superspy Tagged Articles at Cinematical

One more day until Casino Royale hits the theaters. Are you excited about it yet? Have you been following all of the Bond coverage and pretending that you're a superspy? I've personally had the Goldfinger theme song stuck in my head for days. At first, it made small errands (like going to the post office) fun and exciting. I'd pretend I was on a secret mission, and that the stamp on my letter contained a secret microdot that had to get to New York by Saturday. After that was another death-defying mission at the grocery store (plans for the enemy's HQ hidden in the canned vegetables). However, at this point I'm going a bit mental. Get out of my head, Shirley Bassey!

Hopefully my mental slippage won't be too obvious as we immerse ourselves in Part Two of the History of Bond Films. If you missed the first part, you can catch up quickly and be ready for Casino Royale by Friday. Make it your mission, in fact. "Gooollllldifing ... " er, sorry.

Onwards through the doors of MI6 and into Bond history we go -- just don't call me Moneypenny.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock or working on an off-world colony for the past several months, then you know that the 21st James Bond film, Casino Royale, will be hitting theaters this Friday. It promises all the explosions, car chases, fistfights and gunplay that you've come to expect from a Bond film, and an even more emotional Bond, which we might have to get used to.

In preparation for Friday, we're summing up all of the previous Bond movies by capsulizing the plots and picking out our key favorite moments. Oh, who am I kidding, these are my favorite Bond memories. I grew up on these films, reading the novels, playing the role-playing game, obsessively reading the Q Branch Manual to find out about Bond's gadgets. I also must have played GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 a trillion times, so I like to consider myself somewhat of a Bond-o-phile. Roger Moore was the reigning 007 when I was growing up, but I watched the Sean Connery Bond films on tape, and was sold on his coolness vs. Moore's. This led to an enormous rift between me and my best friend, who idolized Moore (and his dad kind of looked like him). Although we both agree that the latest Bond films are a lot of fun, I think we still want to butt heads over who is the best Bond.

Luckily, you don't have to have seen any of the previous Bond films to "get" the next one, but this little history can help you appreciate all of the effort that has gone into the series. We're serving it up to you shaken, of course ... never stirred.

If you haven't seen any or all of the previous 20 Bond films, then you can catch yourself up by watching the trailers for all of the movies. Extremely enterprising YouTube user famouswillie (and other folks with an extraordinary amount of free time on their hands) have made us very happy Cinemites by doing the tedious uploading work for us.

After the jump check out the trailer for every Bond film up through Casino Royale, and some bonus video treats at the very bottom of the list.

These trailers also serve as a sort of visual history of film. It's especially eye-opening to contrast the Dr. No trailer with the one for Casino Royale. We certainly have come a long way, Mr. Bond.