When the best James Bond movie ever made, Casino Royale debuting in 2006, he introduced the audience to a new, rough and much more down-to-earth version of the famous spy. Gone are the elaborate Q gadgets and inescapable death traps. In fact, Q as a character was completely removed from the films. All of these Bond trademarks will find their way back into the franchise with 2012 Skyfall — still the biggest Bond film yet despite not being very good - but for Casino Royale, they were eschewed in favor of cinematic realism that depicted Bond's origins in suitably gritty terms.

But by the time Daniel Craig's tenure as Bond came to an end, much of that delicious restraint had been abandoned—a fact never more apparent than when Aeon Productions and director Cary Fukunaga decided to kill off Craig's ex-ground spy with a whole cluster of missiles at the end of No Time for dying." Of course, this is far from the first time the Bond saga has depicted something unrealistic - although it was the first time it did so with a supposedly grounded version of the titular spy. Indeed, the film that nearly destroyed cinema's most enduring legacy, Die Another Day, is still seen as worst bond movie ever largely due to its more fantastical elements, such as giant ice palaces, invisible cars, and that favorite trope of hacker blockbuster movies: giant sky lasers.

But unrealistic elements and unbelievable scenarios actually have a proud history within the Bond canon, starting with Sean Connery's 007, who came very close to having his nether regions removed with an unnecessarily slow-moving laser beam. Then there was the time Roger Moore's Bond jumped a series of crocodiles to escape certain death. But this amazing moment was actually much more real than most people think.

James Bond movies are not the most realistic spy moviesbut that's part of the reason we love them. Bond himself is a fantasy, a fantasy that author John Le Carré famously tried to subvert with his more realistic character George Smiley. But while Le Carré's novels and their adaptations have their own appeal ("The Tailor Soldier's Spy" is one of the best spy movies of all time), Bond remains the quintessential cinematic spy to this day—even with all the ice palaces and groin lasers.

When Roger Moore played the character, he got into all sorts of absurd and hilarious scenarios, from laser battles in space to snowboarding while being accompanied by the California Girls for some reason. In his first tuxedo outing, 1973's Live and Let Die, Moore Bond finds himself in a classic 007 predicament when he's marooned on a small island in the middle of a crocodile-infested swamp. He then tries to distract the croc by throwing meat into the water before using his electromagnetic watch to lure a boat towards him. When both attempts fail and Bond calms down, he simply jumps his way through the line of reptilian heads to safety in an amusingly batshit finish to the entire sequence.

While this ranks somewhere near the bottom of the funniest Bond moments, it's still amazing when Moore's spy leaps his way to freedom - more at home in a Disney cartoon than a spy movie. But this is one Bond moment that's actually a lot more real than you might know. The scene was shot on a real Jamaican crocodile farm owned by Ross Kananga, which, according to Moore behind the scenes featurehoused 1,500 of the creatures. Kananga has been doing tricks with crocodiles since childhood, and for 20 minutes at one point he caught his own head in the jaws of one of the reptiles. He also watched his father, with whom he performed the plays, eat one of the steps. So you'd imagine that a man who's been through that kind of trauma wouldn't be all that impressed with Bond's daring escape over the heads of a line of crocodiles - and you'd be right. In fact, Kananga was so unfazed by the stunt that he agreed to do it himself ... with real crocodiles.

For the scenes involving Roger Moore and the crocs, several foam animals were added to the swamp, while the rest of the live horns were removed. But once it came time for Bond's precarious escape, Ross Kananga donned Moore's outfit, complete with crocodile skin shoes, to undertake the job of actually jumping over three living legs. Like behind the scenes recording shows, he actually had to perform the stunt five times before doing it, and the unused footage is frankly amazing, with Kananga falling into the water multiple times as his crocs thrash wildly at him. Tom Cruise may have taken six steps on the motorcycle jump in 'Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning' but honestly, if I don't see him jump three live crocodiles in the next Mission: Impossible movie, I'm going to be unimpressed.

According to BalenTransKananga at least tied the animals' legs to make the stunt less risky, but their jaws were left free to strike at the owner as he tried to jump to shore. As the stuntman revealed in a 1973 interview (via BoldenTrance), “The film company kept sending to London for more clothes. The crocs chewed up everything when I hit the water, including my shoes. "I got one hundred and ninety-three stitches in my leg and face."

However, for one man who was trapped in the jaws of a croc for 20 minutes, watched as his own father was eaten alive and Tee Hee actor Julius Harris discoveredonce had a "pet lion" patrolling his crocodile farm, the experience must have been just a day's work. Meanwhile, Moore was happy to simply watch the multiple stages play out, while Kananga was compensated with a $60,000 payout. Sadly, he would die of a heart attack five years later, but his daring efforts are immortalized in Live and Let Die.