Moonraker's bracegate: Did Dolly wear braces?

Films
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Two years ago the strangest debate erupted: did Dolly have braces when she and Jaws first meet?

Some fans say she did and swear they remember them as clear as day. They believe EON airbushed the braces out of all home video releases so that people won’t think she’s underage. Or - I kid you not - in some alternate universe she did have braces and people’s memories have been carried over due to the space-time continuum. This chap, for example, has some theories.

No less than the BBC says she did: “Dolly, a small, pig-tailed blonde with braces, comically played by Blanch [sic] Ravalec.” Not much for spelling, is the old Beeb?

One chap with 15 years professional digital graphics experience has a dedicated website complete with enlarged photos like it’s the Zapruder film. Link #1 and link #2.

Others say she never wore braces. Trick of the mind. The Mandela Effect (“refers to a phenomenon in which a large number of people share false memories of past events”).

Some people claim that the filmmakers had intended to give Dolly braces, but dispensed with the idea when filming the scene. Some chap named Laurent - possibly the film historian and documentary filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau - texted the actress. For those who don’t speak French, the actress says that not only did she not wear braces, the idea was never even discussed (considered). https://imgur.com/09BpNRn

A collector who claims to own an old 35mm print of the film says there are no braces. Link.

Yet a poll shows almost half of people believe she not only wore braces, but that the braces were the reason Jaws went all googly-eyed on her, and not over her gawky pigtails or gawkier still glasses or that bleeding Tchaikovsky blaring his Romeo and Juliet love music through our earholes presumably to induce the Cupid’s arrow effect by proxy.

At some point Richard Kiel did a commercial for Sampo mini Visa card. Sure enough, a female cashier with braces takes a fancy to him. Link.

Don’t believe this is such a big deal? Google the words Dolly and braces, see what it gets you.

Or better yet, take a look see at how many threads the fine folks at reddit have started. Link.

Lots of youtube video posts too. Link.

What say the rest of you?

The old CBn board briefly discussed this in 2004. Link.

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Moonraker and it’s impact :clap::clap::clap:

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Dolly never wore braces. People who claim she did have false memories.

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Much like the lyrics to the theme tune of kids series “Catch the pigeon”

Which in actuality is called “Stop the Pigeon”

Always has been, but people swear it’s called catch the pigeon and the song has the lyrics “Catch the pigeon” in it. As you can see, not true.

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:slight_smile: Beat me to it. Watching this as a 14-year-old in the theater, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t looking at her teeth. Although I must confess at some point in the years that followed the “braces” idea did get planted in my head. Maybe a poor image on my old standard-def TV when it aired on ABC? Or maybe something I read somewhere?

There’s a good possibility the idea could’ve been planted by some other kid. I vaguely remember a kid recounting an exchange of dialog between Bond and Holly that he swore was in the film, but wasn’t. I later realized it was in Wood’s novelization. The most egregious example was when a kid swore up and down that when the crushed car in GF is loaded into the bed of Oddjob’s pickup truck, Mr Solo’s blood is oozing from it. Since I only had a black and white TV set, it was many years before I realized that kid was full of it.

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It’s an assumption. You see pigtails and glasses and your memory automatically adds braces to ‘complete’ the mental picture - hence the Mandela effect.
There was a guy in my 6th grade class who thought he was perfect and any girl who didn’t measure up to his ‘standards’ of physical perfection could only wish he’d ignore her. Instead he would taunt the girls with glasses, pigtails and braces and call them ugly. In a cartoon of one of his targets he drew only those features, plus a few non-existent warts.
I’ve always hoped he’d see one of his former targets again - sans face furniture - and, not recognizing her, try to chat her up, only to be left nonplussed when she tells him to go piss up a rope.

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Bring Dolly back for Bond 25: she, as Bloferhauser’s bullying elder sister, was in fact the author of Bond’s pain, in revenge for Bond’s merciless tormenting of her orthodontic treatment as a young girl.

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I remember reading some stuff about this a few years ago. I always thought she had braces. Pretty wild what the mind can do.

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I too believed I had seen braces, but on a re-viewing two days ago, there was nary a bit of metal to be seen.

The film itself is still grand–Moore acts less than he did in TSWLM and is the smooth central element in a lush movie machine. Drax might be my favorite villain and Lois Childs is a great Bond girl. The whole concoction goes down like a champagne cocktail.

The great Tom Allen wrote about the film that it is “a conceit of pure reflex action and the centerpiece symbol of a fully streamlined catalytic formula… it is as stylized as animation, and as choreographed as musical comedy… The people who made this impudent, wry, and exhilarating movie completely left out the '70s and its predominating motif of realism. Moonraker is the most expensive avant-garde movie since Barry Lyndon.”

No wonder that they had to reboot with FYEO. They only could have repeated MOONRAKER, but never topped it.

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