You Only Live Twice

Factual error: When Bird 1 is launched, both in the cave and outside, the exhaust plume and smoke trail is pitifully small compared to the plume of a real rocket.

Revealing mistake: Obvious model toy helicopters are used during the Nellie fight, with the models having no pilots inside.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: When the divers swim towards the submarine with Bond's body, the submarine is seen from a distance and you can't see the ocean's surface. But in the next clip when Bond is lowered into the hatch the surface is no more than 4 meters above them.

Jacob La Cour

Continuity mistake: When Tiger is looking at the body of the ninja who attacked Bond, he turns the ninja's head on the right side. But in the next clip the head is back in center position.

Jacob La Cour

Continuity mistake: When Bond and Kissy escapes from the gas in the cave she's wearing bright white shoes. But in the under water scenes and when she surfaces she has bare feet. Once back on land the shoes are back.

Jacob La Cour

Continuity mistake: When Bond is attacked by the ninja during training Bond grabs the stick holding his right hand in the end where the blade came out. In the next clip his grip is the opposite - his left hand is closest to the blade.

Jacob La Cour

Revealing mistake: Upon capturing the Soviet spacecraft, SPECTRE's spacecraft does some attitude maneuvering with small rockets on the side of the hull. The rockets fire visible exhaust from screen-left to screen-right, but flecks of the stuff slow to a halt and accelerate backwards, right to left, exactly as if the spaceship model were standing upright with the camera tilted sideways, which is exactly what was done.

Continuity mistake: When Bond finally meets Blofeld, there are shots on Bond and others on Blofeld. Blofeld's cat is seen in all of this, at times looking at Bond and then in the next shot looking at Blofeld. Quick reflexes those cats.

Continuity mistake: When Blofeld is in the volcano control room, and the scene keeps changing from him to the main crater, the position of the cat in his arms is never the same twice. Sometimes both paws are in, sometimes both out, sometimes one of each etc.

Continuity mistake: When Bond and Kissy are on the slopes of the volcano near the end of the film, they watch a hellicopter fly overhead and go down inside. It lands on a helipad. In the next shot from above (when the massive door is closing) the helipad is empty.

Plot hole: When Bond and the other astronaut try to make their way onto the rocket Blofeld has them captured, and he tells Bond "no astronaut would have entered the capsule with his air conditioner." If so, the real astronaut that was helping Bond would have realised this mistake himself.

jbrbbt

Revealing mistake: At the beginning of the film during Bond's "funeral", the shot cuts to a man watching the funeral from a boat through a pair of binoculars. The camera then moves to the newspaper next to him showing an "article" reporting Bond's murder. If you look closely at the "article" itself, you can see it was actually pasted onto the actual local newspaper. They probably bought a local newspaper and pasted the fake article over it to make it look authentic.

poehitman

Continuity mistake: When Hans pulls the bone from the water with the piranhas - in the first clip, from the way the string moves you can see that the bone must have cleared the water. But in the next clip it is still below the water.

Jacob La Cour

Revealing mistake: When one of the ninjas places an explosive charge on the bottom of the fake crater lake roof it wobbles and can be seen its made of plastic - even though Bond earlier said it was metal.

Jacob La Cour

Continuity mistake: Towards the end of the film when the ninjas are coming down the ropes to storm the volcano base, you can clearly see one coming down who has bullet holes riddled in his back - but is still alive.

Character mistake: While one of the Soviet mission controllers does speak with a native-sounding level of Russian, the other controllers and the cosmonauts sound obnoxious at times; strange anglicisms or outright English words are sprinkled into the script, such as the word "pressure" in the middle of an otherwise Russian sentence, not to mention the many grammatical errors.

Continuity mistake: When Bond is about to climb in the raft his hair is soaking wet and brushed forward. When he is inside it's nicely brushed to the right.

Sacha

You Only Live Twice mistake picture

Revealing mistake: The volcano erupting is an obvious composite of at least two images: an explosion on a mountain and lava flowing. The cut-out footage of the lava is blatantly evident for one can see the outline of the pasted film, which has a lighter colour than the mountain's.

Sacha

Tiger Tanaka: I must say I am disappointed with the ease with which I could pull you in. The one thing my honourable mother taught me long ago was never to get into a car with a strange girl. But you, I'm afraid, will get into anything. With any girl.

More quotes from You Only Live Twice

Trivia: For production designer Ken Adam's giant Pinewood volcano set, some 700 tons of steel were used, and some 250,000 square yards of canvas. It featured a working monorail and elevators and cost £1 million to produce.

More trivia for You Only Live Twice

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.