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If you don’t know the significance of this image, Google it.
James Bond fans are dedicated. They love agent 007. As a result, they react intensely even when there isn’t actual news.
On Jan. 16, the My Mom’s Basement podcast/YouTube channel featured an interview with Deadline entertainment reporter. Justin Kroll. He says he *predicts* that Amazon’s first Bond movie will begin casting in mid-2026, with filming starting by early 2027. (Go to the 21:30 mark of the YouTube video linked here.)
Predicting is a long way from actually *reporting* something is going to happen.
Poster for In Like Flint (1967), the sequel to Our Man Flint (1966)
By early 1966, the spycraze was well underway. 20th Century Fox unveiled its spy entry, Our Man Flint.
Derek Flint (James Coburn) had, shall we say, many abilities. He served with distinction during World War II. At the start of the story, Flint is living with *four* women. They all live in a luxury apartment.
That cozy arrangement is about to get upset.
Flint’s war superior, Kramden (Lee J. Cobb), is now head of Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage).
A band of renegade scientists, known as Galaxy, has found a way to control the weather. Naturally, a crisis ensues. The Western powers seek an operative who can oppose Galaxy. Their computers answer there is only one man — Derek Flint. Kramden is forced to approach Flint to bring him back into the fold.
Understandably, Flint declines. But then Galaxy tries to kill Flint but wounds Kramden instead. Flint saves Kramden. Flint has to go after Galaxy.
During a briefing, Kramden tries to give Flint a briefcase with multiple gadgets. Flint produces a lighter with more than 80 gadgets. Even more if you wish to light a cigar.
Obviously, all this wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. But it was elevated by two things: James Coburn’s performance as Flint and Jerry Goldsmith’s score.
Coburn doesn’t wink to the audience. He *is* Derek Flint. Meanwhile, Goldsmith’s music is superb.
The movie generated a 1967 sequel, In Like Flint. Both Coburn and Cobb returned. So did Goldsmith. The audience learns more about Flint’s abilities. He can talk to porpoises and has written books on the subject. The film even features a song by Goldsmith and Leslie Bricusse, Your Z.O.W.I.E. Face. In the climax, Flint goes into space.
There were plans for a third Flint adventure. It doesn’t happen. Still, Derek Flint remains one of the memorable entries in the spycraze.
When it comes to the James Bond film franchise, 2025 was the year of the earthquake (Amazon gained creative control from the Broccoli-Wilson family), followed by some aftershocks (the hiring of new producers, a director and a screenwriter).
We’re into 2026. Many questions remain.
What happens next (reality)?
New screenwriter Steven Knight needs to finish his first draft. “I can’t say anything apart from I’m having a fantastic time,” Knight has been quoted.
His hiring reflects a fresh start. From 1999 to 2021, the writing team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade scripted Bond film adventures, with contributions from other scribes (Bruce Feirstein, Paul Haggis, Peter Morgan, John Logan, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge among them).
Meanwhile, new Bond director Denis Villenuve has completed filming of a third Dune movie. Presumably, at some point, he will transition from Dune to Bond.
Then, there’s the big question: Which actor will be the new Bond? There may not be a lot known until Knight and Villeneuve make more progress.
What happens next (fantasy)?
British bookies will likely adjust their odds who the next Bond actor will be. British tabloids will jump on that. There will be stories with provocative headlines designed to get clicks. These stories will have only a glancing relation to reality. Remember The Sun’s love affair with Aaron Taylor-Johnson?
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Any last thoughts?
This is probably going to be more of a marathon than a sprint. Personally, I think the first Amazon Bond film is more likely for 2028 than earlier. But you never know for sure.
In the meantime, here are a couple of Bond fan videos on the subject. The first is from David Leigh of The James Bond Dossier. The second is from Analyze This, Mr. Bond.
Adam West and Burt Ward in a publicity still for Batman
On the night of Jan. 12, 1966, something hit television that it hadn’t seen before. Batman debuted on ABC in the U.S.
The network was No. 3 in the country. It usually trailed CBS and NBC. But the start of the 1965-66 season was particularly rough. The ABC schedule included The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which had been on the air since 1952, and The Donna Reed Show, which debuted in 1958. Executives of the network decided they had to shake things up.
ABC already was developing Batman for television. But the network accelerated Batman.
The project was assigned to 20th Century Fox and producer William Dozier. The latter, born in 1908, wasn’t into comic books. He was given a stack of Batman comic books to get up to speed.
Dozier and writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. decided to turn the whole thing into a comedy. Except, there would be no laugh track. Semple’s two-parter pilot script was based on Batman No. 171, though no credit was given. Frank Gorshin was cast as the Riddler.
Dozier cast Adam West and Burt Ward as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Dick Grayson/Robin. West had been around Hollywood for years. Ward was a newcomer. The producer said West grasped the idea from the start.
The screen tests by West and Ward incorporated scenes from Semple’s pilot script. In one test, Ward’s costume was pretty close to the final version. West’s was more crude compared to what TV viewers would see on the series.
Dozier got into the act. Semple’s script had a narrator. Dozier ended up taking on the role himself. The producer did not receive an on-screen credit as narrator. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Dozier said the narrator character was known internally as Desmond Doomsday.
For the pilot, Dozier cast veteran supporting actors Neil Hamilton (whose career went back to silent movies) as Commissioner Gordon, Alan Napier as Alfred, Stafford Repp as Chief O’Hara, and Madge Blake as Aunt Harriet.
When ABC picked up Batman as a series, villains had to be cast. Burgess Meredith as the Penguin and Cesar Romero as the Joker were second choices. In the CBC interview, Dozier counted himself lucky that the first choices (which he didn’t name) had taken a pass.
The first four two-parters were based on comic book stories. Again, the comic book creators received no credit. The series did give Bob Kane, then the official Batman creator, a credit. Since 2015, Bill Finger has been officially acknowledged as co-creator of the character.
Batman, at least initially, was a huge hit. On the night the premiere episode was shown, William Self (in an interview with the Archive of American Television), the head of Fox’s TV division, said he got a call on his unlisted home phone number. The caller asked if Batman was supposed to be funny.
“Yes, it’s supposed to be funny,” Self quoted himself as saying. In that case, the caller replied, it was a good show.
In the summer of 1966, Fox released a Batman feature film. It was quickly made and reached theaters in August.
Almost as quickly as Batman emerged, its popularity waned. The series was canceled in the spring of 1968. Since 1989, there have been a series of more serious Batman productions.
Still, you had to be there. In 1986, as a reporter for The Indianapolis Star, I interviewed both Adam West and Burt Ward. They were at a car show in Indianapolis, in costume. It’s something I won’t forget.
Here’s a promotional film (with Dozier doing the voiceover work) that ABC made ahead of the series debut:
Matt Helm and Gail Hendricks (Dean Martin and Stella Stevens) in Matt’s Mercury station wagon equipped with a bar.
The Spy Craze still had a strong head of steam going into 1966. However, there would not be a new James Bond film. You Only Live Twice would film from July through December but wouldn’t be released until 1967.
That meant other spy entries would have room to maneuver. Perhaps the biggest impact came from the new Matt Helm series, which debuted in 1966 with The Silencers.
Producer Irving Allen had once been the partner of Albert R. Broccoli, co-founder of Eon Productions, which had made four Bond films annually from 1962 through 1965. In 1957, Allen had a meeting with Ian Fleming. Allen told the author he didn’t care for the Bond novels. Obviously, the gathering didn’t go well.
Now, Allen looked for a property to get in on the spy game. He came across the Matt Helm novels of Donald Hamilton (1916-2006). The Helm books were very serious. They were a mix of Fleming (sometimes fantastic plots) and Mickey Spillane (first-person narrative, with a gritty feel).
The journey from books to screen took twists for Matt Helm. Eventually, Allen took on Dean Martin as a partner. Suddenly, the Helm on the screen was lighter — a lot lighter — from Hamilton’s original stories. Allen’s Meadway production company joined forces with Martin’s Claude production company.
The Silencers film was based on two Hamilton novels, Death of a Citizen (the first Helm book) and The Silencers (the fourth). Various screenwriters took a whirl. Oscar Saul received the screenplay credit although Herbert Baker got a “parodies by” credit.
The first Helm movie retained basic plot elements from the Hamilton novels. Yet, the production turned the movie into a spy version of Dino’s TV variety show.
The song “Everybody Loves Somebody” could even be heard in one sequence. The Martin version of Matt Helm incorporated Martin’s boozy playboy persona. In The Silencers, Dean Martin’s Matt Helm drove a station wagon. That was hardly a glamorous vehicle. Still, it was equipped with a bar. Stella Stevens, as the movie’s female lead, gets drunk while Matt is driving.
Even Hamilton, despite the major changes, found The Silencers to be entertaining.
“I found the movie of THE SILENCERS enjoyable even though the playboy character played by Dean Martin was pretty far from the grimmer character I’d visualized,” Hamilton wrote to a fan in 1991. The author didn’t like the later Helm movies as much.
Because he was a partner, Martin got 10% of the gross. As a result, Dino received more than $1 million from The Silencers. Sean Connery had gotten about $500,000 for Thunderball. No doubt the Scottish actor took notice.
Regardless, the Helm movies proved to be popular. Four would be made. The second, Murderers’ Row, came out before the end of 1966. Originally, the mega-spoof Casino Royale was to come out in late 1966. But the troubled production couldn’t meet that schedule. Columbia Pictures moved up Murderers’ Row. The spoof Casino Royale debuted in spring 1967, ahead of Eon’s You Only Live Twice.
Bruce Geller “cameo” as a dossier of an IMF operative passed over by original team leader Dan Briggs (Steven Hill).
This year marks the 60th anniversary of Mission: Impossible. The original 1966-73 television series has had multiple lives. There was a 1980s TV revival. And, from 1996 to 2025, there was a series of movies with Tom Cruise.
M:I began with an ambitious writer-producer, Bruce Geller.
Geller had penned scripts for shows such as Have Gun-Will Travel and The Rifleman. He became a producer as well, even collaborating with Sam Peckinpah in an episode of the anthology show The Dick Powell Theater.
Geller wanted to get into feature films. He viewed his Mission: Impossible pilot as a way to achieve that. Geller didn’t expect the pilot to sell. It was complicated. It would be hard to duplicate as a weekly series. However, once made, the pilot would be a major example of what Geller could do.
Then came the law of unintended consequences. CBS bought the pilot and ordered the series. For Desilu, it was one of two difficult series to produce. The other was Star Trek, ordered by NBC. Both shows debuted in the fall of 1966. M:I and Star Trek would be made in close proximity at Desilu.
One crew member, associate producer Robert H. Justman, worked on both pilots. Both Geller and Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry wanted Justman for series production. Justman went with Star Trek.
Regardless, Bruce Geller now had to churn out weekly Mission: Impossible adventures. He made a key hire, Joseph Gantman, as the day-to-day producer. It was Gantman who did the heavy lifting in developing a reliable supply of scripts.
Mission: Impossible was a difficult series to work on. The original star, Steven Hill as team leader Dan Briggs, for religious reasons, quit working on Friday afternoons. Scripts had to be revised. Martin Landau as disguise expert Rollin Hand, originally was intended to appear only occasionally. Soon, he was virtually a regular.
Eventually, Hill departed after the first season. Peter Graves came aboard in the second season as the new team leader, Jim Phelps. He’d remain through the original show as well as starring in the 1980s revival.
Geller devised visual flourishes. It was his hand that lit the fuse in the show’s main titles accompanied by Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme music. A photo of Geller, wearing sunglasses, was in an early episode as an operative Briggs decided wasn’t right for a mission.
M:I wore down behind-the-camera personnel.
Gantman left after the second season. Writers William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter took over at the start of the third season as the new producers. But they had conflicts with Geller and departed part of the way through the season. Others came in and out until the end of the original show. M:I was not a model of stability.
M:I wasn’t very stable in front of the camera, either. In the middle of the second season, Paramount’s then-parent company, Gulf + Western, bought Desilu. New Paramount executives wanted to curb M:I’s costs. That led to Martin Landau and three-time Emmy winner Barbara Bain leaving the show.
Executives later barred Bruce Geller from the lot. Geller would continue to be credited as creator and executive producer but would have no influence on later seasons.
The M:I cast became a revolving door, with various actors, including Leonard Nimoy, Sam Elliott, and Lynda Day George being cast as regulars. Greg Morris as gadget whiz Barney Collier and Peter Lupus as Willy Armitage ended up in all seven seasons. Producers had intended to phase Lupus out. But fans made known they wanted his Willy character to stay. So he did.
Regardless, M:I ended up being the longest-running U.S. spy show from the 1960s Spy Craze.
Later generations know M:I best from the Tom Cruise movies. But they wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for Bruce Geller, a creative dynamo.
It’s the end of another year. Here’s hoping for a great 2026 for readers of The Spy Command.
In 2026, we should get more news about the first James Bond movie under Amazon’s creative control. Do we find out the new Bond actor? Do we get a release date? We’ll see.
As Napoleon Solo reminds everyone, be sure to party carefully this New Year’s Eve.
In the waning days of 2025, there’s a debate about next year’s 007: First Light video game.
The MonsterVine website had a Dec. 22 post featuring an interview with Martin Emborg of IO Interactive, which is developing the new Bond video game.
There was this exchange:
MonsterVine: Bond is known for being a smooth talker and, at times, a womanizer. Will we be seeing this side of him?
Emborg: Yeah, you will. But obviously, as they were saying on stage before, the character Bond has evolved. So, he’s evolved through the decades, and obviously, we reflect modern values. So it’s not going to be your old school Bond, which would just be tone deaf in this day, right? He’s a modern guy.
Since that was posted, other outlets have jumped on the exchange. The FRVR website had a Dec. 29 post headlined “IO Interactive says ‘old school Bond’ would be ‘tone deaf’ today as 007 First Light moves the character towards more ‘modern values’”
In turn, there have been exchanges on social media. Old school Bond? Tone deaf Bond?
We’ll see how this goes. The new video game is scheduled to be released in late May, delayed from late March.
Fan fiction has existed for decades. In the early years, there were fanzines. More recently, fan fiction has been published online.
In many cases, fan fiction seeks to create ties from television episodes. Those episodes were made without any attempt to have such connections. The makers of the show were just trying to make production deadlines.
The original TV shows often were not broadcast in production order. The TV networks picked and choose what installments to show.
But fans can’t help themselves. There must be connections. In fan fiction, such connections are forged.
The connections take the form of puns, or expanded plot ideas based of episodes.
I don’t speak as a critic. Once upon a time, I did fan fiction stories based on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. I once did a fan fiction story that was a crossover with North by Northwest. Leo G. Carroll was in both, right?
In another story, a Rome school was named after Luciana Paluzzi. The actress was in both U.N.C.L.E. and Thunderball, right?
The original source material didn’t have an origin story? Fan fiction fills the void.
What’s more, there is part of fan fiction where, in the original source material, you had two straight characters. In the fan fiction version, they were gay. This genre is known as slash, as in Kirk/Spock from Star Trek.
As stated before, fan fiction today is mostly online. A footnote: Several years before I was contacted by an U.N.C.L.E. fan fiction reader. She wanted to know how to read my stories.
The short stories had migrated online. But I never put the novellas (zine-length stories) online. I said if she’d paid the mailing costs, I’d send them.
I received a lecture that it was my duty to put the long stories online so she could read them and not pay. Needless to say, I didn’t respond.
IO Interactive said this week its new James Bond video game will be delayed to May 27 from its original release date of March 27.
“007 First Light is our most ambitious project to date,” IO said on a post on X, formerly Twitter.
IO said the delay “allows us to ensure the experience meets the level of quality you players deserve on day one.”
Context: 007 First Light has been in the works for years. Even with the delayed release date, it will still be the first major 007 release since 2021’s No Time to Die.
A GoldenEye video game came out after the 1995 movie. It reached a new generation of fans. If done right, the new video game has the potential to do the same. We’ll see.
Regardless of the delay, the new video game will be out long before the first Bond movie made under Amazon creative control.
The Spy Command 