OF ALL THE outrageously overengineered machines James Bond has commanded over the decades, perhaps the strangest came in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, when 007 climbed into an aircraft that his friend Tiger Tanaka—and likely the audience—dismissed as “a toy helicopter.” The single-seat, open cockpit gyrocopter may not have looked impressive, but it was enough for Sean Connery’s character to bring down four full-grown helicopters (with a little help from a pair of machine guns, heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, flamethrowers, and aerial mines).
