For England: Dedicated to Blofeld's Cat

Hi everyone!

This post is going to continue off my post from last week which discussed the gadgets of the James Bond series, one of the many things I enjoy about the series. However, this one will be focused on the animals featured in the films. These animals may only be in the film for five seconds but if I saw the film I probably noticed the animal and went awe it's so cute (yes, even the tiger sharks in Thunderball). I'm a big animal lover if you can't tell.

Let's start with Blofeld's cat. Small, fluffy, and downright adorable it's one of the iconic cats of cinema if only because of the parodies. It also makes Thunderball deeply amusing everytime a SPECTRE meeting is shown because all the top agents are in these big serious black leather chairs and then there's just their faceless boss petting a cat while giving orders to conquer the world. I want to know who looks after that cat. Is it Blofeld? Number 2? Or does Blofeld rent the cat everytime he has a SPECTRE meeting and the rest of the time the cat is looked after by a family of four in the middle of London? I want to know these things. These are important questions.

That's enough about the cat. Now onto the sharks.

Yes I find sharks cute. Yes I know they can be dangerous. However, when I saw that Thunderball's villain had so called "golden grotto" sharks I was ecstatic. The moment I saw them I predicted that at least three people would be fed to them over the course of the movie. I was mostly correct even if the third person fed to them was James Bond and so by pure virture of being the main character gets to sneak past them instead of getting eaten. The behind the scenes information makes the sharks much more interesting though.

For starters Golden Grotto Sharks are a fictional shark species. In reality the shark species used for filming were (according to the Telegraph) tiger sharks (most likely adolescents due to size and lack of stripes). This is an interesting choice as tiger sharks are some of the most aggressive sharks towards humans and behind the scenes information reveals that there were gaps in the plexiglass between Sean Connery (James Bond) and the sharks to the extent one of the sharks got through the gap. Thankfully, Connery was fine and filming was able to continue.

This wasn't the end of the shark shenanigans though. Another scene required a dead shark to be pulled through the pool on wires by a member of the crew. Unfortunately the shark wasn't dead and so (understandably) started thrashing around but the crewmember kept his cool and they were able to keep the scene in the film. No one was harmed.

I'll stop talking about cartiligenous fish.

I hope you enjoyed me nattering about how cute cats and sharks are in their Bond films. Feel free to tell me about any animals you noticed in other Bond films in the comments.