Hacker Cinema
You Only Live Twice
1967 · Film · 117 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
A mysterious spacecraft captures Russian and American space capsules and brings the two superpowers to the brink of war. James Bond investigates the case in Japan and comes face to face with his archenemy Blofeld.
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19 comments on Hacker News
Oh man:
> Several booked passengers cancelled their tickets at the last moment to see a ninja demonstration. These passengers, Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Ken Adam, Lewis Gilbert, and Freddie Young, were in Japan scouting locations for the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).
The James Bond franchise would likely have been quite a bit different had Broccoli died in 1966. Crazy to think he and his colleagues cheated death because they wanted to play tourist a little bit longer than originally scheduled.
Fascinating article. Some interesting anecdotes:
> The victims even included several survivors of the Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 402 crash. (Note: A plane that crashed the day prior, with only 8 out of 72 people on board surviving)
> Several booked passengers cancelled their tickets at the last moment to see a ninja demonstration. These passengers, Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Ken Adam, Lewis Gilbert, and Freddie Young, were in Japan scouting locations for the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).
Coincidences like this are of course bound to happen with large enough numbers of people traveling, but I still find this interesting.
I don't think so, but there were gryojets, which were half way there. They were bullet-sized rockets fired from a gun with an unrifled barrel that accelerated as they flew, exceeding Mach 1 at terminal velocity.
Supposedly you could literally slap them out of the air if you were at the muzzle, when they had just begun accelerating.
They were in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet
To me, this desire to rewrite old media and pretend that the bad/offensive stuff didn't happen is fairly detrimental. It feeds a bunch of issues as I see it:
* It removes the evidence of historical injustice, allowing the kind of person who wants to, to pretend it wasn't real - it was Sherlock Holmes that first introduced me to Italians not being white enough.
* It diminishes the injustice: "the problem is just words in a book/play/movie" rather than the society that made that acceptable
I think that _much_ better is what Disney did: preface the media, bet it a film, a book, or whatever with a "hey, this says some shit that is clearly offensive and we've realized is wrong, but changing that is tantamount to pretending it didn't exist".
[edit: that said I can't wait to see how they eventually try to CGI away the horror in the "you only live twice" film :D ]
Roald Dahl also wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film "You only live twice", which was almost completely rewritten from the novel, about which Dahl said "Fleming's worst book, with no plot in it which would even make a movie", comparing it to a travelogue of Japan.
In the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice the nefarious SPECTRE smuggled* liquid oxygen together with butter, making everyone think the shipment of "butter and lox" was the fish and not the rocket fuel component.
* Perhaps transported is a better word, as they were quite transparent in that they were transporting 'lox'.
>I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples.
>A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type.
Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
There are certainly science fiction and religious traditions where people are born twice. (A James Bond book/ movie has the fun title "You Only Live Twice") One recent thought experiment is the idea that we are in a ancestor simulator and will be born again in a heaven simulator.
A popular genre of anime involves high school students dying by chance and being reborn in fantasy world's where they can have the fun of living out RPG type adventures.
The problem is there isn't a shred of evidence for people being reborn. It seems like wishful thinking or just a fun fantasy.
I haven't read James Fleming's book but would like to. I'm glad that the review does not explicitly claim that James Bond fights the Communists, something so often asserted by people who don't know what they're talking about. Ian Fleming created SPECTRE because he thought that the Cold War might end soon, and so wanted a nonpolitical opponent for Bond.
In the films, the USSR is Bond's opponent only in For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the silent backer in Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, but Auric Goldfinger and SPECTRE are the real enemies, and Thunderball establishes that SPECTRE is willing to work for anyone (including Western powers). Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, General Orlov in Octopussy, and Gustav Graves in Die Another Day are explicitly rogue agents.
I go for James Bond references, when I can. 'Moonraker' is always a great choice.
Sometimes I'm constrained to a specific starting letter, so I've had to stretch it at times, like when I needed an 'S-' word... ended up going with 'Sinatra' since Nancy Sinatra performed 'You Only Live Twice' for that movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Live_Twice_(film)
I love his Bond films, just pure fun. And, god, he was sexy. They don’t make ‘em like they used to!
Few favorites:
- You Only Live Twice (1967)
- Never Say Never Again (1983)
- Goldfinger (1964)
I wouldn't be so sure about all of this. I just bought a copy of the You Only Live Twice soundtrack in physical CD format because my streaming provider (Spotify) only offers 3 tracks from the album. Repeat this story for anything not created in the last 20 years.
The realization that I could permanently lose access to some older media just by way of my streaming providers not caring to continue carrying the tracks has reignited my datahoarder spirit animal.
For some reason the thought of losing access to movies and TV shows is substantially less troubling to me than the thought of losing access to more obscure forms of music.
> or outright stealing them
They took a page out of Blofeld's book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Live_Twice_(film)
You mean like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet it was featured in the 007 Movie - You only live twice, if memory serves...
> An autogyro is a small, helicopter-like aircraft made famous by the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.
I though it was made even more famous by Mad Max 2.
The only time I heard the word "lox" was when I was a kid and had the James Bond film You Only Live Twice on VHS. This is the one where Blofeld is launching rockets from Japan to destroy Soviet and American spacecraft, with the hope of them blaming each other and triggering a war.
For some reason, one of the scenes that stuck in my mind was when the head of the Japanese intelligence services (Tanaka?) and Bond are reviewing the receipts that the latter managed to steal from the company they suspect is acting as a front for Spectre. Tanaka is reading out a perfectly innocent list of items and comes across a huge order for "lox", and asks Bond what that means. At first he just defeatedly dismisses as an American word for smoked salmon, but then has a brainwave and says something like "But... it can also be a shorthand for Liquid Oxygen, which is needed to power rockets!".
And Nancy Sinatra in "You Only Live Twice":
You only live twice Or so it seems One life for yourself And one for your dreams
Its use in the last episode of Mad Men -- where Don is watching a fired colleague contemplate the life not lived -- was brilliant.
> physically acquire portions of other satellites
Sounds like the plot of You Only Live Twice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Live_Twice_(film)