Hughes’ Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a romantic musical comedy so loosely based on the novel that Fleming would have difficulty recognizing it.
Of course, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the magical automobile, is present. Commander Potts and his children Jemima and Jeremy, too. But Mom is replaced by Truly Scrumptious, a beautiful young woman soon to be Potts’s companion. Missing, too, is Potts’ stirring call to action: “Today,” he said, “is going to be a roaster, a scorcher. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s for us to take a delicious picnic and climb into Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and dash down the Dover Road to the sea.”
Fleming’s picnic was on a sandbar in the Channel Hughes’ picnic complex episode with singing and pleasant beach silliness. Hughes has the family start in England before allowing Chitty Chitty to fly them across the English Channel to a deserted beach at Cap Taillat on the French Riviera. They unpack, pitch a tent, and start to play. It’s a typical beach picnic.
The cast: Dick Van Dyke as Cataractus Potts; Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious; Heather Ripley as Jemima Potts; Adrian Hall as Jeremy Potts
Featured Image: Jemima on the picnic blanket.
See Ian Fleming. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. Illustrated by John Burningham. New York: Random House, Inc., 1964; Ken Hughes. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). The screenplay by Ken Hughes, Richard Malbaum, and Roald Dahl is based on Fleming’s novel. Music and lyrics by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman. Dahl’s screenplay was not used for production.