I just got the DVD set of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray. I loved the show as a kid, and now I’m doing the “I remember that” bit.
One odd thing I remember is not being able to quite understand one of Commander Shore’s lines in the opening credits. And I still can’t get it. It’s when they show the closeups of the lights, and then zoom in on the Commander in the window of the control building as he’s speaking over the loudspeaker. It sounds to me like he says, “Refill, miant ally battle stations.” Followed, of course, by the great, “Anything can happen in the next half hour!”
I just wanted to add that when I was a kid, I was majorly crazy about Marina. In fact, one of the times I considered using when I registered was “Troy Tempest.”
You could try the closed-captioning on your TV itself. Sometimes, DVDs that aren’t subtitled have closed-captioning (and sometimes the CC is even more accurate). Good luck!
Stingray was a brilliant piece of art on any number of levels. It was produced at the height of the cold war, when people thought they could survive a nuclear onslaught by dint of superior Western planning… the city built on hydraulic jacks was a metaphor for the fallout shelters millions of Americans had constructed in their back yards; so was the idea that our real enemy comes not from outer space, but from across (e.g. beneath) the ocean.
The shot of the Hydromic missiles rising from their silos sends a chill down my spine to this day, as when I was a little boy, America’s major cities were defended by Nike missile installations that I remember distinctly as being nearly identical to Marineville. They were deconstructed pursuant to the ABM treaty a few years later and forgotten even by native Chicagoans, but by that time Stingray had been burned into my consciousness and I spent the next 30 years studying Gerry Anderson productions the way others might study the interior of distant stars.
KoalaBear thats quite a link! Certainly a childhood memory that would be difficult to lose.
I always thought that Stingray’s appeal was that Marineville was designed around more conventional attacks. But then the real threat was from under the sea and the only defence was Stingray, kinda of a thin blue line
