Why no reboots until now?

[Christopher]

Comic book time is a very good analogy. The casting changes in the role of James Bond can simply be treated as analogous to the changes in the way, say, Peter Parker was drawn by Steve Ditko, John Romita Sr., Ross Andru, JR Jr., Humberto Ramos, etc. Different visual interpretations of the same character.

 

[Vestboy]

TNG bears zero resemblance to TOS either thematically or in execution.

How so? Since both are science fiction series about a starship flying around in space.

Thematically.

And in execution.

TOS was about a crew of space explorers, who happened to be from a progressive, unified civilization.

TNG was about a crew from a progressive, unified civilization, who happened to be space explorers.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ Even the codename thing doesn't really hold up. For Your Eyes Only has Bond visiting the grave of his wife (killed in On Her Majesty's Secret Service). In Die Another Day, Bond is in the Q-Cave looking over all the old hardware, and he even asks "Does this still work?" before flipping the switch on the jet pack. And so on, the obvious implication being that Connery through Brosnan were all meant to be the same person, even if said person lived in "comic book time" with respect to the passage of time.

Yeah, I've always taken it that Connery Bond right through to Brosnan Bond are one and the same. I just imagine that Brosnan Bond made jokes about Bros or New Kids on The Block, rather than the Beatles, when he battled Goldfinger. But snippets like Lazenby moaning 'This never happened the other fella' are fun if you want to explore the other theory.

The Craig movies are the first ones where you definitely have to say that he isn't the same character from the other 20-odd movies, but I still don't buy the 'one codename, different spies' theory. Even the Judi Dench thing doesn't really hold up - she's back as M but her assistant, Tanner, is played by Michael Kitchen in the Brosnan movies and by Rory Kinnear in the Craig ones. Seems unlikely that MI6 passes on codenames for behind-the-scenes civil servants, doesn't it?!

It's amazing the cartwheels we fans will put ourselves through to make stuff like this fit.

Amen, he said, spinning in said contortionist position ...