You could watch a marathon of censored Bond on a crappy cable station. Or you could read the following series in which each film is reduced to a snide summary. Or do both. Or neither. It’s your life. Show some backbone for once and take charge of it.

Wherein Bond is betrayed by a cossack infiltrator in league with a military type lousy with political ambitions and a multiorgasmic pilot aroused by death.

 

Bond begins to suspect the presence of an influencing machine as it exerts control. The sniper’s dream is to play the cello at Carnegie Hall.

 

Bond emerges fully formed from the mouth of a crocodile. A mustache opens many doors in the Cuban army.

 

The villain has webbed hands and possibly a dorsal fin. Bond pulls the old Lawrence of Arabia routine.

 

 

A crass American gets pickpocketed by a baby elephant. He cramps Bond’s style. Bond was born with a congenital heart defect that makes him feel too much.

 

The crane depot has a midget custodian. Bond ruins a calendar. ‘My daughter burned her heart out by living too greedily’ the father tells Bond. Bond provides a type of therapy.

 

Tokyo is a neon forest. To blend in with the locals, Bond meets a contact at a sumo wrestling competition. Bond’s code phrase is ‘I love you’ but it must be said with true feeling.

 

An agèd, blind homosexual painter teaches Bond color theory. There are whole cities underneath Istanbul peopled with Byzantine ghosts. The word of an English gentleman doesn’t mean much

 

Here Bond enacts a journey from tomfoolery into the fierce order of virility, in reverse.

 

The United Kingdom borrows a space shuttle from the U.S. for some reason. The government is run by an old boys network out of a series of interconnected oakpaneled rooms.