The 1976 ABC Edit of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'

The 1976 ABC Edit of On Her Majesty's Secret Service  was a re-edit of the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service conducted by the American Broadcasting Company for the movies television premiere on the ABC Monday Night Movie.

The Edit
ABC had held the American broadcast rights to the James Bond films since 1972 and had already broadcast all of Sean Connery's James Bond films (except Never Say Never Again which hadn't been made yet) and decided to move on to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which was made in-between 2 Sean Connery's films but starred a male model in his first major acting role named George Lazenby.

The film was the longest Bond film at that time and decided the only way to fit the 2 Hour, 22 Minute film into a 2 Hour time slot with commercials was to split it into two parts. But ABC decided that the film needed to have some action during the first half that they felt it lacked. So, they decided to take a scene from the middle of the film, namely Bond's escape from Piz Gloria on skis, to the beginning of the film. The film would shift back and forth between this scene and the scenes that immediately followed and the beginning of the film. At a certain point, the scenes set in the middle of the film stopped showing and the movie flowed in its original order. None of Part 2 of the movie had any flashbacks. To explain what was happening ABC hired an unidentified narrator who was Bond in the context of this edit.

Broadcast
Part 1 was broadcast on Monday, February 16,1976 and Part 2 was broadcast on Monday, February 23, 1976. The time slots were 1 Hour, 30 Minutes.

The edit was broadcast again in 1980 except all in one 3 Hour broadcast. The edit has never been broadcast since.

Legacy
Although films were often re-edited for television to fit in the time allotted, to fit the screen, for sexual content, violence, and language, the ABC 1976 Edit of On Her Majesty's Secret Service is unique in that the films scenes were actually re-arraigned beyond what was necessary due to scheduling and FCC Guidelines.

ABC re-editing a creators work without the creators consent to this extent was an issue brought up again when Monty Python sued ABC for the re-editing of their work.