‘Little Nellie’: The James Bond gadget that almost turned fatal
Gadgets have always been integral to the character of James Bond and the franchise that bears his name, but on one occasion, 007’s shiny new toys were almost as deadly for the stunt team in real life as they were for the villains who come up against them on-screen.
By the time cameras started rolling on Sean Connery’s fifth outing as the iconic secret agent in You Only Live Twice, the Bond saga was already well-established as one of Hollywood’s marquee properties. The problem was that audiences expected the bar to be raised with each new instalment, which in turn spurred the set pieces to become bigger, bolder, braver, and ever more dangerous.
After developing and creating the WA-116 autogyro in the early 1960s, Air Force veteran Ken Wallis seized the imagination of You Only Live Twice production designer Ken Adam, who heard an interview with the former wing commander discussing the tiny craft he’d constructed and successfully piloted himself.
Deciding that Bond was in desperate need of a gyrocopter, the contraption was incorporated into the film with the requisite bells and whistles. Special effects supervisor John Stears kitted it out with various forms of weaponry and gadgetry, rechristening the vehicle as ‘Little Nellie’ in honour of legendary musical hall performer and ‘Essence of Eccentricity’ Nellie Andrews.
As the only person capable of piloting the thing, Wallis was drafted into the crew when You Only Live Twice touched down for its location shoot in Japan. Thanks to the inclement weather conditions and the minute size of the gyrocopter, he was often left at the mercy of the elements and repeatedly crashed into the camera crew following him in the skies.
Part of what made ‘Little Nellie’ so memorable was how radically different it looked compared to Bond’s previous gadgets. Earlier films had leaned heavily on concealed weapons hidden inside sleek sports cars or attaché cases, but the gyrocopter felt like something lifted straight from the pages of a pulp science-fiction comic. Despite its outlandish appearance, the craft was entirely functional, which only added to its mystique and made the aerial battle sequences feel surprisingly convincing for audiences at the time.
The sequence also represented a turning point for the Bond franchise’s relationship with spectacle. From that moment onward, audiences expected every new instalment to deliver a centrepiece stunt or gadget capable of outdoing the last film.
Whether it was underwater cars, jetpacks or invisible vehicles decades later, the spirit of ‘Little Nellie’ lingered throughout the series as proof that Bond’s world thrived on the balance between danger, ingenuity and just a touch of absurdity.
Unfortunately, while the airborne footage was being captured, cameraman John Jordan’s techniques almost resulted in tragedy. He’d developed a means of hanging from a harness with his feet resting on the landing strut of ‘Little Nellie’, but during a downdraft, his foot got caught in the rotors and almost severed it completely.
Fortunately, there was a surgical conference happening in the vicinity of Miyazaki, and Jordan’s almost-severed appendage was reattached. However, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, leading to his foot being amputated completely when he returned home to London. With a prosthetic now in place, Jordan spent several more years working on the Bond franchise before falling over 2,000 feet to his death in 1969 while capturing footage for another film.
It was an ignominious – albeit cruelly fitting – end for a daredevil crew member who came off badly but could have realistically suffered a lot worse on You Only Live Twice, but at least ‘Little Nellie’ was forever enshrined as one of Bond’s most iconic accoutrements.
