Dr. No (film) - Legacy

Legacy

It is because of (Ken Adam) that people believe criminal masterminds operate from the insides of dormant volcanoes and travel between their sumptuously decorated lairs on chrome-plated monorails. It's his fault that we think gold bars are stacked in vast cathedral-tall warehouses and that secret agents escape capture by using jetpacks or ejector seats.

Dr. No was the first of 23 James Bond films produced by Eon, which have grossed just over $5 billion in box office returns alone, making the series one of the highest-grossing ever. It is estimated that since Dr. No, a quarter of the world's population have seen at least one Bond film. Dr. No also launched a successful genre of "secret agent" films that flourished in the 1960s. The UK Film Distributors' Association have stated that the importance of Dr. No to the British film industry cannot be overstated, as it, and the subsequent Bond series of films, "form the backbone of the industry".

Dr. No – and the Bond films in general – also inspired television output, with the NBC series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which was described as the "first network television imitation" of Bond. The style of the Bond films, largely derived from production designer Ken Adam, is one of the hallmarks of the Bond film series, and the effect of his work on Dr. No's lair can be seen in another film he worked on, Dr. Strangelove.

As the first film in the Bond series, a number of the elements of Dr. No were contributors to subsequent films, including Monty Norman's Bond theme and Maurice Binder's gun barrel sequence, variants of which all appeared in subsequent Bond films. These conventions were also lampooned in spoof films, such as the Austin Powers series. The first spoof films happened relatively soon after Dr. No, with the 1964 film Carry on Spying showing the villain Dr. Crow being overcome by agents who included James Bind (Charles Hawtry) and Daphne Honeybutt (Barbara Windsor).

A further legacy saw the sales of Fleming's books rise sharply after the release of Dr. No and the subsequent Bond films. In the seven months after Dr. No was released, 1.5 million copies of the novel were sold. Worldwide sales of all the Bond books rose throughout the sixties as Dr. No and the subsequent films – From Russia with Love and Goldfinger – were released: in 1961 500,000 books had been sold, which rose to six million in 1964 and seven million in 1965. Between the years 1962 to 1967, a total of nearly 22.8 million Bond novels were sold.

The film had an impact on ladies' fashion, with the bikini worn by Ursula Andress proving to be a huge hit: "not only sent sales of two-piece swimwear skyrocketing, it also made Andress an international celebrity". Andress herself acknowledged that the "bikini made me into a success. As a result of starring in Dr No as the first Bond girl I was given the freedom to take my pick of future roles and to become financially independent". It has been claimed that the use of the swimwear in Dr. No led to "the biggest impact on the history of the bikini".