Casino Royale (1954)

[Arkadin]

THE original Bond TV production from 1954 has been released on bd, although whether this bd constitutes a "gray area" release I have no idea. This bd doesn't seem to be reflected in the bd.com database that I could find, but maybe it is hidden somewhere. Apparently, like The Sadist bd, this blu-ray is only available from the distributor through the Amazon marketplace.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Casin...Blu-ray/72825/
http://www.amazon.com/James-Casino-R...no+royale+1954

Casino Royale (1954) (wiki)-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_..._%28Climax!%29

More info about this initial Bond production (contains spoilers)--
The first “Non-Bond”, also, in fact, the first James Bond adaptation ever filmed, has its roots in the very first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. It may be hard to imagine a time that James Bond, agent 007, was not a pop culture icon and a stalwart resident of our collective consciousness, but in 1954 Ian Fleming accepted a mere one thousand dollars from the CBS Television Network for the rights to adapt Casino Royale as the third episode of its anthology series Climax!

In that the novel that first introduced Commander Bond to the world had only been released in April of the previous year, a live broadcast on national American television in October 1954 could serve to expose Fleming’s “dreadful oafish opus” (as he called the novel) to a wider audience and to launch its author (himself a retired Naval Intelligence Officer) to stardom. This is especially true, considering the first book’s sluggish sales in the American market. However, with American Television being what it was at the time (and James Bond being little more than an upstart character in, by that time, two novels) liberties were taken with our beloved super-spy in ways that would rankle true Bond fans of today. The 48 minute adaptation (written by Anthony Ellis and frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett) featured a fully American Secret Agent known as “Card Sense Jimmy Bond” played by fully American actor Barry Nelson.

Nelson was dapper enough, but a far cry from the suave, debonaire Bond of the films that we know so well. Bond may be a Yank here, but his best known American amigo, Felix Leiter has been recast as British Intelligence agent Clarence Leiter. If that fails to be enough to beckon you into the Casino, perhaps witnessing Peter Lorre’s turn as the first ever major Bond Villain, Le Chiffre, will. Owing to the relatively short run-time and limitations of live television, Casino Royale‘s title is its only location and much of the action of the novel is removed in favor of a an hour of much more card playing than spying (complete with an audience-friendly education on how to play the game of baccarat)

The episode did help novel sales, but wasn’t nearly the big splash we would come to expect for one of the most recognizable characters in pop culture. As with a great many live television episodes, Casino Royale was not preserved by the studio and was considered lost for decades. In spite of its many departures from the character and novel, fans embraced Casino Royale when a film historian located a kinescope of the first “Non-Bond” in 1981. Its subsequent airings on TBS and releases on VHS were still forced to omit the final sequences, which were not rediscovered for another several years. This year’s DVD release contains the entire episode as aired. While this one is certainly a unique earmark in the history of Mr. Bond, it remains an interesting look at an early version of our beloved espionage hero.

so if you really want to own the absolute complete record of Bond this bd is needed.