This is too hard.
Both cannot be excised.
Well, they can. But I can’t do it. Don’t want to. Please, don’t ask this of me. I will excise everything else, I promise.
Okay, GF then. Although it was setting the template, the Lotus one is just more fun.
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“Stop, stop, it isn’t finished!” is a broad statement and could feasibly apply to the open cockpit.
I think Bond would be negligent to run through the building without his gun drawn in the moment of a major terror attack. We know there’s nobody inside posing a threat, but he doesn’t.
I’ll give you that. It’s pure comic book to watch like that out in the open, with a machine gun attached to your boat. It just wouldn’t happen, and we have the very movie imagery of the laser sights. That all said, Bond isn’t reality, even in his most serious incarnations. It’s just a question of how much reality we’re comfortable stretching.
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If the Lotus goes it’s only one - albeit iconic - moment scratched from a series that often didn’t have trick car chases. It could either be replaced by some other car - MG, Austin Healey, Triumph even a Bentley - or the film would work entirely without it.
If the Aston goes it changes everything. The whole tone of the film, possibly the entire series might be affected. Closer to Fleming, still bizarre and fantastic, but without the cartoon elements. Generations of kids wouldn’t grow up with Corgie DB5s in their sandboxes, wouldn’t watch Bond at Christmas on the telly.
The films, if they still ran, possibly wouldn’t be extended commercials for an almost exclusively Bond-centred derelict car manufacturer praying for a new production to bail them out. An army of Chinese toy model makers wouldn’t exist. Quite possibly YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE would have been the last film, a moderately successful character study shot in 1969 after the Spectre trilogy was filmed with Connery in the original book order and mostly faithful to their source material. After which Connery goes on to star in a series of Flashman adaptations.
The spy craze might not have happened in the way it did, or with another protagonist. Huge sums of money would have been directed into other projects, other stars. It might result in a world largely unrecognisable to us.
Let’s change everything.
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Right.
Wait, what?
Funny what this “death match” atmosphere does to us. Here I am pulling hair out over this sadistic Sophie’s Choice that Jim’s concocted while on the other end of the pendulum swing, Dustin is ready to gleefully lay waste to the entire history of the franchise, if not civilization itself. What have you unleashed in us, Jim? It’s a slippery slope; it starts with “let’s just break a couple of little things” and ends as Lord of the Flies-level anarchy.
Anyway, to say I adore TWSLM would be putting it mildly, and since childhood I have harbored an heretical love of the Lotus Esprit over the DB5…a position bolstered in recent years by the fact that the Aston keeps on appearing, as Drax would say, “with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.”
Cutting the chase from “Spy” is like cutting off one of my limbs. BUT…Dustin is correct that history is a thread that, if broken, impacts all things downthread. Earlier I defended the PTS from “Spy” as the inspiration for all the great, stunt-based PTS’es that followed, and so by my own logic, I can’t cut the Aston Martin chase. If it goes, if we don’t see its gadgets in action, if we don’t get that payoff of the ejector seat Q promised, then we won’t get the Lotus, anyway. We won’t get Little Nellie OR Wet Nellie. We won’t get the jetpack or the Acrostar jet or the Vantage. And beyond just the vehicles, we won’t have the sense of wild, OTT fun that made me fall for the series in the first place.
So it is that with mixed emotions I volunteer to go through the Guardian of Forever to sacrifice my true love in the interests of preserving the timeline, even as Dustin stands poised to launch an RPG through the portal to destroy reality as we know it. Wish me luck.
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Torn on this one. Disposing of the Aston chase loses one Machine-Gun Granny; losing the Lotus deprives one of the emerging from the sea and disposing of the fish. Ah, flip a coin but I do see the potential in the opportunity to wipe and change everything, persuasively argued.
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Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Ploppenheimer, ‘tis me.
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Having in just the first week of this edition of Sideswipes (thank you Jim it’s always the best!) both used and ignored the whole “it’s the first so” reasoning, I am going to remove that from my logical progression. For this moment…
Aston goes, Lotus stays. The latter is just more, much more (I’m dumping the second O so as not to fight with autocorrect) - more exciting, more polished, more funny(ier), more modern. And one more passenger. Which plays entirely to Sir Rog’s strength and makes the sequence more dynamic. From smiling at Caroline Munro to built-in reaction shots, and the perfect Bond-line which would have fit every single lead “Can you swim?” it’s just, more, much more.
Other than the “first” and “ejector seat” what is the Aston chase really? That cranking thing again, traditional EON back projection, and this awful feeling that we’re just driving around the backlot at Pinewood. Which we are. Gun-toting grandma aside, it’s less, not more. Much less not more.
Anyway, if first is always best, then the last half-decade of my life have been an entire waste since DN…
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My simple solution: there’s no compulsary vote here.
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As a sequence the Lotus one is better, it’s shot better and drives the narrative, GF the Aston chase wasn’t necessary as Bond was already caught, and could move straight to laser castration
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I also think the Lotus chase is better, and it’s rough to vote against it. However the DB5 sequence is simply more important in terms of the overall franchise that I think it has to stay.
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On a side note, this is the core dilemma, but also the core thrill of every time travel story worth its salt: What would we change and how would our world - or at least our lives - look if we had the chance to do it?
Of course nobody would be aware history was changed or have the slightest idea things were off. They wouldn’t even be ‘off’ since in such a changed world they always unfolded in that manner. Who is even to say our own isn’t already such a changed timeline? One could never say for sure. 
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This is an erudite group that can make references all over the place, and understands time travel stories.
Pink ties for everyone!!
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I shudder to think what Jim will demand from us tomorrow…
And I love that.
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8 June
Possibly less soul-wrenching than yesterday in the below, but sometimes the little people have to suffer. Or, if not “have to”, then “I want them to”.
Vote one out. It’s the kind thing to do.
- OHMSS bell room fight
- The Man with the Golden Gun changing room fight
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voters
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Jim, that Astin Martin chase vs. Lotus chase was just plain cruel and everybody gave good reasons for their choice. I kept kept the Lotus chase because it’s better done but Dustin’s iconography argument for the DB5 is spot on and makes me wonder if I made the right choice.
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Good. One has to be cruel to be kind. Or fined.
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Your webellion is noted, O unwise youngster.
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Regarding which fight to expel, I have to go with the OHMSS bell room fight. It’s good as well as comically ironic with Bond trying to stay hidden from Irma Bunt and her men only to have he and Braun keep hitting the noisy bells revealing his position. However, I don’t think it’s as good as TMWTGG’s fight. That is arguably Roger Moore’s best hand-to-hand fight in the series. Plus, as others have pointed out in other Sideswipes, he gets the valuable bullet clue in that scene to advance the plot, whereas, in OHMSS, the bell room fight could be excised, and it affects virtually nothing in that film.
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The changing room fight stays. Its quintissential Sir Rog who wasnt the most natural of brawlers but noone did getting punched as well as him. All the others have their “throwing a punch” face but Sir Rog has that wonderful slightly wide-eyed look of a man knowing he’s about take one.
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