A guy on FB who says he works on the He-Man movies at Pinewood also said he had heard the title of the next movie would be COMMANDER JAMAICA while others have said that’s just a working title.
I was intrigued to learn that as a title Commander Jamaica was dreamed up by Ian Fleming. Can anyone confirm this? What was Commander Jamaica exactly? I have a feeling it could have been a title for the Bond movie screenplay Fleming worked with Kevin McClory on before he changed it to Thunderball. Or maybe it was a title Fleming had earmarked for a future Bond novel further down the line.
I’m not sure how I feel about Commander Jamaica as a title tbh but I lean towards the negative. It sounds more like a title for a 30s movie serial or an 80s Saturday morning cartoon than a title for a Bond movie.
Captain Jamaica was a 1950s pitch by tv producer Henry Morgenthau III to an American spy action adventure set on Jamaica. A mutual friend of Morgenthau and Fleming made the connection and subsequently the project turned into Commander Jamaica. The protagonist was to live on his cabin cruiser and posing as treasure hunter while actually working for various US/UK spy agencies. A bit of a Bruce Wayne/Batman persona.
Fleming’s input changed some of the initial setup, gave the hero the name James Gunn and would introduce many elements of what would later turn into Doctor No. The tv project would not be picked up and Fleming used this material, uncontested, for his book.
Highly unlikely BOND 26 will actually be going there.
It was actually an attempt at a spy show before Bond was the default template and some of those emphasised the cover idea more than others - think I Spy or It Takes A Thief where the assignments happen within the tennis player/playboy cover of its protagonists. Difficult to say how this might have played out since it died at the pitch/outline stage.
Originally it was to be an American secret agent operating on Jamaica, so at least some kind of cover was a reasonable element. That agent was also to be a former US ace pilot KIA on Jamaica who actually survived and worked undercover since, supposedly a myth with the natives. So there was an element of The Phantom and The Lone Ranger, too. The latter tv show was even supposed to be a target audience for, then, Captain Jamaica.
I think I remember reading somewhere about the protagonist getting his orders via his yacht’s tannoy system from a never-seen boss/admiral, so the show might have beat Charlie’s Angels and Magnum P.I. to that particular mystery element. That said, it was probably not really focused as a show until Fleming introduced the need for a good villain in an overarching storyline about rocket toppling. No way of telling whether that would have carried the show longer than a season.