Saturday, January 19, 2008

Thunder pe Wonder

Q: If Agent Vinod, Gunmaster G-9 and Agent 116 (hint: these are NOT fictional characters!) came together to save the country from an attack by giant locusts, what would their war-cry be?

A: Thunder pe Wonder!!

Couldn't stop laughing once I read this article (thanks to Mint)

Excerpts here:

The first desi Bond was Jeetendra in Farz (1967). Gopal or Agent 116 of the Indian Secret Service was still quite a homeboy, with his remarkable exclamation, “Thunder pe wonder”, and his white trousers. He meets Sunita (Babita) in the course of investigating the death of another agent and finds that the trail leads to Sunita’s dad.

The next year, we had Sailesh Kumar, who played a spy in Goldeneyes Secret Agent O77 in 1968. If you do not remember who Sailesh Kumar was, don’t let it worry you. No one else does.

This was followed by Agent 999 Operation Jackpot in 1972. Perhaps these flopped badly for it took a while for Rajshri Productions to start Agent Vinod, played by Mahendra Sandhu, which they released in 1977. The story established a pattern that almost all the others were to follow. A scientist (Nasir Hussain) is kidnapped. The government sends in Agent Vinod, who is helped by the daughter of the scientist (Asha Sachdev).

The only James Bond knock-off to be a hit was Suraksha (1979), in which Mithun Chakraborty played Gopi alias Gunmaster G9, with M played by Iftikhar at his school-masterly best. Suraksha’s most memorable moment was a graveside sequence. One of the Indian intelligence agents, Jackson (Suresh Oberoi), has been killed by the nasties. When the Indian intelligence agencies dig him up, they find pieces of plastic in his grave. Some uncredited extra utters the immortal lines: “Sir, ispe to plastic surgery kiya gaya hai (sir, he has had plastic surgery).”

Director Ravikant Nagaich tried to recreate the glory of Suraksha with Wardat two years later, in which Gopi came back when the nation was under attack from large locusts—but it flopped. Trade pundits opined that this was because Indian audiences could not take the idea of Gunmaster G9 being unfaithful to Ranjeeta, the heroine of Suraksha, since Kaajal Kiron was now playing the daughter of the kidnapped scientist and the G9 girl. It might well have been that it was just a very bad film.

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