The Day James Bond Jumped a River, Boy!

As you've probably heard... it made all the papers, after all... I've been watching the James Bond movies w/ Sara (a friend from Nicola's) this summer. 2 nights ago, we had a viewing of The Man w/ the Golden Gun. I dig Christopher Lee, I dig those tall islands in Phang Nga Bay, & I dig supernumerary nipples, so this movie is obviously high on my list of fav Bond films. I mean, come on, 2 out of 3 would be sweet... but all in one movie three? Almost heaven!

The thing is that there's a scene that almost... not quite, but almost... pushes the movie over the edge. Bond is chasing Scaramanga (Lee's character) & needs a car. He runs into a dealership and steals an AMC off the show-floor. The sheriff, J. W. Pepper, from Live & Let Die happens to be looking @ the car & sitting in the passenger seat. (Why he's considering buying an AMC in Phuket is never explained). Bond jumps in the driver's seat & takes off after Scaramanga. When they realize they're on the wrong side of a river, there's only one option: jump it from a dilapidated wooden bridge while doing a corkscrew/barrel roll thing. It's pretty beautiful... & it might have been an influence on The Dukes of Hazzard.The thing is that this begs the question: "Did James Bond 'Jump the Shark' 4 years before Fonzie?" Of course, the phrase "Jump the Shark" jumped the shark years ago, but this is important, so bear w/ me. You see, while we were watching the film, Hub was showing all 3 parts of the Happy Days shark jump episode. Of course, since I was thinking ahead, I recorded it for later. I watched it yesterday morning, & it turns out, the episode holds up pretty well. Aside from the fact that an enormous shark is being kept in a little pen right where everyone is swimming/surfing/water-skiing, when viewed in its entirety, one realizes that it's actually better than a lot of Happy Days episodes. And Henry Winkler seems to do a lot of his own skiing.To top it all off, this has all happened in the middle of what a million facebook posts seem to suggest is Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Sweet, sweet synchronicity!