After the poor feedback from that film, Eon decided that another change of pace was needed. 1979’s Moonraker went even further, literally, taking Bond into outer space while raising the humor quotient considerably. While that film and its follow-up, The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) awkwardly tried to fit Moore’s Bond into a hard-boiled Connery mold, the series fully embraced its new star’s personality with The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), a big, brash, cartoonish adventure movie that featured outrageous gadgets and parodic humor. It was when a new actor, Roger Moore, took over the Bond tenure with 1973’s Live and Let Die that the character fully changed, as Moore’s cheeky humor and laid-back persona moved the series away from prior Bonds. The Bond films had varied in approach before, most obviously as the actor playing the character changed: when George Lazenby took over the role from Sean Connery in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Bond became more introspective and somber as well as playful, while Connery’s brief return to the role in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) saw him playing a more relaxed Bond than in his prior films. The Bond films had been around long enough to have not only influenced a new action franchise, but seek to evolve its tonal and political approach, making 1981 a watershed year for the Bond movies and their legacy. Coincidentally, the Bond franchise was still going when Raiders was made, and its then-latest entry, For Your Eyes Only, was even released the same month as Spielberg’s film.

Yet they were not the only influence-Spielberg and Lucas were just as inspired by the James Bond films produced by Eon Productions, with that franchise revamping the action film and giving it a bigger, broader canvas along with a new heroic archetype. Those serials from Republic Pictures and the like were the primary influence on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ 1981 action adventure milestone Raiders of the Lost Ark, as evident by the film itself and it’s “cliffhanger”-style action sequences. The most unadulterated dose of action in the ‘30s and ‘40s could be found in the serialized features that were broken up into short episodes, meaning that certain installments were pure action. The action film has been part of the cinematic landscape from the medium’s inception, yet action was not a genre unto itself right away, with fights and set pieces folded into other genres like the Western, the war film, the historical epic, and so on.

Submarine outlaw series