Wednesday, 6 May 2020

The James Bond Cocktail Hour Season 2

Since the season has now concluded, here is a short breakdown of Season 2 of the The James Bond Cocktail Hour podcast.


We opened the season with a review of 1964's Goldfinger, the Fast 5 of the the franchise - the movie that started Bondmania, and led to 22 further instalments (and Casino Royale '67).

This season, we tried a new format of alternating reviews with supplemental episodes on different topics.

For the first supplemental episode, we covered the key bits of new info about No Time To Die and did a short review of David Arnold's Shaken and Stirred covers album from 1997.

With our supplementals, we try to make sure that the subject bears some relation to the next review. Shaken and Stirred led to David Arnold gaining the composer gig on Tomorrow Never Dies, which was our next review.

In the next episode, we covered Becoming Bond, the 2017 documentary about George Lazenby's short time in the role.

This provided the lead-in to our Christmas review of For Your Eyes Only, the spiritual sequel to Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service (covered in our first season).

We started off the new year with a look at the Craig-era teaser trailers (with a short intro covering the teasers of his predecessor Pierce Brosnan).

The first review proper of 2020 was a two-part review of Die Another Day, the last guy's last movie.

With the next supplemental, we covered the latest developments on Billie Eillish's theme song, and went through our own picks for future Bond singers.

We then followed this with our first 'rogue' reviews of Bond-related media, the first two Kingsman films. Originally we had timed the release of these episodes to come out around the same time as the new Kingsman prequel, but then it got pushed back (AND then Corona happened).

The final couple of episodes took us back to the literary roots, as we covered Ian Fleming's third novel Moonraker, and tried out a new segment, casting the literary Bond. As a lead-in, we did a supplemental in which we offered our choices for the novels we reviewed in Season One, and bookend-ed the Moonraker episode with a fan-casting of the main roles in the novel.

Thanks to the release delay, we did have to wind up the season early, but it did give us an excuse to check out the multifaceted weirdness of 1967's Casino Royale.

We will be back later in the year with a new batch of reviews, including (hopefully) No Time To Die.

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