The Billion Dollar Threat was a 1979 TV movie/pilot that starred
Dale Robinette
as American secret agent Robert Sands, who must foil the nefarious plan of mad
scientist Horatio Black - played by none other than John Steed himself,
Patrick Macnee - to destroy the ozone layer with a nuclear missile. The movie was produced by TV veteran
David Gerber (who tried a spy show again a year later with
Once Upon A Spy), and co-starred
Keenan Wynn,
Ralph Bellamy, and
Robert Tessier as a mechanical-handed henchman (
de rigueur for supervillain henchmen of the time; see also
Death Ray 2000/T.R. Sloane).
I
actually taped this one off of TV, so I watched it a number of times. I remember it as a pretty fair - if cheap - little Bondian adventure, written by Hammer Studios vet
Jimmy Sangster (
Deadlier Than The Male), who seemed to have a
penchant for this type of stuff (He also penned the aforementioned
Once Upon A Spy and one of the
better episodes of
A Man Called Sloane).
I
watched that old VHS tape a lot and dug it as a teenager who was just starting to
become obsessed with James Bond and spy-fi. I wish I still had that
tape.
4 comments:
Here's one from around the same year The London Connection: https://youtu.be/vqDN1y3sKEw
Fun film.
I remember that one, vaguely. More, I remember describing it to my older brother, who pointed out that the plot borrowed heavily from the original MOONRAKER novel.
Except for the presence of a rocket, there's little similarity.
I do not know if they are available to you but every few months for the last year or so either the Sony movie channel or the MGM movie channel (I think it is the Sony one) puts 'Billion Dollar Threat' in their schedule rotation and they run it two or three times within the month. They - either Sony or MGM - also seem to run 'Once Upon A Spy' in rotation around the same time (but no one ever runs 'Dr. Scorpion' which is the one I really want to see).
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