The first screen adaptation of Ian Fleming's James Bond was not Eon Productions’ film of Dr. No (UK: Terence Young) in 1962 but a live studio dramatization of Casino Royale broadcast on the American CBS television network on October 21, 1954. The one-hour drama was part of the network's anthology series Climax!, broadcast Thursday evenings at 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time. For many years Casino Royale, in common with much live television drama of the period, was thought to be “lost,” but a kinescope recording was discovered in the early 1980s and the “first James Bond film” again became available for public view. It was aired on the cable station TBS in 1992 and was subsequently released on VHS in the United States and Britain. While it is no longer “lost,” however, the television Casino Royale remains a marginal text in James Bond and Ian Fleming related scholarship, despite the burgeoning academic interest both in adaptation studies and in Bond as a multi-media franchise.

On one level the critical neglect of Casino Royale might simply be due to the still widely-held perception that it was a cheaply-made and shoddy production. It would be fair to say that it is little regarded within the Bond fan culture. Steven Jay Rubin (1981, 2), for example, refers to it as “the feeble American television drama.”