Reel Trivia

It's recently been announced that Billie Eilish will be singing the theme to No Time to Die and she becomes the latest in a long line of Bond theme performers. The songs are a key part of the films and in many cases more than one artists was asked to pitched a title song. Many of those not selected have not been revealed to the wider world but there are a handful of alternate Bond themes out there that were rejected but released elsewhere. Thunderball  The original title song for Thunderball was "Mr. Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" taken from an Italian journalist who used the phrase to describe James Bond. It was originally recorded by Bond-theme legend Shirley Bassey though is perhaps better known from a later version recorded by Dionne Warwick. There's not a lot wrong with the song but producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman felt the theme really needed to have the film's title in the lyrics. In the end it was Tom Jones who gave us "Thunderball...

With 1917 hitting UK cinemas this week, I thought it might be interesting to look at other films which have years in their titles... 10,000BC   Disaster movie director Roland Emmerich made this 2008 film about a prehistoric tribe of mammoth hunters. Most people thought it looked decent enough but style was no substitute for substance and the large number of historical inaccuracies didn't help critics enjoyment of the film. It's widely regarded as Emmerich's worst film and by many as the worst film of the year. Despite this, it did reasonably well at the box office. Year One   Another pre-historic disaster by a respected director, this time Harold Ramis. It stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as cavemen and is supposed to be a comedy. I struggle to get past the title- surely "Year One" means the first year after Jesus' birth and therefore some time post-cavemen? 1776  This 1972 musical based on the Broadway show of the same name is a...

Jimmy the Crow is surely one of the most unnoticed movie stars of all time. Between the 1930s and 1950s Jimmy, actually a raven, appeared in more than a thousand feature films, including the likes of The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life . Jimmy was found in a nest in the Mojave Desert in 1934 by animal trainer Curly Twiford. Twiford was keen to make Jimmy appealing for use in films so taught him as many tricks as he could including typing, opening letters and even riding a tiny motorcycle. Jimmy could understand several hundred words though Twiford said that only about fifty of those were actually useful. It generally took a week for Jimmy to learn each useful word, though it would take longer if the word has more than 1 syllable. Jimmy's big break came in when he was cast in the 1938 film You Can't Take it With You and I like to imagine he was a key reason why the film went on to win Best Picture. Jimmy obviously did something right because director Frank ...