Watching a 1998 Broadcast of The Living Daylights!
15 Days of 007, 25 Years Ago...
The Living Daylights! The James Bond adventure where Bond teams with Osama Bin Laden and Hawk the Slayer to stop Mitchell and the bad guy from The Fugitive from smuggling diamonds through phony heart transplants! I swear I’m making none of that up! It’s one of my favorite Bond movies but even I’ll admit that my love exists mainly on vibes. What’s the real plot? Who cares! Bond surfs a cello across international borders! And for once the entire Ian Fleming story is imported verbatim into the film, even if that only takes up the first twenty-ish minutes of two hours at the movies.
Like a lot of kids of the 90s, I never actually owned a copy of The Living Daylights on a legitimate VHS, because the Bond box sets were expensive as hell. What we did have was The 15 Days of 007. Every Christmas season, as constant as It’s a Wonderful Life or depressing marches through your local ransacked department store, cable station TBS would air every James Bond movie in random order. Two weeks of primetime on Ted Turner’s catch-all superstation would be filled with everything from Dr. No to License to Kill, plus or minus a Never Say Never Again. Two movies a night, thirty airings, sixteen Bond movies, which means one got the short shrift and it was probably On Her Majesty’s Secret Service despite the fact that it’s more of a real film than most of the other Bonds.
I refused to miss a moment of any of it. At this point I had probably seen all of the Bond movies several times over, and my fandom was at a fever pitch after a year of playing the GoldenEye adaptation for Nintendo64. The problem was that these were primetime screenings, and I had school the next day. The solution? Sink all the money I had into blank tape! I set the family VCR to film every single night of the 15 Days, grabbing every movie for studious rewatch over the next year. Every Bond movie captured (nearly) uncut—and in some cases like Moonraker actually longer than their theatrical releases—and all it took was a stack of Maxell tapes and a mastery of VCRplus+.
With the nature of streaming and films-on-disc more fractured than ever, I’m not exactly sure how to watch half of these movies right now. MGM+? What the hell is that? Maybe some of them are on Prime? Somehow only the Daniel Craig movies are on 4K, even though I’d probably pay umpity billion dollars to get the full series on disc. (I paid actual money for Tammy and the T-Rex, imagine what I’d pay for real movies.) So imagine my relief when I unearthed my original tapes from the TBS broadcast.
Insane 14-Year-Old Archivists: 1The Increasingly-Depressing Media Landscape: 0
These tapes represent the way I best remember these movies. I’m all for the purest way to watch film, OAR and in a theater as close to the original exhibition as possible; seeing Dr. No on film at the Ziegfeld gave me a better appreciation for that first Bond movie. But these airings feel special, like we were all in on something important across America. It wasn’t just a movie, it was a two-week event that gave us something more than Christmas over the extended Christmas lead-up. James Bond is as much part of the holidays as terrifying stop-motion from the 70s or bows on top of luxury cars.
So let’s take a look at parts of this broadcast and see what happened between the points where a KGB assassin kills a guy with a Walkman or James Bond rides a magic carpet or a main antagonist is foiled by falling furniture full of Marx Best of the West figures. Here are some highlights from a TBS screening of The Living Daylights, aired exactly twenty-five years ago this week!
With your host, Grace Jones!
The Bond marathon was a major event for TBS. The Superstation often felt like the “what else is on” network; they used to start their programming at five after the hour so you would flip to them after realizing the other stations weren’t offering anything quality. So you’d catch Andy Griffith or Edward Scissorhands for the fifth or sixth time, maybe a National Geographic documentary. It didn’t feel special even if it was acceptable TV. But the Days of 007 were something different, expanding on the schedule and getting their own special wraparounds. This year the movies were presented by none other than hit songstress, art icon, genuine hyper-influential weirdo, and former Bond Girl Grace Jones. I’m sorry, but what? Even as a kid this placement made no sense. Grace Jones was everywhere when I was growing up, like she couldn’t help but be part of each part of pop culture, from art galleries to crap cinema. Did the Conan money run out? Were we not all still spinning “Pull Up to the Bumper”? In a normal and sane world this hosting gig would have gone to Carey Lowell or—god help us—Shirley Eaton. Instead we get Ted Turner’s money throwing Grace Jones (GRACE JONES!) into a series of amazing outfits and wigs to tell us that the only place to be was the Superstation. They already had my buy-in, but these segments turned each movie into an event.
Not Edited for Television
Not a moment has been cut from The Living Daylights! Seeing “Edited for Time” and “Edited for Content” missing from the front of these movies was a joy to a budding film fan. Yes, there were commercials every twenty minutes, but we got the whole film from stem to stern. After the ABC Movie of the Week versions it felt like a miracle. (Read into the way they butchered OHMSS for a fun infuriating time.) The Gunbarrel opening is preserved here for a fun bit of Bond Minutiae. Film distributors United Artists changed hands more often than Italy got a new prime minister in the latter half of the 20th Century, eventually ending up dead even after Tom Cruise purchased them for some damn reason. Constant sales and reshuffling saw their new corporate logo plastered on old films, which has never been distracting and certainly doesn’t make me throw up my hands when I see someone like Warner do it. Astonishingly, (nearly) all of the Bond Movies during the marathon ran with their logos intact; in some cases, this was the last time one would see the MGM/UA laser or the Seven-Arts logo in commercially-released form. Pour one out for a tiny bit of film history.
The Rugrats at Burger King!
It was still Christmas, and that meant TOYS! We were seeing an improbable run from The Rugrats Movie at theaters, one that honestly wasn’t on my radar as a teen at the time. I knew it existed, but that it outgrossed The Mask of Zorro and Shakespeare in Love and The X-Files? One of the biggest hits of the year? That’s a hell of a run for the least-interesting of the original Nicktoons. (I said it.) While I was too busy getting into Industrial music and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, uh, cable retransmissions of decades-old spy movies, Burger King was making sure the little kids had what they wanted for Christmas easy lunches. To be honest these are phenomenal Happy Meal Kids Club toys, detailed and obviously sturdy. You could hurt somebody with that Chuckie riding Reptar. If you’re going to get a toy surprise on December 19th because your parents are just too worn out to do anything but get fast food, you could absolutely not do better. I bet these were excellent holdovers for kids born in 1992 before Santa showed up.
Sweepstakes, Bond Sweepstakes
Awwwwww yeah, Grace Jones wants to give you a home theater setup! Anything on the internet in 1998 felt like the important and immediate future, any show that had a website was automatically better and cooler to us. James Bond's associates want us to use code words on the internet to win prizes? I’ll pay attention, 007! This sweepstakes made James Bond into locker-hallway conversation at school. Did anyone tape Live and Let Die? Did you hear the code word for that night? It turned kids from different scholastic social strata into intelligence officers using the latest technology. (The code word for tonight was LASER.) I was an irritable delinquent in a school full of misfits, but bridges were built before Christmas Break through Grace Jones’ mission. Saying this little interstitial started friendships is probably overstating it, but it definitely helped. We had to band together to get all the information. After all, we were “running out of TIIIIIiiiiiiMMMMMMeeeeee!!!”
And that’s the way it was on Manhattan Cable Channel 20, twenty-five years ago today. What other treasures lay on these tapes? Only fifteen more Bond films to go!
Next Time: For Your Eyes Only misses five seconds, someone stays on a bull for eight seconds, and Christmas specials forever!