20 James Bond References You Might Have Missed In Die Another Day
11. Domino's Dream Man
As audiences will recall, Q's workshop in Die Another Day is housed inside an abandoned London Underground station at Vauxhall Cross.
It is literally filled with paraphernalia from earlier Bond films, specifically the many gadgets that have featured therein. There is the crocodile mini-submarine and Acrostar mini-jet from Octopussy (1983), Rosa Klebb's trick shoe and Bond's attaché case from From Russia With Love (1963), and the jetpack from Thunderball, to name but a few.
However, a far more discreet Bond reference appears when Q (John Cleese) presents Bond with his new transportation ("Aston Martin call it 'the Vanquish'. We call it 'the Vanish'."). As the invisible Aston Martin is rolled out on a flatbed truck, it stops next to a poster advertising Players Navy Cut Cigarettes. This references the character of Dominetta "Domino" Vitali in the ninth James Bond book, 1961's Thunderball, which was a collaboration between Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce, and Ernest Cuneo, even though the poster chosen for Die Another Day does not precisely match the one described in the novel.
In the novel of Thunderball, Domino explains how she is in love with the sailor who features on the Players Navy Cut packets; she has fashioned her own fantasy love story in which he will one day take away from her unhappy existence with Emilio Largo. Ultimately, James Bond performs a similar function, rescuing her from Largo and his SPECTRE cronies.