Let's get one thing absolutely clear. I'm not going to include Terrahawks. It was rubbish. I may be all nostalgic over most Gerry and Sylvia Anderson programs - including the live action of UFO - but I draw the line at Terrahawks.
OK. No Terrahawks then.
Gerry Anderson started way back in 1957 with The Adventures of Twizzle of which I have no recollection at all. (Well I was only born in 1957!) I also know the second series, Torchy The Battery Boy (1958-59) only by reputation. I've seen it since on YouTube but I have no memory of it. It's the only one though. I do recall seeing the next series, Four Feather Falls (1959-1960, but repeated later) in which Two-Gun Tex had a talking horse and dog and magic guns. The characters in Toy Story 2 bear more than a slight resemblance to it.
Of course the first "proper" one, the first of their science fiction series and a precursor to all of their greatest triumphs, was Supercar. I have some Supercar episodes on DVD. They have clunky string puppets that walk without touching the floor, a flying car, a child who gets into trouble and a pet monkey. What more could you want?
Supercar was an innocent and rather primitive foray into puppet adventures but, for me, the best it ever got was the next production from the Andersons: Fireball XL5. Later series, particularly Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet were great but it was Fireball XL5 that started the whole style. It had the truly iconic spaceship of the title, piloted by Steve Zodiac and Venus ably assisted by my favourite Robert The Robot who would frequently intone an electronic "On our way 'ome". It had a theme that it's impossible to forget, the most perfectly ludicrous take off mechanism for XL5, a catchy closing theme, and the transparent humanoid Robbie who bears more than a passing resemblance to C3P0 as he is shown in the Star Wars prequels before he gets his gold-plating. It was wonderful.
Then there were the adventures of Stingray. Who could forget that opening with Marineville disappearing underground and the voiceover of "Anything can happen in the next half hour"?
Increasingly sophisticated series Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet followed. Now the puppets were getting more realistic and the stories were getting more complex, sometimes almost up to a live drama level.
Then it all started to fall apart. Neither Joe 90 nor the Secret Service were particularly good, though they were OK.
UFO, an attempt at live action, I remember with fondness but the acting was often as wooden as it had been in any of the puppet series and its successor Space 1999 suffered not only this problem but a ludicrous premise and a lot of technobabble scripting that often made it unwatchable.
There has more recently been a new version of CGI Captain Scarlet which was actually pretty good, being, in the main, true (apart from Lieutenant Green's inexplicable sex change) to the spirit and ideas of the original but suffering from a lack of network commitment and poor scheduling. I'd still rather have the puppet version but modern kids demand a more sophisticated approach to television.
I think most of the series would stand a modern update. The ideas and the stories would be update easily and I would love to see a remade Fireball XL5 - as long as it was done in the style of the new Captain Scarlet and not in the style of the truly dire Thunderbirds movie.
OK. No Terrahawks then.
Gerry Anderson started way back in 1957 with The Adventures of Twizzle of which I have no recollection at all. (Well I was only born in 1957!) I also know the second series, Torchy The Battery Boy (1958-59) only by reputation. I've seen it since on YouTube but I have no memory of it. It's the only one though. I do recall seeing the next series, Four Feather Falls (1959-1960, but repeated later) in which Two-Gun Tex had a talking horse and dog and magic guns. The characters in Toy Story 2 bear more than a slight resemblance to it.
Of course the first "proper" one, the first of their science fiction series and a precursor to all of their greatest triumphs, was Supercar. I have some Supercar episodes on DVD. They have clunky string puppets that walk without touching the floor, a flying car, a child who gets into trouble and a pet monkey. What more could you want?
Supercar was an innocent and rather primitive foray into puppet adventures but, for me, the best it ever got was the next production from the Andersons: Fireball XL5. Later series, particularly Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet were great but it was Fireball XL5 that started the whole style. It had the truly iconic spaceship of the title, piloted by Steve Zodiac and Venus ably assisted by my favourite Robert The Robot who would frequently intone an electronic "On our way 'ome". It had a theme that it's impossible to forget, the most perfectly ludicrous take off mechanism for XL5, a catchy closing theme, and the transparent humanoid Robbie who bears more than a passing resemblance to C3P0 as he is shown in the Star Wars prequels before he gets his gold-plating. It was wonderful.
Then there were the adventures of Stingray. Who could forget that opening with Marineville disappearing underground and the voiceover of "Anything can happen in the next half hour"?
Increasingly sophisticated series Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet followed. Now the puppets were getting more realistic and the stories were getting more complex, sometimes almost up to a live drama level.
Then it all started to fall apart. Neither Joe 90 nor the Secret Service were particularly good, though they were OK.
UFO, an attempt at live action, I remember with fondness but the acting was often as wooden as it had been in any of the puppet series and its successor Space 1999 suffered not only this problem but a ludicrous premise and a lot of technobabble scripting that often made it unwatchable.
There has more recently been a new version of CGI Captain Scarlet which was actually pretty good, being, in the main, true (apart from Lieutenant Green's inexplicable sex change) to the spirit and ideas of the original but suffering from a lack of network commitment and poor scheduling. I'd still rather have the puppet version but modern kids demand a more sophisticated approach to television.
I think most of the series would stand a modern update. The ideas and the stories would be update easily and I would love to see a remade Fireball XL5 - as long as it was done in the style of the new Captain Scarlet and not in the style of the truly dire Thunderbirds movie.
2 comments:
Fireball XL5 was my favourite too. Isn't the launch pad simply a V1 "ski slope"? - it worked all right for the doodlebug so why not for a 21st century space shuttle?
My only problem was that Fireball XL5 only travelled to made-up planets, unlike the Galasphere in Space Patrol that visited worlds you could actually recognise from an encyclopaedia - including Jupiter, where the atmosphere was so thick it actually came up to Larry Dart's knees!
On our way 'ome
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