From Russia With Love started off with Bond creeping around a hedge maze in sequence that provided both background and foreshadowing but neither in such an amount that it couldn’t have been achieved in some other way. The one and two-scene sequences which followed in Goldfinger and Thunderball had nothing to do with the plots of those films and appeared to do little but celebrate Bond’s style and skill while providing a touch of action to spice things up. It was scenes like these – coming at the height of 1960s “Bondmania” – that indelibly etched the teaser sequence on a generation of fans.
In later films, the balance of content shifted. The teaser sequence was no longer for mere entertainment, but rather told some of the story – sometimes a great deal of the story. First we had the three-scene device of You Only Live Twice which set-up the entire plot of the film. The teaser sequence was used to introduce the new Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and it was used to wrap up plot threads in the next film, Diamonds Are Forever.
The storytelling trend reached its peak in the next two films – Live and Let Die and The Man with The Golden Gun. So much so, in fact, that there wasn’t room left for James Bond himself. The former film had three scenes which covered a great deal of ground in telling the plot, and the latter film had an extended sequence which introduced the villain, the henchman, and the girl.
Things began to change with the next film. Despite having the highest scene count of any teaser sequence, The Spy Who Loved Me marked a gradual shift back to the irrelevant, action-driven sequences of the early films. It was used to set-up the revenge sub-plot of Bond’s Russian counterpart and foreshadow the master scheme of the major villain, but the part everyone remembers is the stunt – Bond’s ski-borne flight off a cliff that had nothing to do with the film, but existed solely to leave the audience in slack-jawed disbelief.
From there, the sequences beefed up on action and cut back on story-telling. After a quick plot-driven scene in Moonraker, we watched Bond jump out of a plane with no parachute. How did he get in the plane? Where was he going? Who was trying to kill him? Nothing was explained and no one seemed to care. The teaser sequence had returned to its origin – it was an excuse to throw Bond in harm’s way and watch him overcome the circumstances.
Moonraker was the last sequence with more than one scene. In For Your Eyes Only, Bond was walking on the skid of a helicopter in flight, and Octopussy had him dodging heat-seeking missiles in a miniature jet – neither had anything to do with the rest of those films.
Subsequent films introduced the current era: the flimsiest thread of plot combined with a one-scene action sequence that’s sometimes the highlight of the movie. A View to a Kill gave us another ski chase wrapped around the search for a microchip relevant to the plot. The Living Daylights introduced us to the term “Smiert Spionam” during a training assault on Gibraltar. The teaser sequence for both Licence to Kill and GoldenEye brought Bond face to face with the major villain. Finally, Tomorrow Never Dies introduced us to a mysterious red box during a rip-roaring encounter high in the mountains.
Notably, the teaser sequences are getting longer. While From Russia With Love was a scant two-and-a-half minutes, subsequent teasers averaged four to five minutes through Live and Let Die. After that, they stayed on the high side of five minutes, sometimes ballooning to seven-and-a-half minutes or more. Licence to Kill broke the eight minute mark at 8:15, and GoldenEye was only a few seconds short of ten full minutes. More and more, it seems, the teaser is becoming the highlight of the film.
The Good, the Bad, and the Penalty-Free
But what makes a “good” teaser sequence? Any answer is obviously subjective. While some sequences stand out from others, three things seem to have become recurring themes:
First, action has become par for the course. Live and Let Die remains the only teaser without an action sequence of some kind. The action has kept pace with contemporary cinema, and scenes like the fight in Thunderball, which seems tame in retrospect, have evolved into action blockbusters like the assaults on Gibraltar in The Living Daylights and the chemical weapons plant in GoldenEye. More often than not, the sequences contain large-scale or gimmicky stunts that wouldn’t fit anywhere else in the film – the Acrostar sequence from Octopussy, the bungee jump from GoldenEye, and the cliff leap from The Spy Who Loved Me, among others.
Second, as mentioned earlier, the sequences are used to set up the plot – more so in the earlier films than today. The method is subtle – bits and pieces that make little sense before the film starts are fully explained later on. Of late, the links to the plot have been extremely thin – nothing is revealed in the teaser sequence that couldn’t be handled in a minute or two anywhere else in the film. In fact, it sometimes seems as though the plot details in the teaser are present simply so the sequence makes sense. Audiences don’t like irrelevancy, and they may wonder why exactly Bond was fighting in the Khyber Pass and what that has to do with a media party in Hamburg. Thus, a complete reversal has taken place – the teaser sequence no longer sets up the plot as much as the plot is used to justify the teaser sequence.
Finally, there seems to be a welcome abundance of Bond’s personal style in these scenes. One-liners abound, and we get witty moments like the tuxedo under the wet suit in Goldfinger and the exchange with the lonely woman on the yacht in The Living Daylights. These are bits that would seem out of place in any other location in the film.
This begs a question: are the teaser sequences free from the dramatic constraints imposed on the rest of the film? Many moments seem to work in the teaser sequences where they wouldn’t by the time the film gets wrapped up in the plot. The Beach Boys music while Bond snowboards down the mountain in A View to a Kill is a perfect example. Though many fans cringe at the memory, the sequence went over well with the general public. But would it have been the same if the sequence was integral to the plot? If the world hung in the balance and this scene was the culmination of two hours worth of storytelling, you’d have to wonder if the audience wouldn’t be rolling their collective eyes in disgust. (Some did anyway, but t_hat’s another point entirely.) Other examples of this are Lazenby talking directly to the camera in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Jaws flapping his arms in an attempt to fly in Moonraker.
In a way, the teaser sequences have become penalty-free zones, where even more unrealistic things can happen than in the film proper. They are moments unconstrained by plot or character where screenwriters can get all their James Bond fantasies out without damaging the main storyline or making it do backflips to accommodate a situation they’re just dying to see on the screen.
As a result, the teaser sequences have provided us with a few flashes of questionable farce but also countless moments of pure Bond. Next time you watch a retrospective of clips from the eighteen films, count how many came from the beginnings of those films. You’re bound to see Bond shed his wetsuit for a tuxedo, take a flight off a cliff with a Union Jack parachute, or bungee jump into harm’s way.