15 Spy Gadgets From Movies and Television We All Want

By Stephen Chow

When we were kids, spy movies inspired playground fantasies of chasing bad guys and solving mysteries. As we grew up, the playing stopped, but somewhere within everyone who enjoyed watching Sean Connery cruise his Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger lies a dormant desire to strap up with spy gadgets and save the world from certain doom. These gadgets are an integral part of any good spy movie. Everyone loves explosions and gunfire, but there’s something uniquely exhilarating about watching Q unveil his latest contraptions and eagerly anticipating how they would used. Below are the 15 coolest movie gadgets that any fan of action and suspense would love to own.

The Copter Hat From Inspector Gadget

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Inspector Gadget might not have been the most adroit spy in the world, but he sure had a convenient way of getting around. Sleuthing across a city presents numerous travel problems: morning traffic, mid-day traffic, evening traffic, crowded sidewalks, crowded buses, an utter dearth of taxicabs, etc. For all the amazing super-cars that spies traditionally drive, nothing compares to the transportation power of a concealed personal helicopter under your fedora. While Bond might be stuck behind a bus that keeps stopping every half-block, Gadget would just up and fly across town with nothing slowing him down (and never has to worry about finding parking at his destination.)

Mobile Phone From Tomorrow Never Dies

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Today’s mobile phones can outperform desktop PCs, but in 1997, most of us were lucky to have a functioning phone that fit in our knapsack. However, in Tomorrow Never Dies , 007 was connected to MI6 with a futuristic mobile phone boasting several unique features. Its built-in fingerprint scanner read prints left behind by perpetrators and instantly revealed their identities. The phone also served as a stun gun for close quarter encounters and missions where firing a gun would tip off enemies. Finally, Bond’s phone doubled as a remote control for his BMW, allowing him to drive it from afar, and to summon the car to him when the route was too fraught with danger.

X-Ray Glasses From The World Is Not Enough

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James Bond’s two biggest loves were always stopping villains and chasing trim. Not surprisingly, one of 007’s favorite weapons were the x-ray glasses that helped him do both. After all, any respectable spy should be able to enjoy a night at the casino while surreptitiously spotting weapons on some people and scoping out lingerie on others (a capability Bond was never shy about using.) Never one to be taken by surprise, Bond always knew who his aggressors were, and possessed the tactical advantage of preparing himself accordingly.

Cigarette Dart Gun From You Only Live Twice

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Cigarettes kill, but Bond’s cigarette dart gun made sure you didn’t even have to smoke to meet your demise. A brilliant little weapon, the gun looked just like an ordinary cigarette, except when you lit it, a rocket-propelled dart flew out and exploded upon impact with Bond’s target. These days such a weapon might be less practical, now that smoking in most indoor public places is illegal. But outside all bets are off, and a man lighting up a cigarette in the shadows might be the last thing a hoodlum sees before it all goes black. It also comes in handy for breaking out of locked rooms and holding cells, as Bond ingeniously demonstrated in You Only Live Twice.

Explosive Chewing Gum From Mission: Impossible

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Tom Cruise introduced meanest stick of Wrigley’s the world had ever seen in 1996’s Mission: Impossible. Dubbed “Red Light, Green Light” gum, the stick of candy was anything but child’s play. One side of the gum was red and the other was green. When combined, they produced a big enough explosion to knock a helicopter clear out of the sky. And this gum carries more risks than a toothache; it seems that the agent had to be quite precise to avoid falling victim to his own secret weapon. Hazards notwithstanding, adhesive, explosive gum has endless uses and rescued Cruise from numerous sticky situations. Pun intended.

TV-Wristwatch From Octopussy

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It’s tough to top the swashbuckling image of James Bond receiving video intelligence feeds and cable television on his arm thanks to his TV-enabled wristwatch in Octopussy. We might be able to watch YouTube clips from our iPhones, but we’re still waiting to call up ESPN or FX on our wrists. Interestingly, a company actually attempted to sell a television wristwatch with meager success a few months before the movie’s release. Sadly, the watch required wearing a headset for sound and a bulky receiver for the TV signal. Their impractical burdens outweighed their benefits, and almost no one wore them after the novelty wore off.

Contact Lens Video Camera From I Spy

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For situations where even hidden sunglass cameras are too conspicuous, contact lens video cameras ensure you don’t miss a frame of the room or get a chest full of lead in the process. In I Spy, Eddie Murphy sports one of these innocuous oculars and sings some Marvin Gaye to Owen Wilson. Not exactly the most fascinating use for such bleeding-edge technology, but then again, I Spy wasn’t exactly a blockbuster flick, either. Nonetheless, the lenses made for some serious intrigue. (Although it does beg the question of how contact lenses containing wires and video transmitters were still transparent enough to see through.)

Lighter With 83 Options From Our Man Flint

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For a lighter with more options than a fully loaded Maserati, one must wonder how there is still ample room for fluid in the Lighter With 83 Options. Boasting such exotic features as steel-cutting lasers and impact explosion triggers, the lighter may well be all a spy needs to complete his mission and smoke a celebratory cigar. The movie Our Man Flint was more of a comedy than a serious spy thriller, and unfortunately we never did get to see what the majority of those 82 other options consisted of. The only foreseeable problem with using such a gadget in the field might be the sizable manual one would have to carry in order avoid confusing “option 57” from “option 75,” or other similar, perhaps disastrous mistakes.

The Swiss Army Knife From Get Smart

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Every secret agent needs his trusty pocketknife. Hundreds of potential scenarios call for a versatile multi-tool, but Maxwell Smart’s special issue Swiss Army knife goes a few steps beyond the model you might have toted as a young boy scout. For starters, the pocketknife came equipped with a flamethrower that could roast opposition up to six feet away. When greater distance stood between Agent Smart and his targets, the knife’s built-in blowgun with poison tipped darts took center stage. A folding scope was also included for ease of targeting. Lastly, the Swiss Army tool boasted a pocket crossbow that fired harpoons connected to spider-silk nano-silk with the holding capacity of steel cable. All told, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which this little gadget wouldn’t assist Max in making his getaway.

The Pontiac GTO From XxX

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James Bond was always famous for having slick and super-equipped rides, often featuring exotic weapons or invisible cloaks that allowed him to avert disaster with vigor and aplomb. When it comes to the most action-packed spy car ever assembled, however, even Bond would be jealous of Xander Cage’s 1967 Pontiac GTO. Aside from being one of the most powerful and capable muscle cars in American history, Cage’s GTO was an all-out war machine, capable of taking down any one foolish enough to stand in front of his lead foot. Twin rocket launchers took care any vehicles in hot-rod tank’s path, while exploding hubcaps dispensed with ill-intentioned tailgaters. Just to err on the side of too much weaponry, the car also came stocked with a flamethrower in the event Cage ran into any unexpected opposition. For defense and escape, the car featured parachutes for slowing (or soaring off roadside cliffs, as agents so often do) and an ejection driver’s seat for when you’ve gotten in a bit over your head. In an age where European super-cars dominate action movies, XxX offered a sorely-needed tribute to this ferocious piece of American muscle.

Shoe phone From Get Smart

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In an age where cellular phones can fit in the palm of a toddler’s hand, the shoe phone from the original TV series Get Smart might not be today’s most desired spy gadget. But in its day, the clunky device was both top of the line and humorous to watch. The 2008 movie featured a modern version of the shoe phone, which was a bit sleeker, but still no match for an iPhone 3GS. (Then again, even the most suave spy can only look so good talking into a size 11 shoe.) Still, agents need a lot of pocket room, and cell phones just take up space. Store it in your shoe and that’s more room for cyanide pills, exploding dental floss and the like. No matter how you look at it, the shoe phone may not have been sexy, but it sure was funny.

The Eyeball Camera From Doomsday

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One might assume that getting your eyeball destroyed in a military riot would be a bad thing. For many of us, it would. For Major Eden Sinclair, though, this childhood trauma enabled her to take utilize one of the most intriguing spy gadgets in recent memory. The cybernetic Eyeball Camera can be slid into her eye socket and provide binocular sight, or dislodged and rolled down a hallway where it acts as a pivoting video transmitter. The feed can be watched by Sinclair on her wristwatch from anywhere nearby. This portable and inconspicuous surveillance gadget is infinitely helpful in planning out your room clearing tactics before bursting in all-guns-blazing.

Golden Gun from The Man With The Golden Gun

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Perhaps the most famous James Bond gadget of all, the Golden Gun consisted of a pen, a cigarette lighter, and a cufflink. It sounds like something MacGyver would whip up, but Bond had him beat with this flashy firearm. The downside is that the weapon only held one bullet, but fortunately, that was usually all Bond needed to put down the villain on the receiving end of the 24-karat barrel. The bullet could travel a distance too; it’s just too bad he was unable to build a model with a high- capacity clip. Then the bad guys would really be in for a gleaming spray of death.

The Neuralizer From Men In Black

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Secret agents do more than just battle terrorists and organized crime: they also fight against the worst scum of the universe. These agents are known as the Men In Black, and their slickest gadget is one of the most practical for daily use. A small, portable memory erasing device, the Neuralizer is an MIB agent’s most important tool. All the agent has to do is flash the bulb at the intended person or crowd and stand back as their memory of what just happened is erased. If the person has witnessed something top-secret, the agent can erase their memory of the event, and then offer some neutral explanation for it (for example: “There was a gas leak”). Men in black always wear dark black sunglasses that are specially constructed to protect them against the effects of the Neuralizer.

Cell Phone Sonar From The Dark Knight

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Imagine the ability to see every square inch of a city simultaneously. You could track your friends, incriminate your enemies, and locate almost anything you desired. This is the kind of power that Batman wielded in 2008’s soon-to-be-classic The Dark Knight. Using a multitude of flat-screen displays, Batman could view anywhere in Gotham City on a massive, ostentatious machine. There was no need to set up cameras on every street, either. Rather, the machine locked onto every cellular phone signal in the city and repurposed the phones’ speakers as sonar emitters. In this way, everyone and everything could be imaged using sound waves broadcasted from the phones. Such power quickly leads to corruption, and that’s why the machine came with its own self-destruct system to ensure that it was only used for its expressed purpose.