Dressing as a priest. If nothing else, the electronic dog is naturally in Q’s wheelhouse. But dressing as a priest to give 007 some info. Was everyone else in MI6 on holiday?
Unless of course, Q volunteered, seeing the whole thing as a chance to sate his natural desire to dump the tweed suit and wear a robe. Q had, from his time as child, always wanted to wear a robe as his daily wear, and had found the civil service uniform of brogues and three-piece suits restricting. He had longed for the freedom of shawls, cloaks, togas, and saris, much to the dismay of his neighbours in the village of Lower Ramsbottom…….(ok, enough)
I know that, for good reason, people deride the Scooby-Doo gang approach of the recent Bond films with all the back-office types having prominently meaningless agency, but the 1980s Bonds really do establish the rot with Q popping up in Greece for absolutely no reason, India for marginal reasons but he doesn’t really need to be there, San Francisco for no reason, Austria for marginal reasons at best but again, doesn’t really need to be there and then basically being 5th lead in Licence to Kill.
Joke was done by about 1965; no wonder the series was in decline.
Having Q stumble about the location in early films with some kind of equipment - Geiger watch, mini-attack gyrocopter - may just about be feasible in some we-have-nobody-else-for-this-stuff way. The worse offender - to me - would be M with his desk in a submarine, an off-kilter shipwreck, a pyramid tomb or aboard a C-130 payload deck (with some government documents turning into loose-leaf confetti in the process). Who signed off on that at No 11???
In fairness it was original a Bond briefing to M on location scene and with Bernard Lee not feeling well enough anymore to do his scenes, they changed it at the last moment in a Q scene.
But yeah, watching this movie you immediately think why did Bond not ask this to Columbo in the first place?
Not so much stupid as Qpid (and not in the romantic sense, unless you have a thing for tweed and dentures).
Which is the greater waste of budget, be it fictional government budget or the one for the film which could have been spent on, I dunno, more explosions, another do-over of the script or much clearer cue cards?
GoldenEye - airbag telephone kiosk thing that someone in Q’s lair thinks is real (why?)
GoldenEye - parachute device for slowing down a notoriously underpowered car, even with its five forward gears (five? FIVE? ooh!)
The airbag thing fits right in with the lab‘s other waste of time which Q just develops to be amused and use up his budget (we all know that saving money will only lead to smaller budgets for next year).
But the parachute for the car seems like Spinal Tap‘s amp, showing off like a schoolyard bully, this time not saying „this goes to 11“ but instead „only parachutes can slow me down“ (because I can’t drive and did not learn to step on the brake pedal).
At least theoretically the braking parachute might serve some purpose by shielding the car from enemy action from the rear (by some nano-kevlar material-mumbojumbo) and subsequently releasing it onto a purchase vehicle. You could have some fun with a stunt sequence there, provided the budget lets you have it.
The phone booth is really only good for pranks on new interns (quickly turning into former interns who finally figured out what the NDA on top of the Official Secrets Act was about). It is, however, a design currently tested by an allied government that doesn’t want to be named, for purposes of whistleblower ‘protection’…
I’m going with the parachute - both a waste of time in the film and a waste of time for the film. Basically - we thought up a cool stunt with a car and parachute but for whatever reason couldn’t get it done. But we’ll show you anyway, just to prove that we were full of great ideas for this film. And hey, this new Bond is different, because in the old ones, we would’ve seen a cool gadget and then seen it used.
The kiosk we know is asinine, and no one is leaving the cinema thinking “dang, wish we’d seen that phone box in action.”
Weirdly, though, I remember audiences laughing at the Q silliness back then, and, yes, I laughed along. This was the mindset back then: we don’t expect really useful gadgets, just a parade of absurdity. Please, top the last film´s inventions, no matter what.
There is als a scene in Golden Gun when Bond asks “What the hell is Lazar?” And then Q answers “Not what, but who!” “The chap who makes the bullet, 007!” But between this question and answere you can see in the background a couple of guys almost doing something scientific, but at the end of the day… they just blow up the wall! If you concentrate on those guys (in white lab coats ofcourse) it is actualy very funny, because I believe it is just a lot of nonsense.
No, no! That’s not what you have to think about this. The Bondteam, director, productiondesigner etc, want you to think that when he had so much coffee to drink, he must be there for hours planning and inventing all kinds of brilliant stuff. What a great guy who takes his work serious!
The parachute bit does serve a useful purpose though: it provides the only mildly interesting moment for a car which does absolutely nothing on the actual mission. Unless you count cleverly disguising a theoretically glamorous superspy as a garden variety yuppie commuter.
