Of the phrase ''This Never Happened To The Other Fella'' being spoken in the opening scene of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), screenwriter Richard Maibaum said in an interview with Steven Jay Rubin in Los Angeles on 30th April 1977: "It was the first time that we actually spoofed ourselves in the series. We decided this time that we would break the aesthetic distance for once. It was a different guy. We knew, and we knew the audience knew. So we decided, what the hell. Let's have a little fun. And the audience laughed and accepted it, and they were pleased that we didn't try some kind of phony B-picture thing to excuse the fact that we had a new James Bond."
This film's ''This Never Happened to the Other Fella'' title is taken from a line of dialogue in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). This is when George Lazenby playing James Bond says at start of the film this never happened to the other fella which was a veiled fourth-wall breaking reference to Sean Connery playing James Bond and George Lazenby replacing him.
One of a number of major mainly theatrical feature film documentaries about James Bond that have been made during the 2010s and 2020s since the 50th Anniversary of the official James Bond film franchise in 2012 and the release of the Bond movie Skyfall (2012). Others include: Everything or Nothing (2012), Becoming Bond (2017), For Our Eyes Only: John Glen (2021), Being James Bond: The Daniel Craig Story (2021) and The Other Fellow (2022).
Though this doco's title 'The Other Fellow', is taken from dialogue in the Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), where James Bond says ''This Never Happened To The Other Fella'', the word ''fellow'' actually also appears in dialogue in the very first James Bond filmed production - the tele-film Casino Royale (1954). Clarence Leiter (Michael Pate) asks ''Aren't you the fellow who was shot?'' to which James Bond (Barry Nelson) replies: ''No, I'm the fellow who was missed.'' In fact, the words ''fella'' and/or ''fellow'' are mentioned several times in this tele-movie and most of these are by the Clarence Leiter character who is actually an Englishman.
''This Never Happened To The Other Fella'' is also the name of a piece of music score composed by John Barry from the soundtrack to the Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).