James Bond Ultimate Edition, Vols. 3 & 4
20th Century Fox Home Video

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There have been Bond movie collections before: Two 1996 VHS sets assembled the first 13 Bond films in chronological order; then in 2000, MGM's three-box James Bond Collection series packaged a random ordering of 18 Bond films on 18 special-edition DVDs. With the release of volumes three and four of the James Bond Ultimate Edition series, new distributor 20th Century Fox gives the world's greatest spy his due with all 20 pre-Casino Royale 007 outings (with the exception of the off-franchise Never Say Never Again and a 1967 Bond spoof also titled Casino Royale).

On Set Three you get Pierce Brosnan's debut in GoldenEye; Roger Moore's debut in Live and Let Die; 1963's From Russia With Love; 1981's For Your Eyes Only; and George Lazenby's solo 007 outing, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Set Four bundles Tomorrow Never Dies, You Only Live Twice, Octopussy and the debut of metal-mouthed madman Jaws in Moonraker. Set Four ends at the beginning with the very first Bond, Dr. No, starring Sean Connery and featuring Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder memorably emerging from the surf.

Unlike previous Bond box sets, each movie in this Ultimate Edition comes on two disks. Disk one is the feature, newly restored frame-by-frame using the proprietary Lowry Process which digitally eliminates defects like flicker, jitter, weave, dirt, scratches, mold stains and color fading, leaving no artifacts. The second disks house myriad bonus features, among them never-before-seen deleted scenes, old documentaries and new featurettes.

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for Volumes 1 and 2 »

And for the first time ever on a Bond DVD: new audio commentaries by Sir Roger Moore. Each movie is accompanied by its own eight-page booklet of photos, with production anecdotes and fun facts about filming locations, the music and the actors. Volumes 3 and 4 cap off the definitive Bond collection.

by Dwayne Hoover