I got interested in Gerrymation as a child because my uncle was fascinated with it. In particular, he was fascinated by the technology involved in producing it. This is something that’s hard to explain to people looking at this stuff for the first time after decades of exploding special effects technology and budgets, but their model work was really astonishing for the time, and the several series’ can be viewed as a case study in working out the technical problems of this rarified medium of supermarionation. You’ve heard it said about just about everything, but they were way ahead of their time.
Thunderbirds was my first exposure to the culture of fandom. I mean, of course I had been watching Dr. Who and could speak about its particulars. I had seen Star Wars and found it exciting. A lot of people I knew had about the same knowledge and interest in these. But on my birthday one year a relative, I don’t even remember which, gave me a blister pack of little die cast metal space ships, and when my uncle saw it, he recognized the ships as The Thunderbirds even though it didn’t say ‘Thunderbirds’ anywhere on the package. Whether it was an outright knock-off or just some repackaged surplus I don’t know, but when my uncle saw that one of the little ships had doors that opened, he said there would be a submarine inside. And lo, when the doors were opened, a little plastic submarine fell out. This was the first time I perceived that there were boundaries of shared knowledge and vocabulary that separated fans from mere audiences.
I haven’t seen Fireball XL5, but those lyrics look vaguely familiar. The song I’m remembering has a 50’s sound. It was used on a space film I saw – possibly in From The Earth To The Moon.
BTW: Based on the recommendations here (becaus the series came too early for me) I bought the Stingray boxed set. Haven’t had time to start watching them though.
This week BBC2 have been showing two episodes of Thunderbirds every day. And Sky one is showing Stingray at 8am every day, tho’ so far I’ve forgotten to tape it :smack: I want to catch an episode with agent X-two-zero
Yesterday we had Alias Mr Hackenbaker In which Thunderbird two fires a missile at a hijacked airliner (on which a fashion show is taking place) in order to prevent it landing in the Sahara desert so some crooks can nick a new dress material. The airliner crash lands back at London airport but doesn’t explode***** because Brains has designed the plane so that all the fuel can be jettisoned in a winged unit which can fly away on its own, and be exploded****** safely at altitude Flaws you say?
Maybe I should’ve done a spoiler box round the whole thing, oh well.
