Rahda

There were a lot of very vague allusions with Blofeld . Presumably were are supposed to believe that he has plastic surgery at the drop of a hat, that he uses voice boxes to change his accent, and that he may have kept Bond alive and continued his ruse to find out how much he knew.

I vaguely recall that there was at least one example of a black lawman or bounty hunter back in the day. I suppose the premise was tweaked based on that although he would likely have encountered racism. Apparently up to a quarter of cowboys were black but this is rarely seen in movies.

 

Well no, it can't be the same Felix either can it? Either Felix is a name given to CIA agents of a particular rank or it is the same guy but wearing a new body of sorts, similar to how Bond wears different bodies every few years so from that theory it could be the same Moneypenny, although that might just be the codename that a new secretary might take in that job, but M is definitely a new character due to comments made in the Brosnan era!
JB

 

Well Blofeld did look different in the books as well apparently although he was always taller than Bond but in each book he had used plastic surgery or extreme make-ups!
JB

 

How did you cope when they recast Miss Ellie in Dallas?

 

Or having black bankers in 1930s London (In Mary Poppins Returns).

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PoliticallyCorrectHistory
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackVikings

 

The Bond series definitely reboots in the Craig era. The 2006 Casino Royale explicitly shows Bond gaining his 00 status and he gets his Aston Martin DB5 in a completely different way.

They kept Judi Dench in the role of M because she's a great actress, but the M she's playing in Casino Royale to Skyfall isn't the same M she was playing in Goldeneye to Die Another Day. In Goldeneye, she's brand new to the job, and is referred to as "the evil queen of numbers," suggesting that she hasn't had much experience in espionage, or is more concerned with budgets and accounts than in the missions. She refers to Bond as "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War." In Casino Royale, she's an experienced head of MI6, and actually says, "Christ, I miss the Cold War!" Skyfall makes it clear that she was section chief in Hong Kong during the handover in 1997, which is incompatible with Goldeneye's release date of 1995, where she's running MI6. The James Bond fan wiki even lists her M as two separate characters, Barbara Mawdsley and Olivia Mansfield.

Likewise, the Craig era Moneypenny, Q, and Felix Leiter are different people than the ones we got in the Connery through Brosnan eras. Before that, the Bond series had a vague continuity, where Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were all playing the same guy who had similar life experiences, although necessarily compressed because of sliding timescales. The Craig Bond apparently had many offscreen adventures that were perhaps similar to the previous movies, since in 2006's Casino Royale, he's a brand new agent and in 2012's Skyfall, they're talking about putting him out to pasture. Plus, in Skyfall, he's got his Aston Martin tricked out with all the devices it had in Goldfinger, where in Casino Royale, it was just a regular car.

The Bond series, much like Star Trek at times, plays fast and loose with its continuity for the sake of whatever its current story is. You just have to roll with it.

 

And before somebody tries to make Craig Bond fit into the (loose) continuity of the previous movies with the idea of "James Bond" being a code name assigned to different agents, that would require three different James Bonds to have been in love with Countess Teresa (Tracy): Lazenby Bond marries Tracy, then Connery Bond goes after Blofeld for revenge for Tracy's death, and then Moore Bond mopes over her grave and goes after Blofeld too.

Kor

 

Why not both? Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were all playing the same guy who had similar life experiences, but with plastic surgery and such, but James Bond was still just a code name - it was never his real name. It's just that now there's a new guy - Craig - with the code name, and the plastic surgery makes it confusing to some whether or not it's the same guy. Which is just how MI6 *wants* it.

 

And? It's no doubt in the entry requirements: excellent physique required, affinity to strong spirits and strong accent appreciated, willingness to adopt backstory with all its baggage a must.

Although neither "Diamonds are Forever" nor "Live and Let Die" actually involve Bond shedding tears for Tracy. Rather, they both hunt for Blofield, an enemy of the Queen and her government, which is supposed to be another box to tick on said entry requirements.

The very idea of a famous secret agent really works best if none of it is real, from the in-universe point of view. One just wonders which lot thought it up first: CIA with its Felix Leiters, or MI5 with its James Bonds and assorted others?

Timo Saloniemi

 

M is a series of clones?

 

Those 00s are a tight knit lot; wound one, wound them all.

 

Although Connery's Diamonds Are Forever never mentions Tracy at all, so saying that he's getting revenge on Blofeld for Tracy's death is more fanon than anything. The movie plays exactly the same if you've seen Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service or you haven't. Hell, DAF even has a couple of in-jokes about Connery's Bond just returning from vacation.

But yeah, the "James Bond is just a codename" theory doesn't hold any water if you know the movies more than casually. There are just too many instances of the different actor's Bonds sharing biographical details, or referring to events of previous movies that one of the other actors starred in.

Sean Connery was 32 years old when Dr. No was released in 1962. How do you explain Bond still being so hale and hearty in 2002's Die Another Day, when Connery was 72? Plastic surgery doesn't give you added vitality.

Right. Although Tracy's gravestone in the pre-credits scene in For Your Eyes Only give 1969 as the year of her death, and references a line of dialogue from OHMSS.

How known James Bond is by the general public is another thing the movies have gone back and forth on. When Bond switches his ID with a slain henchman in Diamonds Are Forever, Tiffany Case says, "You just killed James Bond!" as if he's world famous. In most of the other movies, he's only known in espionage circles.

 

Some additional mix of it being other men with the same code name, and off-screen adventures that either involved time travel or relativistic travel when we weren't "looking"?

 

Hah! I was not really a fan so couldn't care less, Paul!
JB

 

Sure, because time travel totally fits into the world of James Bond.

 

David Niven was the only real James Bond. How he loved Mata Hari. ..

 

Yes, because time travel is soooo much more ludicrous than a guy that throws his hat as a bladed weapon, a car that travels on the moon and jumps craters in a clear rip-off of Moon Patrol (James Bond video game), and turning all the gold reserves radioactive so yours is more valuable. Not to mention a "secret" agent who goes out of his way to call attention to himself.

 

I have three possible explanations for the relative lack if Chinese or Indian characters in Star Trek.

ONE:

In "Space Seed" Khan is identified as:

Other supermen later gained power in other countries:

The wars between the countries ruled by the supermen may have been very violent:

Was China ruled by one of the supermen who might have been an opponent of Khan in the Eugenics Wars? Maybe:

"Patterns of Force":

"Whom Gods Destroy":

It is possible that Lee Kuan was a superman who ruled China and fought an atomic war with Khan Noonian Singh.

Thus China and India might possibly have suffered the most in those bombings, presumably carried out by ICBMs. And possibly the radioactive fallout and/or chemical and/or biological weapons, may have caused mass sterility and caused the populations of East Asia and South Asia to plummet for decades, generations, or even centuries after the war.

TWO:

For some unknown sociological reasons, the populations of East Asia and South Asia in the Star Trek future might not be as adventurous or interested in space exploration as the populations of other regions of Earth, despite the fact that some regions in East Asia and South Asia had seafaring traditions for thousands of years.

If that is the case, it may result in most of the Earth people who move to colony planets not being East Asian or South Asian. And if possibly a large proportion of Starfleet is recruited from Earth colonists on distant planets, most of those colonial recruits to Starfleet would not be of East Asian or South Asian ancestry.

THREE:

Many planets in TOS have natives who look totally like Earth Humans despite the fact that there is no evidence that those planets were settled by Earth Humans after Earth discovered faster than light interstellar travel a little more than 200 years before TOS. In fact the Enterprise is sometimes the first Earth or Federation ship known to have visited such a planet.

So those human-looking natives seem at first sight to have originated on those planets by convergent evolution. In science fiction aliens who walk on two legs and have two arms and a head on top of their torsos are said to be humanoid. Andorians, Tellarites, Klingons, and Gorns are all humanoid. But in Star Trek the word humanoid seems to mean looking exactly like Earth Humans, though I call those aliens who look like Earth Humans exo-Humans..

In "The Paradise Syndrome" Earth plants are found on a distant planet, as well as people who look like American Indians. Later Spock studies the symbols found on a strange obelisk on the planet:

Thus it is possible that many or most of those humanoids or exo-Humans found on alien planets may be descended from Earth Humans brought to those planets by the Preservers.

Most of those humanoids or exo-Humans look like "white" or "Caucasian" or "European" Humans, no doubt because the majority of available actors in Los Angeles are more or less "white" or "Caucasian" or "European". So it is possible that for some unspecified reason the Preservers mostly took "white" or "Caucasian" or "European" people from Earth to seed on alien planets.

And if exo-Humans who look "white" or "Caucasian" or "European". are very common, there should be many planets with such exo-Humans in the Federation. So it is possible that a lot of the Federation citizens and Starfleet members seen are actually exo-Humans who look like Earth Humans, and look like "white" or "Caucasian" or "European" ones at that.

If the Preservers settled members of European cultures on alien planets, those transplanted people would probably retain their European cultures and languages and names at the times they were contracted and joined the Federation. Thus having a name in an Earth language need not prove that a Star Trek character is descended from Earth Humans and is not actually an exo-human descended from Earth Humans brought to his planet by the Preservers.

And if Earth is very important in the Federation, it may be common for exo-Humans to take Earth names. In E.E. Smith's Lensman series some aliens used Earth names. I remember a crime lord named Edmund Crowninshield, for example, and he didn't even look English, being a blue skinned Kalonian.

CONCLUSION:

So it is possible that some combination of the those three possibilities - and maybe others I didn't think of - is the in universe cause of the relative lack of East Asian and South Asian characters in various Star Trek productions.

 

I've assumed that they took the biggest hits from the nuclear exchanges of World War III and the atrocities of the Eugenics War. It's a terrible but also pretty workable reason why we see so few of them.

 

Oops! you replied to my comment while I was still working on it. If you go back to mt post number 58 a space or two above you will see that I expanded it. And one of the possible explanations I suggested was the same wartime slaughter and destruction as you suggested.

As for the continuity problems with James Bond, one possibly explanation would be that Bond was somehow connected to another famous character who first appeared in British made productions in 1963.