Blondie Bondie

After a suspenseful wait, the newest actor to take on the role of James Bond has been announced. His name? Craig, Daniel Craig. So what has the first impression of the film media been?

Horrified voices of weasely entertainment reporters: "He's blonde! James Bond is blonde!!! His hair is the same color as the villain from From Russia with Love!! He's blonde we tell you!!!!! (Cue apopletic fit of entertainment news posts and television pieces.) "

Before the people at Entertainment Tonight, Entertainment Weekly, and the E! Channel (No, the "E!" doesn't stand for "Entertainment", it stands for "Excrement") start slitting their own throats in despair, perhaps I should point out something.

They can dye his hair.

I don't know much about Daniel Craig, but I do know that there is a tradition of "Interim Bonds" in the series. After Sean Connery's initial stint, Australian George Lazenby wallabalooed his way through a single film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, leaving viewers with the impression that the inestimably suave James Bond had been replaced with his stilted country cousin. We were supposed to believe that Diana Rigg was driven to swooning over a bloke who walked about like he was avoiding cattle droppings in the pasture, rather than seducing nubile and flaky young women. Emma Peel, Rigg's character from The Avengers, would have repeatedly planted a spike-heeled leather boot in that Bond's sternum until his chest looked like a colander with nipples.

After Roger Moore's lengthy run, Timothy Dalton took on the role, but was handicapped by the fact that he played Bond as a really nice, affable guy, who just happened to be a licenced to kill secret agent. In fact, in his second and last Bond film, coincidentally entitled Licence to Kill, Bond spent the entire film seeking horrible revenge for the multilation of his close friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter. (Incidentally, Leiter was originally played by Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord, in the first Bond movie, Dr. No. Jack Lord not only would not have allow a bunch of thugs to harm him, but would have calmly killed all of them with a rounded toothpick.) Dalton played Bond as though he were on a desperate and dangerous quest for a really good bottle of shampoo. It didn't help that one of the dangerous villians in the film was played by perennial Vegas showman Wayne Newton. It's hard to be intimidated by a villain whose greatest threat is that he might, at any minute, break out into a rendition of Danke Schoen.

So, who knows what will become of this new Blonde Bond? He may turn out to be a hit, or, in a few years from now, he may be yet another answer to a question in Trival Pursuit, the Bond Edition (Name the only actor to play Bond who was a toe-head.)