The Increasing Strangeness of James Bond Titles

I prefer the titles that refer to characters or operations or locations, ie. Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, OHMSS, Octopussy, GoldenEye, Skyfall, etc. When you get to the titles that feature "die", "kill" or "live", some are cool, but there are too many of them! Still, the only titles I would've changed would be Licence to Kill (it's just four years after A View to a Kill!), Tomorrow Never Dies ("Lies" would've been better), and Die Another Day. QOS is a bizarre one - it understandably refers to Bond's post-CR mood, but then the villain's organization happens to be named Quantum too. Awkward circumstances, with predictable confusion from moviegoers.

Sounds like porn.

Give or take a letter or two...

The trick with original Bond titles is that it's often quite difficult to find something that is sufficiently clever and sufficiently Bondian. It's altogether far too tempting to simply through "death" or "die" somewhere in some recognizable expression and think the result quite clever (ala, say, ONE DEATH TO DIE, which is as rubbish as it gets).

The trick of a great Bond title is to be something at once both pulpy and poetic, with a touch of the surreal. GHOST OF A CHANCE, perhaps? At the very least, it sounds like something Fleming might have conceived of and later rejected, ala THE ROUGH WITH THE SMOOTH. Same goes for, say, DEATH HAS TWO FACES, which isn't altogether too terrible, provided the story had a good enough explanation for it. A SPY FOR A SPY? Now we're just getting silly.

And then there's the one-word titles. They can be pulled off by folks who aren't Ian Fleming (Gardner's novels gave us two good ones in ICEBREAKER and BROKENCLAW, though SEAFIRE leaves a great deal to be desired), but they're the hardest ones to pull off. SKYFALL doesn't quite cut it. I'm still waiting on EON to use SHATTERHAND and/or SHAMELADY.

Nice copy n paste there. ;)

Shatterhand would be fantastic!

I've never liked Shatterhand. And Shamelady's worse by a factor of five.

Whom Fortune Favours

Hmmm...Shamelady....sort of like me in my campus years.... :face:

I came up with a title years back with "death". DEATH IS AN ALLY. That's all I got when it comes to "death". Though I think Benson's NEVER DREAM OF DYING isn't the crappiest one I've heard.

SHATTERHAND makes me think of a hand full of... well.

I wrote part of a Bond short story years back about Bond in an icy environment titled DANGER, ON THE ROCKS. But that would be at best a short story title.

Had a movie idea called SHADOW OF THE GUN, but the original Star Trek series had an episode called "Specter of the Gun".

Thunderball = nuclear blast

Oh shit, you're right. I'd even about read that before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_%28sail%29