Five…
Four…
Three…
Two…
One!
Thunderbirds are go!
Okay, this is me reverting to childhood… 
I’m watching Thunderbirds. Just finished Episode 3: City of fire. It involves a 350-storey tower that is brought down by a fire caused by an exploding car in the car park. Eerie.
I remember that episode. The acting was kinda… wooden.
Actually, the acting is rather… fiberglass! 
Did they ever release that live action Thunderbirds movie? That looked even worse than the series and it, um, was not my cup of tea.
‘Worse than the series…’ I understand the individual words, but the arrangement is nonsensical. I mean, the way they’re arranged, it sounds as if the series was bad!
Johnny, me old pal, I was a mere sprat of ten when it came on the air, its very the Core Audience itself, and I thought the series, at my most gracious, stunk. Sure, I still watched it since there was naught but it and Air Force propaganda videos I had seen ten times to choose from at that time of a Saturday morning, but that didn’t make it any better.
I was younger than that – six, or so – watching them on re-run. I think I was a little intrigues by the marionettes, but I really liked the air- and spacecraft. (I was the kid who laid out runways with teletype paper, and played with my Matchbox airplains while watching Skyhawks.) Unlike cartoons, the ships they used were ‘real’. I thought it was cool.
Now that I’m older, I can pick out flaws. For example in ‘City Of Fire’ they were experimenting with a new gas Brain invented that, when used in cutting torches, allows them to cut through steel faster than with a laser. Seems the gas gets into their pores and makes them pass out. Erm… Why not use a protective suit? Or in ‘Pit Of Peril’ the army guys go into a burning pit with only an air mask for protection, and they’re injured by the over-200°F heat. Kinda dumb. And when Thunderbird 2 comes out of its cave, the palm trees flop to the side so that it can go on the road to its launch site. Why not just plant the trees farther apart? And where do they get their money, anyway?
But a lot of the stuff hold up – at least, taken in context. And there’s some amusing dialog that never occured to me as a child. (‘Those International Rescue boys sure have some nice equipment!’ ) I’m also amused that everything is labelled. (Anderson did the same thing in UFO, which was aimed at an older audience and which I also watched as a child.) As a child I liked the adventure and the awesome ‘toys’. As an adult I still appreciate the model work, and the puppetry and the early-'60s version of 21st Century technology.
If you’re in the UK, you will be able to enjoy Thunderbirds each weekday on BBC2, starting on Monday at 12.15! (they muck about with the timings throughout the week - typical Beeb). Looks like they’ll be showing them in sequence, as they’re starting with “Trapped in the Sky” followed by “Pit of Peril”, “City of Fire”, the magnificent “Sun Probe” (“This is it; she’s breaking up. Figured I’d be dead by now…”) and, on Friday, “The Uninvited”.
I was about 6 when the show first aired (I recall seeing a trailer while I was off school with chickenpox); I was already a fan of the other Gerry Anderson stuff - Stingray, Fireball XL5, Supercar - so took to it readily. Now I’m in my mid-40’s and will still tune in.
Sadly, I’m not. 
If only an attractive English woman were looking for a Yank husband…
I don’t think they ever showed Stingray over here. From what I’ve heard, it focuses on characters more than technology. Sounds interesting; I may have to pick it up. Hey, I’ve got Thunderbords, UFO and Space: 1999 on DVD. May as well add to the Gerry Anderson Collection!
Oh, yeah…
One of the fascinating things about the series is the wacky ways the crews get to their vehicles. For exampl, Virgil. He puts his back to a painting of a rocket ship. The painting pivots backwards and Virgil slides onto a padded trolley. The trolley runs down a track (with Virgil riding down head-first on his back) until it gets to a 90° turn. The trolley turns so that Virgil is now going down feet-first, and he rides it until a chute deposits the trolley into Thunderbird 2. It folds into the pilot’s seat, and the chute retracts.
Or Thunderbird 3. Alan sits on a sofa in the house. The sofa disappears into the floor, and there is a long shot of it riding down on an improbably-long piston. Another sofa heads up as Alan’s heads down. The empty sofa replaces the one Alan used in the house – never mind that it has to be offset by a couple of meters! Meanwhile Alan (and Brain, in the episode I watched) still sits in the first sofa, which is deposited on a rail car that takes him (them) to Thunderbird 3. Another piston raises the sofa way up through a hatch in the bottom of the rocket, and the sofa is locked down to become the pilot’s seat.
And uniforms emerge from concealed compartments, so that they can fly in their IR togs.
Today I think, ‘Why not get dressed beforehand, and just walk to the ships?’ But as a kid, such incredible entry procedures were futuristic and fun!
I was 10 or so, and collected all the models of the aircraft/spacecraft.
Then I threw them out the upstairs window. They didn’t fly too good.
I knew the acting was irritatingly bad. But I think I believed the plots, as if they were really exciting adventures.
If only you’d foreseen eBay! (Of course, if I’d foreseen eBay, I would have held onto my GI Joe space capsule.)
I always felt sorry for poor Deke Slayton and Walter Schirra.
I mean all the other Mercury astronauts had Tracy boys named after them- why not those two?
Of course, “Deke Tracy” might’ve sounded silly.
I loved the Anderson shows as a kid … and I still do! Thank goodness for DVDs, is all I can say; I’ve got all the Supermarionation shows from Supercar to The Secret Service, plus the live action UFO, The Protectors and Space: 1999, and the … errr … rather different Terrahawks.
Thunderbirds was one of the best (though I think that the best of the Supermarionation shows has to be Captain Scarlet.)
OK, it’s not plausible on an engineering basis. Or characterization, either. Know what? I don’t care. It’s fun. It’s beautifully crafted pure entertainment, that’s what it is - it’s not deep or complicated, it’s just got lots of cool gadgets and stuff blowing up. And that works for me!
Yes, they did. Chicago, early 60’s.
I always found the equipment facinating, & it played a large part in my kindergarten coloring.
Flaming Thunderbolts! What’s wrong with Terrahawks?
Apart from Kate Kestrel’s singing.
As an aside - “Stingray”, made in 1963, was the very first British TV servies made in colour (and not in ordinary colour: in “Videcolour” no less). But colour television transmissions did not begin over here until 1967. I can only assume that Gerry Anderson gambled on selling the series to the USA.
The best parody of this is in Wallace & Gromit’s A Close Shave, in which Wallace goes through all of the Thunderbirds routines, with appropriate march music playing, and when he ends up deposited on the window-washing motorcycle, Gromit shows up having just walked into the garage. Priceless! Then the small pond with the garden gnome rotates to give them a clear exit path, in the manner of Thunderbird 2 with its folding palm trees and launch ramp.
Aaah, memories!
I was just going to add that! The director’s commentary on the W&G DVD specifically refers to “Thunderbirds” as an inspiration for that sequence.
Gromit’s bemused little roll of the eyes as he steps through the door and gets in the sidecar is priceless.
My ten-year-old son is quite taken with the old episodes; we caught one on SciFi network or something at his grandmother’s house a whille back, and he thought it was really cool. So we grabbed a couple of the DVD collections, as well as the new live action movie (he got interested just after the movie disappeared from theaters in the US – which was about five hours after the movie appeared in theaters). He got distracted by other things for a while, but last week found a Tracy Island playset with, I think, Thunderbird 1 and 3, at Toys "R’ Us in a clearance bin and that set him off again.
I’ve encouraged him in this interest, because (a) I’d rather him watch Thunderbirds than a lot of other stuff out there these days, and (b) it gives him the necessary background to appreciate The Rezillos’ song “Thunderbirds Are Go!”.