Watching the breakfast news earlier I noticed a short item about the Paris Olympics: it still isn’t for six months and they’re already talking about it. Obviously they were focusing on the sport side of things, but what I’m most interested in are the ceremonies. To be honest I’m expecting nothing less than spectacular from Paris this summer; anything else would be a disappointment.

Mind you, I’ve already started to wonder about the LA Olympics in four years. I’d be curious to know whether they have already started to plan their ceremonies: Los Angeles is supposedly the entertainment capital of the world, after all. I wonder if they would try to do something similar to having James Bond escort the Queen, a la London 2012.

Strangely, the prospect that they might do so interests me. We know how competitive American culture can get, so I reckon that there will already be several film studios vying to have their characters and franchises foregrounded like James Bond was. What producer wouldn’t be dying to have their lead character be shown to escort the President from Washington to LA? It would obviously give that character a status in American culture like no other. After all, Happy and Glorious was arguably the stand out moment of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony – the bit everyone still remembers, a moment of incomparable national pride. Then again, do any American fictional characters resonate with America culturally in the same way that James Bond resonates with Britain? I don’t think any character holds the same cultural significance. Nonetheless, the execs of every film studio in the States must be jumping over one another to get their franchise used in such a moment of national glory. The question is, what could the ceremony planners do? What character could be linked to the American state like 007 was linked with the UK twelve years ago? Jason Bourne? Agent Jay from Men in Black? Captain Jack Sparrow? I suppose we’ll have to just wait and see.