Sunday, August 21, 2016

Bond In Motion

So a few weeks ago, I visited Great Britain for the first time. We were meeting a cruise and had only a day and a half in London to do some sightseeing. When looking on-line to find places to visit, my wife came across the page for the London Film Museum. Their current exhibit is a collection of vehicles on loan from EON Productions, that have been used in the making of James Bond films for the past fifty three years. This was easy, count me in.

 The museum was at one time known as the British Museum of Transportation, so when we directed the cab driver to the location we wanted, that's the way he referred to it. From the plaque above you can see it has in fact been re-christened.













The exterior is really just a storefront size space, you could easily miss it if you were not looking for the attraction, although like most tourist based locations, there is a barker out front occasionally, passing out flyers and encouraging pedestrians to enter.





We did not need the encouragement we had already purchased our tickets weeks before on-line. Actually arriving though got me all revved up again.As we entered the premises there is a large description on the wall of what the exhibit consists of.


The Upper mezzanine had a series of storyboards and a couple of props from early Bond Films, that's where we started our visit after a ride in a small elevator.






We tried to look more like tourists but without putting on an Aloha shirt and a straw hat, I don't think we could do a better job. 

When we arrived on the lower level, the Vehicle displays began. In the interest of brevity, I will limit the photos to one per film, but believe me, I an loaded for bear on this trip.



Goldfinger's Yellow Rolls Royce.











The Rolls used in "A View to a Kill", it was actually Cubby Broccoli's personal car that he lent to the production.




Dolores gives some perspective to the mini jet featured in the opening of "Octopussy".











For an invisible car, it was pretty easy to see this Aston martin from "Die Another Day".











Tracy's Thunderbird from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".




The speedboat from "Live and Let Die".












The Lotus that doubles as a submarine in "The Spy Who Loved Me". 








The DB5 from Goldfinger and Skyfall.



The AMC spinning Hornet from
"The Man with the Golden Gun".










The amazing reversible Mustang from "Diamonds are Forever".










An Aston Martin with skis, from "The Living Daylights"




And this is SPECTRE's Rolls Royce, that delivers Bond and Madeline to Blofeld. 
















There are many more images to share, I'm working on a video to post, but for now, eat your hearts out all you Bond fans who can't make it to London. Maybe it will tour and then you can geek out like I did.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh my God, you lucky sonofabitch!! 😮😮😮

That's awesome, that is seriously awesome.

I saw all the Batmobiles to date together in one place at Comic-Con once, and it's burned into my memory.

This will be for you, you'll never forget it.

I actually saw a couple of Bond cars at SDCC, but NOTHING like this!! Did they play that stupid slide whistle at the Hornet display? Lol

Thanks for sharing, what an awesome trip!!

Richard Kirkham said...

Yeah, they had the clip looped and it had the soundtrack. I hate that stupid whistle. This is a small portion of how great it was. There are dozens of other images yet to come. Keep your fingers crossed for this to make its way across the sea.