Roald Dahl is the Reason James Bond Movies Have Killer Piranhas and Volcano Bases
Dahl's screenplay for 1967's You Only Live Twice created the modern Bond movie, sending the franchise in a very bonkers direction.
Across his many works, beloved children’s author Roald Dahl does one thing exceptionally well—crafting bizarre and elaborate ways for his characters to die.
Dahl off’ed the two evil aunts in James and the Giant Peach by rolling the eponymous peach over top of them (while James and his animal friends cheer from inside the titular fruit). He spent most of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory documenting how Willy Wonka hoped to sugar murder the children he invited over for a business meeting by seizing on their moral failings.
If you want your characters to beef it uniquely, Dahl is the right man for the job. It shouldn’t surprise you, then, that Dahl is the reason why James Bond movies became as outlandish as they are.
Cue the Man-eating Piranhas
Dahl wrote the screenplay for 1967’s You Only Live Twice, a wild-ass movie from start to finish. Sean Connery’s Bond fakes his own death, adventures to Japan in search of a stolen American spacecraft, and foils a plot to start World War III between the Russians and the U.S. There’s also about 20 minutes where Connery has surgery to “look Japanese” for — reasons? It’s worse than it sounds. Moving on.
In a 1977 interview, Dahl told author Steven Jay Rubin that he had to toss most of Ian Fleming’s novel of You Only Live Twice to turn it into a movie. Outside of keeping Ernst Stavo Blofeld as a villain, a few minor characters, and ninjas, “I had nothing except a wonderful Ian Fleming title,” Dahl said.
As he crafted the script, Dahl played to his strengths. You Only Live Twice goes ham on creating strange ways for its characters meet their end—here’s an incomplete list of ways people are killed within just the first hour of the movie:
A henchwoman is thrown into a tank of hungry piranhas via a trap door inside what appears to be Spaceship Earth from EPCOT Center.
An astronaut is cut loose from his space capsule when another, larger space capsule comes up from behind and swallows up said capsule, cutting his tether in the process.
James Bond shoots down several helicopter gunships in a build-it-yourself gyrocopter that looked to have been purchased by your unmarried uncle from the back of a Popular Mechanics magazine. He uses, in no particular order, missiles, airborne mines with little tiny parachutes, a machine gun and an air-to-air flamethrower.
An ally of Bond’s is stabbed in the back mid-sentence through a paper wall. He even does the “I’m telling you something important, but right before I say it, I get stabbed and can’t speak” bit.
Such diversity! Such creativity! Dahl truly had a gift for creating elaborate murder scenarios. And yet, the creativity of this violence doesn’t hold a candle to his most inspired choice—THE SECRET VOLCANO BASE.
This Volcano Base is Everything You Could Ever Want
This is the first time a Bond villain had a proper evil lair. Dr. No had a nuclear facility that was basically just a factory near water. Largo in Thunderball got to have man-eating sharks in his pool, but beyond that, his base was just a house and a pretty standard boat.
With a big hat tip to production designer Ken Adam, You Only Live Twice gave Blofeld a whole volcano base, and it is exactly the secret volcano base you’d want it to be. It’s got it all—retractable roof. Monorail for easy movement. A control room with a monotone man tediously giving instructions. Repurposed golf carts. Henchman in brightly colored jumpsuits running hither and yon. Space for multiple rockets. Self-destruct button.
It hits all the items on your punch list. It is move-in ready. It is a steal at twice the price.
Do we need a helicopter? No. Would it be rad if we got a helicopter? Yes.
Dahl’s “just make it bigger and stranger” energy permeates every inch of this movie, even the parts he likely didn’t have much to do with. Check out this rooftop action sequence:
Watch closely. At one point, you can see Bond fighting three guys at once, and he’s swinging his arms with the precision of a child pretending to be a tornado. He’s standing a good three feet away from the henchmen, and yet SOMEHOW, he makes contact with them and sends them hurtling to the mat. And then he picks up a stick from nowhere, which he then throws SO HARD that he stops four more guys before he escapes.
Does filming this from a helicopter make the scene better? Not really. But is it super rad that someone said “let’s get a helicopter and watch James Bond fight from it!” 100%.
“A Million-Dollar Playpen”
You Only Live Twice did more than just “go off the rails.” It filled the train with lit fireworks and wild raccoons cranked on Adderall and sent that train careening into a canyon filled with gasoline. You don’t really know if anything has a broader purpose, but by golly it’s loud.
In his contemporaneous review of the movie for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert had this to say about You Only Live Twice:
”There is still the same Bond grin, still the cool humor under fire, still the slight element of satire. But when he puts on his cute little helmet and is strapped into his helicopter, somehow the whole illusion falls apart and what we're left with is a million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.”
With the benefit of hindsight, this “nothing” is still entertaining as hell, and would become the prevailing motivation of Bond movies for several decades. They become explodey mish-mashes, all bursting at the seams with gadgets and bad jokes and increasingly elaborate stunts.
They didn’t have to do more than be million-dollar playpens, because that’s good enough. And it’s Dahl who unlocked this potential.