Only sadly it wasn’t to be. Barry McCann looks back at what a 007 movie in Supermarionation might have been like...

JAMES BOND IS GO!

Moonraker was the third novel James Bond novel by Ian Fleming. It was published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1955. The plot is derived from a Fleming screenplay that was too short for a full novel, so he added the passage of the bridge game between Bond and the industrialist Hugo Drax. In the latter half of the novel, Bond is seconded to Drax’s staff as the businessman

A mong that much celebrated pantheon of James Bond films planned but never made is one proposal that became particular legendary. Partly because it became lost for years and subjected to much speculation during that absence, but mainly due to one of its authors being none other than Gerry Anderson.

If made, it would have seen the king of the futuristic Supermarionation joining forces with the producers of the biggest action movie franchise of that decade, and many more since. Or so Anderson hoped at the time.

The unearthing of a long since buried screen treatment by Gerry Anderson and his regular co-writer Tony Barwick has shed new light on what had been intended as the seventh James Bond film that eventually became Diamonds Are Forever, but could well have been Sean Connery starring in Moonraker! And that was one of a fair few aborted movies of Ian Fleming’s 1955 James Bond novel.

In fact, Fleming had conceived of Moonraker becoming the basis of a film even before he wrote it. His 1953 first Bond novel, Casino Royale, had been adapted for American Television the following year and the movie rights then sold to Gregory Ratoff. Alexander Korda showed interest in Live and Let Die, though was not sure if it would translate well into a movie. Fleming informed him that his planned next Bond adventure would be more filmic.

Fleming actually began working on Moonraker as a Bond screenplay, having mulled over the plot of a nuclear rocket dropped on London ever since the war and the threat of the German V missiles. He then decided to adapt the scenario as his third 007 novel, though styled to have more potential as an exciting movie.

The plot concerns Sir Hugo Drax, a self-made multi-millionaire industrialist originally from Liverpool and who is developing a revolutionary nuclear missile for the Ministry of Defence called the Moonraker, an advanced rocket that can withstand the ultra-high combustion temperatures produced by its engine and thus increasing its range.

In expanding his screenplay to fill the length of a novel, Fleming added a set up whereby Bond is assigned to investigate suspicions that Drax cheats at cards, which M finds curious for a man of his wealth. Bond takes on Sir Hugo at the card table and beats him at his own game, using his both his skill and a deck stacked in his favour.

Suspicion grows further when a Ministry of Supply security officer working at the Moonraker project in Kent is mysteriously shot dead. M sends Bond to replace him and there he discovers that Drax’s personal assistant, Gala Brand, is in fact a Special Branch police officer also working undercover.