Offworld episode 4: Moonraker (1979)
Space billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in the news today, but one of the first space billionaires appeared in the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker. Ariel is joined by author Bonnie Burton and science correspondent Emily Calandrelli to talk about pop culture’s stylized take on space travel in the late 70s, in the wake of Star Wars and the dawn of NASA’s Shuttle program.
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Who’s to say there isn’t an evil billionaire and this “colony on Mars” is a spin on some global plot to rid the world of politicians and telephone sanitisers 🙂
Where do I sign up?
Fun show, Moonraker is such a wacky movie, pigeons doing double takes, it goes from ambulance fight to horseback in a single cut with NO explanation. And they do this thing that a lot of sci-fi movies do where air = gravity. It’s like the whole movie is a carnival ride. But still one of the more watchable Bonds of that era.
i have always assumed ELON is a James Bond villain and he is waiting for James to show up IRL and attempt to stop him from taking over the world.
i think you captured a big part of moonraker’s charm here – it is so over the top goofy and campy, and yet you can see the effort to base this on a plausible near-future world with space stations, shuttle travel to and from space, and thus the notion of the cold war’s earthbound stand-offs extending to space, with space soldiers and pew-pew.
and while drax isn’t the first crazy villain with a big wallet involved in bond stories (auric goldfinger and karl stromberg as direct opponents, osato and willard whyte being roped into spectre plots), he is the first one who struck me as the elon-ish kind of billionaire. and as for elon as a bond villain: he is a person who allegedly said the words ‘i am the alpha in this relationship’ to his wife, unironically, during their wedding reception. that is eerily close to bond villain levels of surreal creepy camp.
Ha! Interesting contemplation. And yeah, it’s totally fun to watch despite its flaws.
Thanks!