Over the weekend, I was casually surfing YouTube, and I came across a video claiming Amazon was airbrushing out the guns in classic James Bond posters used as the thumbnails for the James Bond movies on the streamer. The controversy grew online, and though Amazon removed the posters as the thumbnails, they were replaced by a screenshot of Bond, all sans firearms.
This all reminded me of a similar circumstance from a couple of decades ago, when Steven Spielberg seemingly spent a fair amount of money replacing all the guns in the hands of law enforcement officials with walkie-talkies in his classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which is available with a Netflix subscription, for that movie’s 20th anniversary version, released in 2002. Amazon should maybe look back on how Spielberg later felt about the decision.
Steven Spielberg Made A Few Changes For The 2002 Release
If we hop in the time machine all the way back to 2002, we’ll see that remixing and re-editing old sci-fi movies was all the rage (I’m looking at you, George Lucas), and Spielberg, much like his friend, decided to play with E.T. a little. For example, he swapped out the word “terrorist” for “hippie” when Michael and his mom were talking about his Halloween costume. Spielberg also used CGI to alter the iconic shot of Elliott and E.T. flying past the moon.
By far the most controversial choice that Spielberg made was to use CGI to replace the guns in the hands of the law enforcement officers pursuing Elliott and his friends with walkie-talkies. It’s a decision the director later regretted, telling Time magazine in 2023,
That was a mistake; I never should have done that because E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily or being forced to adhere to.
It’s advice that Amazon should heed. No matter what they want to make Bond in the future, and we can discuss that at another time, they should be careful not to mess with the legacy of the iconic franchise.
This Isn’t The First Time Amazon Has Done This
Last year, Amazon made a similar change to Full Metal Jacket’s thumbnail. The company removed the words “Born to Kill” from Matthew Modine’s character Joker’s helmet in the photo. The helmet famously has those words next to a peace sign in the movie and in much of the promotional material, and it’s been that way since the movie was released in 1987.
One of the things that makes the Stanley Kubrick movie one of the best war movies of all time is, as Joker puts it in the movie, the “duality of man.” The movie is meant to be hard to watch, controversial, and conflicting. No one should ever santatize it, for any reason. That goes for Bond, too. Early Bond films, all of which are available with a Prime subscription, are, as Spielberg said about E.T., a product of their time, and whitewashing the history isn’t right, even if they don't meet the standards of our time.
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