WARNING: Massive spoilers for the new James Bond movie Spectre are found throughout this essay.
I love the Bond franchise. I’ve seen every movie in the franchise, all 24 of the official EON productions, from 1963’s Dr. No to this month’s Spectre. (And yes, I’ve even seen the unofficial Never Say Never Again, which is harmless and forgettable, and 1963’s Casino Royale, which should constitute a human rights violation.) I can recite my favorite Bond lines, invite friends over to watch my impressive 23-movie Bond DVD collection, and rank all the films in terms of my favorites. (And FYI, From Russia with Love is at the top and Die Another Day is at the bottom.)
As much as I love Bond on its own, there is another series that has definitely shaped the way I’ve come to see and experience the Bond films, particularly the older ones, and that is the Austin Powers trilogy.
Jay Roach’s three films, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) are the gold standard for spy spoofs and particularly for Bond spoofs that all others, past, present and future will always be compared to. (Looking at you, 1963 version of Casino Royale.) They are very loving homages to the original Bond films, particularly of the Sean Connery era, while doing a good job of pointing out the comedic elements and the ridiculous nature of some of those movies.
Besides the somewhat James Bond-ian protagonist Austin Powers (“Yeah, baby! Oh, behave!”), at the center of all this satire is the trilogy’s antagonist, Dr. Evil. (Both Austin and Dr. Evil were played by Mike Myers, famous for Saturday Night Live, two Wayne’s World movies, and 4 Shrek movies, and not famous for The Love Guru. Myers also wrote all three movies.) Dr. Evil is very much modeled on Bond’s longtime nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, with particular acknowledgment to the character’s appearance in the Bond film You Only Live Twice. Both Dr. Evil and Blofeld are bald with prominent facial scars and a penchant for wearing grey button-down suits. They both have cats (including Dr. Evil’s much-beloved, famously-hairless cat Mister Bigglesworth). They are famous for having eccentric henchmen and meeting in boardrooms hidden in secret bases in exotic locales. (Blofeld’s headquarters were in a volcano in You Only Live Twice, and Dr. Evil constantly welcomes people to his “underground lair.”)
But in the context of the movies themselves, Dr. Evil is a pretty standout comedic character. From putting his pinky finger near his mouth in order to look nefarious, or screaming about wanting “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads” to his antagonistic, bullying relationship to his son Scott Evil (Seth Green) to his much more paternal relationship to his much smaller clone Mini-Me (Verne Troyer), to perhaps most famously his holding the world ransom for “One Miiillllion Dollars!” Hell, for my money, one of the best comedic scenes of the past 20 years is when Dr. Evil and Scott go to a father-son group therapy in the first movie:
Despite his prominence in the Austin Powers franchise, the actual inspiration for Dr. Evil, the character of Blofeld, never got a chance to shine in the Bond franchise. While he is an unseen but powerful presence in the franchise’s first four films, he is a prominent part of You Only Live Twice (1967) where he is played by Donald Plesence, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) where he is played by Telly Savalas, and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) where he is played by Charles Grey. After that, beyond a small cameo in the opening of 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, Blofeld did not make an appearance in the official Bond films for over 40 years. This was because of a complicated rights issue originating with the development of the Ian Fleming book Thunderball. Fleming wrote Thunderball (which would become the basis for the 4th Bond movie) originally as a screenplay. Producer and filmmaker Kevin McClory claimed that Thunderball, as well as the concepts originating from it, including the evil organization SPECTRE and the character of Blofeld, were all his, not Fleming’s, intellectual property. McClory was awarded the literary and film rights to Thunderball and all related characters and concepts. After the character’s appearance in Diamonds Are Forever, the Bond producers refused to include Blofeld in any more Bond movies because of fears of the copyright issue coming up again. McClory, on the other hand, produced an independent, Bond film unrelated to the official EON productions. That film was 1983’s Never Say Never Again, also based on the original Thunderball novel, which featured Max Von Sydow playing Blofeld.
After McClory’s death in 2006, EON and McClory’s estate settled the dispute, and agreed to bring Blofeld back into the main Bond canon. Blofeld, SPECTRE, and all those terms are now solely the property of EON Productions and MGM. So, it would only make sense that they would use these new rights to bring back Bond’s most iconic nemesis for the 24th film in the series, Spectre.
In the film, Christoph Waltz plays a character originally identified as Franz Oberhauser. Oberhauser is shown as the leader of Spectre, a villainous organization hell-bent on world domination much in the same way they were in the first few Bond movies. They even meet in dark, ornate European boardroom, an updated take on the boardrooms Spectre used to meet in (and similar in layout to Dr. Evil’s boardroom table in Austin Powers). But beyond the connection to Spectre, there are personal connections between Daniel Craig’s Bond and Oberhauser. It is revealed Bond is Oberhauser’s adopted brother, and that he prefers going by the name Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Bond confronts him in his desert base (the look of which more than resembles Dr. Evil’s “underground lair”), where Blofeld tortures him until Bond can escape and the base explodes. Back in London, Blofeld plays mind games with Bond in a deserted building as he sports a new facial scar, culminating in a chase on the River Thames and Blofeld being arrested.
Much of the problem with Spectre has to do with issues with the villain. He is simply not menacing enough, particularly in comparison to the villain of the last Bond film Skyfall (2012), Raoul Silva, played memorably by Javier Bardem. But does Blofeld’s lack of bite in this reboot have anything to do with the popularity of Dr. Evil? After all, since the last time Blofeld appeared in a Bond movie, a satire of his character has become one of popular culture’s most endearing comedic villains. After we’ve gotten so used to laughing at a very Blofeld-esque character for so long, it’s hard to take the real Blofeld seriously once he’s re-entered the Bond canon, even if he’s played by a two-time Academy Award winner whose most famous film role to date was a psychopathic Nazi SS officer. The character of Blofeld simply has too much cultural baggage, the most prominent of which is the association with Dr. Evil. The facial scar Blofeld sports at the end of the film alone seems rather silly post-Austin Powers, not nearly as menacing as the team behind Spectre probably was hoping for. I even noted how a cat seemingly didn’t jump up into Oberhauser/Blofeld’s lap during the boardroom scene, seemingly to avoid an Austin Powers connection.
Spectre has received mixed reviews from critics, audiences and Bond fans alike, far from the near-universal praise of Skyfall. It is expected to earn close to $100 million less than Skyfall did at the domestic U.S. box-office. Many critics blame the lack of compelling narrative and character development for the villain as reasons why the movie doesn’t succeed. The movie appears to a disappointment on multiple levels, with its villain being one of the most identifiable reasons why. Is that because the general public doesn’t see the villain of the film as his own character, but rather as an amalgamation of various interpretations of Blofeld, be it from other Bond films or from a popular spy-spoof trilogy from the 90s? So the question remains: is Blofeld ruined, and if he is, is it Dr. Evil that ruined him? After all, no one can say that Spaceball’s Dark Helmet ruined Darth Vader. (The Star Wars prequels did a fine job of doing that on their own.)
If it was inevitable to bring back Blofeld, I think the Bond producers should have taken a far riskier approach to his character, made him still menacing but someone different than the previous incarnations of Blofeld we’ve seen. Both Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker from the Batman movie The Dark Knight (2008) and actor Andrew Scott’s (who coincidentally is also in Spectre) take on the Sherlock Holmes villain James Moriarty on the BBC TV series Sherlock stand out as risky, modern incarnations of iconic villain characters.
Their performances and the way those characters were written allowed us, the audience, to get into the nitty-gritty of these characters. Ledger’s Joker and Scott’s Moriarty are updates of classic antagonists, ones that deal with modern paranoias. And both of them, like Blofeld, have a little bit of cultural baggage. (Cesar Romero’s campy version of the Joker from the 1960s Batman TV show is still a prominent part of popular culture, and Moriarty was once even turned into a giant rat named Ratigan for Disney’s animated movie The Great Mouse Detective.) But both of these respective incarnations overcome that cultural baggage to the point that we take each of these characters on their own, and don’t associate them with previous film, television, comic book, or literary history.
So no, Dr. Evil, despite his prominence in popular culture, did not ruin Blofeld. It is only because the Bond producers and writers chose to stay so close to the original, iconic incarnation of Blofeld that the question even exists. Had they turned Blofeld into something different, updated his character a la Scott’s Moriarty or Ledger’s Joker, Austin Powers would probably be the last thing on people’s minds. As it stands right now, it’s the writers and producers’ own fault for not being creative enough so that when we see Blofeld again, we don’t think of him as his own character, but rather as just a different take on a character we’ve already seen before, be it in previous Bond movies or in Austin Powers.
