bond for spoiling his shot, had unique if similar names. BookBond would have been experiencing these events for the first time, with no need for contradictions or coincidence.
...View...of course had nothing to do with what Fleming wrote, an entirely new experience bookBond could have had.
Any of these three movie were just as worthy of a novelisation as Moonraker.
Whereas License... actually repeated a lot of what Fleming did write, despite the all-new title.
(2) also, I thought I once read here that there were novelisations of Diamonds... and ...Golden Gun, but done for long out-of-print newspapers. Did I dream this? (entirely possible, I do have recurring dreams about missing Tintin adventures, why not missing Bond novelisations). If they ever existed, did they ever get scanned or transcribed?
These were a sort of precursor to computer adventure games, called Find Your Fate where the reader has to make choices sending him/her to a certain page to continue the story, and aimed at a teenage audience.
Re newspaper serialisations of DAF and TMWTGG, this thread may be of interest: https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/30786/man-with-golden-gun-printed-in-an-australian-newspaper-1965/
Re "The Property Of A Lady" Only slightly, in that it was a globe by Carl Faberge rather than an egg.
And for novelisations of OP and AVTAK, it helps to know Dutch.... https://www.thebookbond.com/2013/01/chris-moores-unknown-novelizations-of.html
By coincidence these were the first two Fleming books I tried to read (based on what films ABC had most recently broadcast) and was surprised at how little the books resembled the film, especially since James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me was such a close adaptation. It took me a while to spot the error in my logic. woah-ho, some enterprising agent needs to do a translation of those
I saw one of those Find Your Fate books the other week but didn't buy it … I gather they're inspired by scenes in ...View... but expanded into bigger stories contradicting what happens in the film. Meaning that, unconventional as the format may be, they are all new Bond adventures only available in book form, just like Gardner's new books … but how do they fit into continuity? They exist within a third tier of subtly contradictory realities for our agent Bond.
One of these days someone is going to have to write Crisis on Earth Double-Oh, in which realities collide.
It's the former- not written by Maibaum or Mankiewicz (though obviously based on their material which in turn was based (loosely) on Fleming) but, if memory serves cos it's been a long long time, by someone associated with the newspaper. Again if I recall correctly, these started off in great detail but took up less and less space on the page as the story progressed thus compressing the events of the film as they got nearer to the end. These were prose, with some illustrations (at first).
A View To A Kill and The Living Daylights also got a comic book adaptations in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark as part of the Semic James Bond comic series. More about them here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070507050146/http://home9.inet.tele.dk/oreskov/
even though Kara Milovy (an untrained phony sniper) is not Trigger (a pro, regarded by Bond as an equal), Bratislava is not Berlin, and Yorgi defecting is not Number 272 coming in from the cold
… Bond would still have twice had the experience of waiting for a sniper, oggling a beautiful cellist as he waits, only to discover the sniper is that very cellist and deciding to spoil her shot rather than kill her … that is a rather unlikely coincidence.
He probably has had to snipe a sniper more than once in his dirty damn job, but as soon as he spotted the beautiful cellist in Bratislava he must have thought "woah, there goes that deja vu again"
on the other hand the Octopussy movie is actually a sequel to Fleming's short story … how many filmed sequels to unfilmed Fleming stories have we got? I think that's the only one.
and I don't think it contradicts anything in Fleming's Octopussy. so it could theoretically even be canonical.
There could have been a novelization that would fit neatly into Fleming's continuity.
… well except it does contradict three of Fleming's earlier novels, but you can't have everything.