Volcanic

Above, as you probably know, is a still of Blofeld's volcano base from the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Below is ten minutes of Super8 film showing the construction of the set. It's grainy ShakyCam fare, but it gives you some idea of the enormous cost and complexity involved. It cost more to build that one set than the entire production budget of the first Bond film, Dr No, only five years earlier. The money was there, however, because the Bond series was the single most popular movie series in history until Star Wars came along. Nowadays, of course, this sort of thing is accomplished by computer rendering, with the actors performing on a bare green screen set. The days of building such fantastic sets are long over. A shame, really.