Growing the Beard/Film


 * While Dr. No was considered a good film, From Russia With Love is where things started to grow for James Bond. It was a stronger film and introduced many of the things we would think of with the series. It was an even greater hit and is among the fans often (and by Sean Connery himself) considered to be the greatest Bond of them all and put the series on the map. Goldfinger is another strong contender and was the start for the Bond-fever. The Spy Who Loved Me is often considered the film where Roger Moore grew the beard, but many also consider him to have lost it soon afterwards.
 * The Star Trek film series itself grew the beard between its first and second installments. The Motion Picture was devised as a grand meditation on man's place in the universe, but ended up as a shallow light show filled with wooden actors playing cardboard characters. In contrast, The Wrath of Khan was a swashbuckling adventure in space that dealt far more successfully with weightier themes than its predecessor. The film series went through the exact same cycle with The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country; the former film was a self-conscious epic that fell on its face, whereas the sequel was superficially a detective mystery, but one that dealt with dark and complex themes in the form of a political fable about the end of the Cold War an entertaining way. The cycle repeated itself once again with the Darker and Edgier Nemesis, which was such a disaster that the series needed a reboot.
 * In an amusing inversion of this trope, Riker shaves off the Trope Naming beard in Star Trek Insurrection. He grew it back for Star Trek Nemesis, but the damage was done for the Trek franchise.