20 Best James Bond Gadgets

Pay attention 007!

By Alex Porritt /

The James Bond franchise, much like any other franchise, can fairly easily be split up into its main key ingredients. It's not a complicated formula: (Bad Guy + Henchman) x Evil Plot - Witty Remark/Fast Car + Beautiful Woman = 007 But somewhere in amongst the clever one-liners and the explosions are Bond's Get Out Of Jail Free cards: the gadgets. From the outset, the 007 franchise has been at the very forefront of technology. It's been consistently cutting-edge, innovative, and in some cases has even laid the foundations for consumer technology of the future. Smart watches, anyone? Sure, the gadgets have occasionally been a bit hit and miss (don't expect to find Roger Moore's crocodile motorboat or the flying AMC Matador on this list), but when they're good, they're brilliant. The gadgets have ranged from the classic and the realistic, all the way to the far-flung and far-fetched ridiculousness more fitting of the science fiction genre. There's sure to be a few entries on this list that would have Bond creator Ian Fleming spinning in his grave, but regardless of realism, the technology on display is always sure to capture the imagination. If you doodled it in the margins of your Maths textbook back in school, chances are Bond has used it to get out of a scrape. In fact, chances are that Mister Bond, James Bond, likely wouldn't have gotten very far at all without the gadgets. He certainly wouldn't have made it fifty years and nearly thirty feature films, and so it is to MI6's Q Branch that our hero owes his life and successes. And let's face it, we all spend the first third of every film just waiting for the gadget scene.