Summary
- Hollywood embraced space movies post-Star Wars, leading to Moonraker's absurd space adventure starring James Bond.
- Silly moments on Earth in Moonraker include a pigeon doing a double take at Bond in a hovercraft gondola in Venice.
- Director Lewis Gilbert cleverly achieved the pigeon's double take without CGI by using a looping editing technique.
Moonraker is notorious for being the most far-fetched James Bond movie, because it sends 007 into space, but the movie’s most absurd moment happens long before it leaves Earth’s atmosphere. The end credits for The Spy Who Loved Me declared, “James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only.” But after the unexpected blockbuster success of Star Wars, space movies were in fashion, so the Bond producers delayed For Your Eyes Only and followed up The Spy Who Loved Me with Moonraker instead.
After Star Wars became the biggest movie of all time, Hollywood started setting everything in space. Alien, Flash Gordon, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Battle Beyond the Stars all tried to get in on the Star Wars action. Even Bond jumped on the bandwagon. The Roger Moore era of the Bond franchise became infamous for its silly slapstick tone, but Moonraker finally went beyond the pale by sending 007 into the cosmos. Moonraker is full of ludicrous sci-fi moments, but its goofiest moment actually takes place on Earth.
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A Pigeon Does A Double Take After Seeing Bond In A Hovering Gondola In Moonraker
From the G-force scene to the climactic laser battle amongst the stars, Bond’s adventure in space is full of ridiculous moments. But Moonraker has its fair share of silly moments set on Earth, too. In the opening scene, Bond is thrown out of a plane and survives with ease. Jaws chews through the cable of a ski lift, Moore’s performance devolves into self-parody, and the movie is filled with blatant product placement. As absurd as these moments are, the most ridiculous moment in Moonraker is when a pigeon does a double take.
Bond’s investigation into Hugo Drax takes him to Venice, where he gets into a gondola chase. When the chase moves out of the water and onto the street, Bond reveals that his gondola is a hovercraft and drives it up over the curb onto the street. Upon seeing this, a pigeon does a double take. Moore’s Bond movies are known for being cartoonish, but this scene could’ve actually been ripped straight from a cartoon. As a whole, Moonraker isn’t as bad as people say, but it is pretty preposterous.
How Moonraker Pulled Off The Pigeon's Double Take
If Moonraker was made today, the pigeon’s double take would be achieved with CGI. But Lewis Gilbert made his intergalactic James Bond adventure in the days before CGI, so how did he pull off this ridiculous shot? Rather than trying to train a pigeon to do a double take (something that even some human actors struggle to do convincingly), Gilbert simply shot the pigeon turning its head and used a clever editing technique to loop the footage, which looked like a double take. The same technique can be seen in Star Wars with a Tusken Raider waving his gaffi stick.
