20 Things You Didn't Know About A View To A Kill (1985)
14. Leaving An Agent In The Field
When James Bond walks into M's office, he finds Q (Desmond Llewelyn) testing a new gadget: the "Snooper" robot.
Whilst it is not quite as impressive as some of the things to have emerged from Q Branch over the years, it helps to convey that the film is concerned with the advent of the technology of tomorrow.
It was not introduced purely to provide a joke at the end of the film, when Q uses it to search for Bond in Stacey Sutton's home; it was actually designed for a far more important surveillance sequence.
During his investigation into Zorin's oil pumping platform in San Francisco Bay, Double-0 Seven was supposed to use the Snooper robot to take a closer look at the madman's operations. However, when the robot was discovered and chased into a pipe by some guard dogs, Bond would have been forced to abandon it. Amusingly, Q would then have berated Bond for abandoning a fellow agent in the field.
Sadly, owing to budget restrictions, the scene was ultimately dropped from the script.