20 Things You Didn’t Know About Moonraker (1979)
8. “Play It Again, Sam!”
Executive producer, Michael G. Wilson suggested that his aikido instructor, Toshirō Suga portray Drax’s murderous manservant, Chang.
Double-0 Seven’s fight with Chang in the Venini Glass Museum in Venice was adapted from a discarded idea for a fight inside the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, Egypt for The Spy Who Loved Me and filmed inside a former Luftwaffe aircraft factory at Studios de Boulogne.
The smashing scene holds the record for the most sugar glass broken in one scene, even though it did not involve any sugar glass!
British plasterers, David Baynham and Roy Seers spent months creating the 17th Century Venetian glassware that James Bond and Chang decimate in the museum from the brittle “Dow’s resin”. They experienced many failures whilst creating enough ornaments for filming (including for retakes) and were understandably distraught to see Moore and Suga gleefully destroying their work on-set.
The fight concluded in a recreation of the Torre dell’Orologio, whose detailed Merceria Clock depicts the changing seasons. Chang’s death was filmed in Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square), whilst Roger Moore misquoted Humphrey Bogart from Casablanca (1942) inside the wrecked recreation of the clock face at Studios de Boulogne.