Because of Sir Sean Connery's high fee, the special effects budget was significantly scaled back. Connery was reportedly paid $1,250,000 to return as James Bond, a figure unheard of in those days.

During a late 1990s airing of the movie on TBS' "Dinner and A Movie", Bruce Glover recalled that while filming their scenes together, he and Putter Smith had Sir Sean Connery convinced that the two were actually openly homosexual. Glover added that a few years later, while on an airline flight, he was flirting with a stewardess when he suddenly heard a male Scottish-accented voice saying, "You son of a bitch". Glover turned around and saw that the man was Connery.

Instant mashed potatoes were used to replicate the consistency of the brown substance mud bath featured in the opening teaser. What the producers failed to take into account was that after twenty-four hours, and under all the hot lights, mashed potatoes emit an almost unbearable smell.

Sir Sean Connery made the most of his time on-location in Las Vegas: "I didn't get any sleep at all. We shot every night; I caught all the shows and played golf all day. On the weekend I collapsed, boy, did I collapse. Like a skull with legs." He also played the slot machines, and once delayed a scene because he was collecting his winnings.

During Bond's briefing with M and Sir Donald Munger at the beginning, Munger refers to Bond having just been on holiday, and M later quips how the Service had managed well during Bond's absence. These were inside jokes referring to Sir Sean Connery's absence in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).

Continuity

During the lunar rover chase scene at 1:01:45, the camera follows the rover going down a ravine while a pursuing car flips and rolls down the slope. When the car stops at the bottom of the hill, one of the moon buggy's wheels, not the car's, rolls into the foreground. In the next shot, Bond is still driving the rover with all of its wheels attached.

The lunar rover and the dirt trike chasing it both lose a wheel which reappears on the vehicle later.

Bond passes the Golden Nugget several times during the chase but has not turned any corners on the street so he can't just be going round in circles.

Tiffany's position in the doorway changes rapidly several times while Bond is fighting Peter Franks in the glass elevator.

When Bond is holding Bambi and Thumper under water his hair is messed up. When Felix comes in, it is slicked back again.



Factual errors

The laser beam destroys a Soviet submarine moving underwater. First, it's almost impossible to locate a submerged, moving submarine in the vastness of the ocean. Then the chances of a laser going through the water causing it to blow it up are extremely remote.

Scorpions rarely sting humans, and even more rarely do scorpion stings cause death. Most scorpion stings are non-fatal. In cases that are fatal, death is not instantaneous. Scorpion venom usually takes several hours to take complete effect on the body. A scorpion is not a portable lethal injection device, as depicted in this movie.

Shady opens the coffin, that was just in the incinerator, without releasing the catches and then grabs the lid which ought to be too hot to touch. Also, as it had just come out of the incinerator, the coffin should have been smoking.

You cannot make a laser out of diamonds. Even if you could, you could not make a laser out of multiple gem-quality stones; ruby lasers, for instance, are made from a single flawless rod of artificially-grown ruby.

When Tiffany takes Bond's [fake] fingerprint and compares it to that of Peter Franks, the two images are 100% identical. Although the two images would be similar, it would be virtually impossible to produce two 100% identical fingerprints, which are taken at the same angle, with the same amount of substrate, and the same amount of pressure applied. Additionally, the fingerprint does not appear to be an actual fingerprint, but portions of two separate prints that have been mashed together.



Incorrectly regarded as goofs

Cremation furnaces run at 870-980 ?C which would burn up any diamonds present. It would be impossible to successfully smuggle diamonds inside a cadaver and separate them via cremation. However, we never see the furnace at Slumber, Inc. actually operating, and cremation usually takes an hour and a half whereas Bond is given the diamonds a few minutes after the coffin moves down the belt. It is more likely that the diamonds were simply removed from the body.

During the Las Vegas car chase scene, Bond's car ends up riding on two wheels in order to pass through a narrow alley. When the car emerges at the other end of the alley it is balancing on the opposite pair of wheels. The producers spotted this error before release, however, and inserted a quick shot to indicate that, for some reason, Bond flips the car onto its other wheels. There must have been an opening somewhere in the alley.

Bond's Las Vegas hotel room light switches are oriented to the British standard (up for off, down for on) instead of the US standard (up for on, down for off). Many large rooms in the United States, particularly hotel rooms, will have multiple switches for the same light. If the light had been turned on using one switch, the other switch would have to be flipped the opposite way in order to turn it off.

As Bond escapes from W. Techtronics and runs across the "moonscape" set, one of the astronauts moves in slow motion when he tries to stop Bond who runs past him. It may seem that there's no reason for this, but apart from being a funny joke, it's also a jibe at the stupidity of moon-landing conspiracy theories. It's also plausible that the astronaut was moving slowly because he was wearing a 200 lb. spacesuit.

Wint and Kidd are clearly assigned by Blofeld and Saxby to kill anyone involved with the diamonds within the organization, their faces being unknown by all targets. Yet, when they knock Bond unconscious and put him into the coffin, it is Shady Tree and Morton Slumber who open the coffin, as if they had also participated in the murder. There is nothing to suggest that Shady Tree and Morton Slumber were not involved in the attempted murder, as they are also associates of Blofeld involved in the diamond smuggling operation.



Revealing mistakes

In the chase scene in the desert when James Bond is being tailed by sedans, Bond makes a jump that causes one of the cars to flip and roll behind him. Once it rolls down the dune, a spare tire not matching those on the car rolls into the foreground for no apparent reason. The rolled car did not lose a tire. (The wheel is in fact from the lunar rover - apparently the prop vehicle shed its wheel(s) a few times during filming.)

During Bambi and Thumper's attack, while performing a series of cartwheels, Thumper's skin color appears to change. This is most noticeable just as she lands.

During the establishing shot of the Whyte House, in actuality the Las Vegas Hilton, you can still see the Las Vegas Hilton's name at the entrance to the building.

When the construction workers open the manhole in the pipeline you can see that the hand wheel isn't connected to any kind of latching mechanism, therefore making it useless to be turning it before they open it.

When Bond is fighting Peter Franks in the elevator, Franks drops the glass shard before his wrist gets hit for the second time (the one that supposedly makes him drop the shard).



Miscellaneous

When Bond is escaping from W. Techtronics and is being chased by the Honda ATVs, the one ATV fails and has to be restarted. After the rider restarts it, instead of immediately taking off and going after Bond, he pauses and waits for Sean Connery to attack him.

Blofeld's "voice box" is simply a Sony TC-165 cassette deck with some added "lights, bells and whistles".

When Kidd and Wint are watching the helicopter fly away before it explodes, Kidd's hair is being blown by the wind. When the helicopter explodes, Kidd's hair stops blowing and the image jumps slightly which means the shot of the explosion was edited into the scene after the recording of the helicopter flying away was stopped.



Audio/visual unsynchronized

As the Ford sedans are racing through the desert in pursuit of the lunar rover, the exact same engine revving sound effect is used over and over throughout the scene.

The man Bond attacks in the very first scene manages to scream "Cai-Cai-Cairo!" without moving his mouth.

When Bond is released from the burning coffin, Shady Tree's diatribe against him about the phony diamonds doesn't match the movement of his mouth.

When Bond is speaking, as Saxby, to Blofeld using the voice disguise machine, Bond's lips do not match the voice when he says, "It's a cinch he's not working alone."

When Plenty O'Toole comes to Bond's room, she compliments on how "super" the place is, but her mouth does not move. Later, when a half-naked Plenty is yelling as she's being forced over to the window, her screaming does not match the movement of her lips.



Crew or equipment visible

When Peter Franks arrives at Dover he gets a message. He parks his car outside an office and as he walks in the camera crew is reflected in the window.



Errors in geography

When Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd exit the tunnel with Mr. Bond in the trunk of the car, the cover that lifts up has a Saguaro Cactus on it. That type of cactus only grows in extreme southeastern California, southern Arizona and adjoining northwestern Mexico.

The effect of the white cloud from the explosion of the rocket in North Dakota is used again for the explosion of the long row of rockets in China.



Plot holes

Since the diamond cartel is careful to identify Peter Franks with fingerprints, it is odd that they didn't take the additional precaution of having a photograph of his face.

Wint and Kidd operate by killing their victims quickly and with certainty, except for Bond who they leave in a deathtrap, unless they assumed the poison gas in the elevator was lethal.

MI6 goes through the trouble of providing James Bond a set of fake finger prints to match that of Peter Franks, but does not provide any facial disguise when all it would have taken was a photo of Franks to give Bond away.

Wint and Kidd dispose of Bond by leaving his drugged, unconscious body in a 8' section of underground pipe, open at both ends. The next day, a construction crew somehow manages to select the pipe section, hook it to a crane, lower it into position and bury it in dirt without happening to notice a man in a tuxedo apparently sleeping in it.

At the gas station, Bond enters the rear of the green van. The van visibly shakes as he enters but the driver takes no notice.



Character error

At the circus the announcer says that the transforming woman was captured near Nairobi, South Africa. Nairobi is in Kenya.

During the discussion about the satellite and what it might be used for, Bond describes Dr. Metz as being an expert in "light retraction" - he should have said "light refraction".

During the craps game, Plenty throws a nine to establish the point, then immediately throws a seven, thus losing. The stick-man incorrectly says she "craps out" when the proper phrase would be she "sevens out."