Wonder What Could Have Been

OHMSS was supposed to be the fifth film in the series, after Thunderball, but the producers changed their minds in early 1966 and did You Only Live Twice when they discovered that the snow conditions in Switzerland were so poor that year

One wonders what YOLT would have been like, had these changes been made:

In the book, Blofeld was in a castle, not a volcano. Problem was, no castles existed in Japan near the ocean, like Ian Fleming described. But could they not have filmed the castle scenes in Scotland or some other country, to make it LOOK like Japan ? I'm sure they could have done it if they wanted to. In the 1980s, alot of movies were filmed in Mexico as a substitute for Vietnam

Instead of all of the sci-fi elements which were not in the book, how about keeping it true to the novel ? In the book, Tanaka asked Bond to go to the castle to kill Blofeld aka Dr. Shatterhand


I think it all could have worked, and you would have had a successful film without the over the top stuff