Pilot of the Future... Product of the Past

To anyone remotely interested in British comic history, Dan Dare is an iconic figure, whose reputation has long since transcended the relatively narrow fraternity of comic collectors. It may come as some surprise then, when I report that, during the 1960s, I remained in blissful ignorance of his existence.

Dare had made his comic debut some eleven years before I was born, and by the time I was of an age to take an interest in more sophisticated comics, Eagle was drawing its final breath. 1969 saw it absorbed into old rival Lion, and the years immediately preceding the takeover had been a story of gradually diminishing quality. Dare himself, a front page feature for the whole of the 1950s, had eventually been relegated to the inside pages, and by the mid-60s new adventures were set aside in favour of reprints. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t anything of merit in the post-50s Eagle: indeed, the Dare strip had enjoyed a temporary reprieve around 1964, returning to the front cover, in colour, under the capable stewardship of Keith Watson, who had formerly served as an assistant to Dare’s creator, Frank Hampson. I, however, saw none of this, save for odd glimpses of back numbers that formed part of the comics stash kept in our school classroom to be broken out on rainy lunchtimes. Such occasions were less frequent than one might imagine, and I was fully occupied chasing up old copies of TV21 or following the exploits of The Cloak in vintage copies of Pow! I literally had no time to find out what those Eagle comics were all about.

By the early ’70s, I’m fairly sure I knew of the existence of a character called Dan Dare, but beyond that basic information, I was still very much in the dark. I’d seen Dare-branded toys on sale in a few shops, including a cool-looking torch raygun that produced a range of differently-hued beams of light; and I’d been afforded a passing glimpse of a 1960s Eagle cover in the first cinematic outing for Doctor Who, where Peter Cushing as the titular character was seen engrossed in a copy.

The first real step in my discovery of Dan and his chums came in the form of a parody. By the early ’60s, all rights in the Dan Dare character had passed into the hands of Odhams Press, who in 1964 launched a distinctive new humour comic in the form of Wham! Masterminded by Bash Street Kids creator Leo Baxendale, Wham! saw Odhams take on the tried and tested DC Thompson comics formula and bring it up to date. The inhabitants of Wham! had a slightly sassier, more contemporary edge than their Beano or Dandy counterparts, and even included a pair of pop-fans, The Wackers, whose exploits revolved around efforts to collect their idols’ autographs or sneak into gigs without paying. Another comic character in the Wham! lineup took advantage of Odham’s ownership of the Dan Dare copyright, in the form of Danny Dare, whose adventures came with the tag-line: ‘he’s Dan Dare’s number one fan.’ Danny, a junior Dare wannabe, complete with lantern jaw and ’50s hairstyle, imagined himself as his hero, with his winged go-cart standing in for Dan’s iconic ship, Anastasia; his mundane exploits in the here-and-now were transformed into futuristic reimaginings via thought bubbles interspersed between the normal comic frames. The strip was thus a curious mixture of styles, with Danny rendered in the standard Leo Baxendale manner (although not, seemingly, by Baxendale himself), whilst his imaginary adventures were drawn in a style approximating that of the contemporary Dare strip, which by this time had passed into the hands of Keith Watson.

From the 1966 Wham! Annual: Danny Dare. (Xel was the current villain in the real Dare strip at the time of publication)

I first came across this strip in a battered old copy of the first Wham! annual that had been passed on to me by a cousin. The Danny Dare strips probably weren’t the best thing in it (that honour falling instead to Eagle Eye, Junior Spy), but they intrigued me with their blend of comic and serious artwork, and in the ersatz Dan Dare panels, I felt I recognised something of the style of another artist whose work I had admired for some time. Although he had no input into the Wham! parody, the drawings had put me in mind of the work of Eric L. Eden, who had provided illustrations for some of WM Collins and Son’s Fireball XL5 annuals. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’d accidentally made a connection that was entirely relevant: Eden had worked on the Dare strips as a studio assistant since Eagle’s beginnings, and his style had evolved from his close association with Frank Hampson.

Having discovered his comic alter ego, I would have welcomed any information or insights into the ‘real’ Dan Dare, but in the absence of Eagle or access to back numbers, I simply had to bide my time. The chance finally arrived at christmas 1973 with the publication of a Dan Dare Annual, again from the Odhams group. There had been a couple of Dan Dare annuals in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but none of them had registered on my personal comics radar. The 1973 publication was, in fact, comprised of reprinted material from the 1950s: the first half was made up of 1951-52’s The Red Moon Mystery, while the second consisted of 1959’s Safari in Space. One look at this annual was all I needed. The Danny Dare strip had dropped the vaguest of hints about the genuine Dare artwork, but nothing could have prepared me for my first encounter with the undisputed genius of Frank Hampson. In his pages, I recognised many of the techniques that had drawn me to the work of his assistant, Eden: the cross-hatching, the elaborate back-lighting, the tonal modelling on faces... but this was work of an altogether higher order. While Eden had achieved a form of stylised realism, some of Hampson’s panels might almost have been photographs outlined with a mapping pen. I still believe that it is the best work ever produced for any comic, anywhere in the world, and that it will never be bettered.

Hampson’s artwork had, in fact, never been seen to such impressive effect, for the printing technique of the 1970s collection far surpassed the somewhat limited rotogravure of the early Eagle, which had the effect of ironing out all the subtleties in shading and tonality. The annual had been put together from original artwork boards which, having been chopped up to remove the space left by Eagle’s red masthead, were newly photographed for four-colour offset lithographic reproduction. This may seem like vandalism, but at the time of its production, the Dare artworks would have been viewed by Odhams as nothing more than twenty-year-old assets ripe for exploitation, rather than artefacts for preservation. The two stories were somewhat shortened to fit the page count, but in so doing, the storytelling was considerably tightened, losing a few episodes where the narrative had trod water for a week or so. One such elision included an experimental page wherein Hampson, whether by intent or through fatigue, had lapsed into a loose, jagged technique that felt at odds with his customary detailed approach. A couple of pages in the annual had been redrawn, presumably in the absence of the original art boards, but otherwise this was full-on Frank Hampson.

The Red Moon Mystery must be one of the very best Dan Dare adventures. Its Earth/Mars setting gives it a realism that was set aside when Dare and co ventured into more exotic realms, and there are parts of the story that anticipate the later trend for disaster movies, with the British Isles battered by hurricanes as the rogue Red Moon approaches. The story also presents a very early example of Martian archaeology, with its backstory of Dan’s uncle Ivor investigating the ruins of an ancient civilization that had been wiped off the planet by a mysterious force known as ‘the Red Moon.’ This discovery provides the cue for the dramatic revelation that astronomers at Mount Palomar have discovered a rogue asteroid entering the solar system, to which they have coincidentally attached the selfsame appellation. The story builds and builds, finding time en route for a full-scale evacuation of Mars (portrayed here as a kind of ski resort in space), which culminates with a flotilla of little ships defying the gravitational pull of the rogue moon as they attempt to drag the orbiting space station away from its malign influence. It’s as good a piece of space opera sci-fi as has ever been realised in any medium.

Regrettably, the story begins to lose pace and focus towards the end. Hampson, succumbing to the first of many bouts of debilitating illness, took a forced leave of absence from the strip, leaving the concluding weeks in the hands of his studio team, whose work, whilst efficient, lacks the sparkle of their mentor in full flight. The ending, in fact, feels rushed, almost as if the team couldn’t wait to crack on with Dan’s next adventure, which a fully-recovered Hampson already had on the drawing board; but Marooned on Mercury would run for mere weeks before he was forced to relinquish control once again, and ended up a relatively drab and uninteresting affair.

Dan’s personal spaceship, the Anastasia, was already familiar to me from the two Danny Dare strips in the Wham! annual, and in the Red Moon Mystery it is employed to great effect, taking part in some of the story’s most dramatic episodes. In later years, ‘Annie’ would be absent altogether from some of Dan’s adventures, which seems a pity, given that it was such a neat, well-designed craft. To me, Anastasia was everything a spaceship should be: great looking, with a compact, yet detailed interior, an ideal setting for dramatic close-ups, and possessing a kind of cosy Englishness that recalled the interiors of wartime fighter-bombers.

If the artwork in the Red Moon Mystery impressed me, then Safari in Space was little short of stunning. In the seven years between the end of RMM and the beginning of Safari..., Hampson had honed his working methods to perfection, with a studio system that began with his own carefully-crafted page roughs, before moving on to posed photographs of the team in costume, or table-top models, that would serve as reference material for the final frames, ensuring that details such as shadows and folds in garments were rendered with absolute conviction. Of course, at the time of acquiring the Dan Dare Annual, I knew nothing of this, and blithely assumed that Hampson had done all the work himself, although there could be no question as to his genius. It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the publication of Alastair Crompton’s Dare/Hampson history, The Man Who Drew Tomorrow, that the full story was revealed to me. This volume, indispensible even in the wake of its supposedly upgraded edition, provides a salutory story and a stark warning for anyone contemplating comic art as a career path. Frank Hampson’s story was not a happy one: deprived of his copyright, cast into obscurity and forced to tout for entirely unsuitable commissions (his speculative pages for Modesty Blaise are a sad illustration that what looks good on one character doesn’t necessarily work for another).

Odhams’ 1973 annual may have been a cheaply-produced exploitation of a valued copyright character, but it started me on the road to Dare fandom. It’s not a journey I ever honestly completed, and although I have a modest pile of 1950s and 60s Eagles in the wardrobe, I’d draw the line at calling myself a full-on Dare fanatic. The merchandise, for instance, has never interested me, albeit its unavailability probably has a lot to do with this (Dare was, in fact, a very early example of the kind of character merchandising that would later attach itself to many film and television properties). Neither have I ever taken anything more than a passing interest in the many (one might argue too many) Dare revivals that have been talked about, argued over and occasionally put into production since the strip’s demise. 2000 AD’s attempt at a ‘punk’ reimagining of the character was Dan Dare in name only, and while there have been more faithful attempts to rekindle the magic of the glory years, none has ever come anywhere near equalling the sheer imaginative and creative power of the original. It’s a safe bet to say that there will never be any more Dan Dare artwork of the quality of those Hampson-era boards, and however diligently contemporary artists may work at likenesses and hardware, their efforts are constantly hampered by today’s reliance on digital colour. Whilst it is possible, with a great deal of time and effort, to achieve some stunning effects in the digital arena, it’s simply not possible to pass off such work as having been rendered in ink and gouache, and it’s those lovely organic textures of the original Dare that still shine through today, even from the muddiest, most faded old copy of Eagle.

Dan Dare was one of those creations who arrive at exactly the right time; in retrospect, the 1950s Eagle feels like a key component of the mood of post-war optimism, and the comic thrived in that environment, benefiting from improvements in reprographic technology, as demand pushed its circulation figures skywards. By the end of the decade, however, boys’ comics faced stiff competition from the mushrooming medium of television, and within ten years the golden age of Eagle would be little more than a fading memory. I regret not having been around to experience it at the time, but turning over the pages of those old and fragile editions is to take a step back into a more innocent world, where all things were possible, and the idea of Britain being the international base of an interplanetary space fleet still seemed eminently plausible...

Dan Dare may have been the pilot of the future, but for me at any rate, he is best appreciated as a product of the past.

Run for your lives, it's a synthesiser!

'Trying to connect you, caller.' An early Moog synthesiser, or telephone exchange...

Sometime in the summer of 1972, an unsual record appeared in the UK pop charts. Weirdly electronic, with an insistent, pulsing rhythm, it didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard before, certainly not in the form of a pop single. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first example of synthesiser-driven electronic pop to chart in the UK, and it was the forerunner of things to come.

Popcorn had, in fact, been around since 1969, when it first appeared on an album entitled Music to Moog By, recorded by one Gershon Kingsley. The better-known chart single version was recorded in 1972 by Stan Free, a member of Kingsley’s band, with his own outfit, Hot Butter. Thanks in no small part to its new sound, the single became a significant worldwide hit that same year. Although it sounded like a novelty record and was, in fact, a one-hit wonder, I had a sneaking suspicion that this might turn out to be the sound of the future.

Synthesisers had been making very slow inroads into the pop music field since the late ’60s, the revolutionary Moog (pronounced ‘mogue’ by those in the know) leading the field since its demonstration at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Even the Beatles had used one, although its presence on Abbey Road was as texture rather than a prominent lead instrument. They weren’t the first either, having been pipped to the post by the Monkees (on their Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones album), the Byrds, and Simon and Garfunkel. It has to be said that the Monkees’ use of the instrument was fairly chaotic and random, providing a kind of electronic aural scribble across their songs Daily Nightly and Star Collector; and Roger McGuinn had managed to lend it a doom-laden quality in his frankly fairly horrible offering Space Odyssey, a kind of science fiction sea-shanty, which had wisely been omitted from the original release of the Notorious Byrd Brothers album (finally making its appearance on a CD reissue).

At the time of Popcorn’s release, none of these efforts was known to me. As far as I was concerned, electronic pop began in 1972. But I had already heard electronic music elsewhere. Pre-dating the invention of the synth, Dr. Who’s distinctive theme was probably the best-known example of electronic music, owing its origin to the Heath-Robinsonesque aural experimentation of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Contrasting this innovative piece, Dr. Who’s early incidental music was pretty dreadful, as well as inconsistent, with some items sounding like the results of a troop of chimpanzees let loose with a load of kitchen utensils. By the 1970s, a more consistent approach had emerged, with Dudley Simpson’s synth cues becoming a recognisable part of the programme. The instrument may have been innovative, but Simpson’s incidental cues were for the most part quite conventional (the best item was probably the heavily vibrato’d three-note sting that usually accompanied each revelation of The Master).

Another early example of an electronic score accompanied Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol, whose composer FC Judd was a maverick experimenter, pursuing similar lines to pop producer Joe Meek. In the case of Space Patrol’s soundtrack, it was hard to draw the line between which of the blips and warbles were intended as sound effects, and which were meant as music. In an effort to avoid music copyright issues, the series’ credits referred to this aural collage as ‘electronics’, and made no mention at all of music.

Elsewhere on television, Tomorrow’s World offered occasional demonstrations of synthesisers, and by the time of Popcorn’s appearance in the charts it was clear that, in the future, pop groups would move away from the guitar-heavy lineup that had dominated the scene for over a decade. But when the expected rush of Popcorn clones failed to materialise, I began to think it might all have been a nine-day wonder. Guitars remained the instrument of choice for the glam bands of the early ‘70s, and it took until the middle of the decade for another synth-driven hit to make a chart breakthrough. That single was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

Around the time of its release, Kraftwerk formed the subject of another piece on Tomorrow’s World, in which they spoke of such innovations as being able to play music using the lapels of their suits. I may have found favour with the band’s ascetic appearance, but I can’t say I was a fan of the sounds they were making. Nor, indeed, of any electronic music. Since my first exposure to the phenomenon, via the aforementioned TV series, I’d found the sound of synthesised music faintly repelling, for reasons I still can’t quite explain.

Both Dr. Who and Space Patrol were programmes that posessed a scary, other-worldly atmosphere, of which a significant component was the music: and this reaction may go some way to explain my later aversion to synth-pop; but it was Dudley Simpson’s efforts on Dr. Who that really turned me off. For some reason, I really disliked the reedy, resonant tones that Simpson coaxed out of his equipment, and part of me felt that, in a fundamental way, he was cheating. His music wasn’t a patch on that of Barry Gray, over in the Anderson camp, who not only wrote better themes, but scored them for a full orchestra, while Simpson was, seemingly, doing the whole lot himself on a single keyboard. By the age of eight or nine, I knew that I liked the sound of a full orchestra, with its wide palette of tone and colour, and had already discovered items like Holst’s The Planets suite (a clear influence on the work of Barry Gray). Next to that, a single, monophonic synth sounded as dramatic as someone humming through a comb-and-paper.

My opinion wasn’t altered by any of the coming tide of synth-driven pop music: in 1977, simultaneously on the chart, we had Space’s Magic Fly – a song I dislike as much today as when I first heard it – and Jean-Michel Jarre’s genre-defining Oxygene. By this time, I knew exactly what it was about the sound of the synthesiser that I didn’t like. It simply sounded too unreal. The ghostly tones of Oxygene sounded like the aural equivalent of an airbrush: nebulous and hard to define. Real music, even that of an electric guitar, came from the sound of air being moved around, and from the resonant properties of wood, metal and calfskin. Synth music was the sound of circuits being engaged, and it didn’t engage me at all. Prog-rock bands like ELP or Yes, who made heavy use of synthesisers definitely didn’t interest me, and their music seemed pompous, over-inflated, self-important.

Luckily, all this nonsense was about to be brought to a grinding halt by the intervention of punk. The back-to-basics ethos of punk saw a return to the traditional band line-up of guitar/bass/drums, and if a keyboard was employed anywhere, it would be in the form of some retro item like a Vox Continental organ. But you can’t keep a bad thing down, and by the end of the decade, the synth was starting to shake off its dodgy prog associations as bands like The Human League began to emerge.

Now the tide turned completely. During the early to mid ’80s, you couldn’t move for synth-pop, but I didn’t think much of any of its prime exponents, and I still didn't warm to the sound of the instrument (which, in its most recognisable form – such as Van Halen's Jump – was typically buzzy, bright and shouty, like a fake brass section). I still managed to buy my fair share of synth-pop singles, but it was hard to avoid doing so, with synths dominating the pop charts to such an extent. Meanwhile, guitar pop had migrated to the fringes of the music scene where it continued in semi-underground form as indie, with only occasional breakthrough acts like the Smiths serving to remind the wider pop-buying community that there were still guitar heroes out there if you knew where to look for them.

For me, the perfect marriage of synth and guitar pop came courtesy of the short-lived combo New Muzik, whose singles Living by Numbers and This World of Water managed to achieve an almost unique balance of acoustic and synthetic sounds: Tony Mansfield’s strummed 12-string guitar is as vital a component in the mix as the wash of synths adding colour and texture in the background; and the synth sounds were innovative and well-chosen. Somewhat later, The Blue Nile pulled off a similar feat, with their extensively synthetic compositions like Tinseltown in the Rain and A Walk Across the Rooftops managing to steer well clear of the usual synth-pop clichés. Even so, it took me the best part of ten years to discover them, such was my antipathy to anyone weilding a synth in anger.

By the 1980s, I owned and played musical instruments myself, but I wouldn’t give a synth house room. Neither would I contemplate using the synth’s cheating bedfellow, the sequencer, which was responsible for a lot of what passed for virtuoso playing on pop singles. Over one Christmas, I had the loan of a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, a keyboard which included dozens of pre-set tones (the traditional synth required the user to create their own tones using a patch bay resembling a telephone exchange, through which various tone and waveform generators could be combined). It was certainly fun to mess around with, and many of the tones were instantly recognisable (virtually the entire backing track of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas was generated on a DX7). But for the time being, I passed. In fact, it wasn’t until around ten years ago that I finally got round to purchasing a synth, at which time I discovered that the biggest problem with the devices is not how to use them, but how not to use them…

The average synth offers hundreds of tones and colours, ranging from the conventional (an electric piano or organ) to the utterly insane. The cheap Akai model I bought includes pre-sets that sound like they’ve been flown in from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, alongside others that are straight emulations of Rick Wakeman and other well-known exponents. With so many sounds available, it’s easy to go mad. It’s also very, very hard to find exactly the right sound for a specific application, which is where the traditional, patch-bay synth wins out, allowing the user to start from scratch. One can easily spend hours ‘auditioning’ different sounds for a short piece in a recording. After owning a synth for a few months, I could more readily appreciate how a band like the Blue Nile were able to spend over a year recording an album and still not deem it fit to release…

I also began to realise how many records include synthesisers without them being in any way obvious. Sometimes, a low-level synth ‘bed’ forms a kind of aural glue that fills in the gaps in a recording in a manner that the listener can be completely unaware of. Take it away, and you’d notice. Synths are good at filling in missing mid-range frequencies that aren’t present in the very ‘toppy’ sounds of guitar and piano, and without them, many modern recordings would sound hollow and echoey, not unlike recordings from the 1960s (when the usual solution was to use compression and limiting to ‘push’ the sounds to their limits, reducing the amount of audible ‘space’ on a record).

It took a long while, but I came round to synths in the end... just don’t ever expect me to start a Kraftwerk tribute band.

Spectrum is… Fifty

He may be indestructible, but he can’t resist the march of time. Captain Scarlet turned fifty on Friday, 29 September, marking the anniversary of the first broadcast on ATV in the Midlands. Viewers in London will be celebrating today, having had their introduction to the series on Sunday, 1 October...

I can still remember where I first saw Captain Scarlet: it was in the pages of the Daily Sketch (later relaunched as The Sun), where a small, black and white photograph of the heroic Spectrum agent accompanied a piece about Gerry Anderson’s upcoming new production. This would have been in the spring or summer of 1967, well in advance of the series going to air. I remember noting that the Captain was wearing a peaked cap, putting me in mind of Troy Tempest, whose adventures in Stingray were currently being repeated on weekday evenings, and this detail, together with his title of ‘Captain’ (a rank which seemed associated with the sea), led me to imagine another nautical adventure. I’m fairly certain that the article, which took up little more than a single column’s width, did not go into any details about the format, and didn’t even mention the Mysterons.

This announcement came as a mild surprise, as I thought I already knew where Gerry Anderson would be going with his next TV series: back into outer space, aboard Zero-X, which had been an integral part of the recent feature film Thunderbirds Are Go! The spaceship and its crew were already enjoying weekly adventures in the pages of TV21, and their transition to television seemed a logical next step. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the Zero-X spaceship had been designed to look good in a cinemascope frame, and wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as well within the confines of the television screen, but such niceties didn’t occur to me as a six-year-old.

Zero-X or otherwise, the prospect of any new Gerry Anderson production always generated a frisson of excitement, and back in the good old pre-internet days, it was next to impossible to glean much information about what to expect before the programme actually appeared on our screens. TV21 began dropping hints during the summer, as did its curious companion paper Solo, but at the time I wasn’t being bought either title and thus I had to wait for that first broadcast at the end of September before I knew what it was all about.

Unlike Thunderbirds, I don’t remember seeing any programme trails for Captain Scarlet, although I must have done so, and I don’t have any clear recollection of seeing the first episode on screen, although my brother and I were certainly in front of the television and waiting in eager anticipation at 5.25pm that September evening. Obviously, we were watching in black and white, and so the colour-coded characters were all, effectively, Captain Grey. I could grasp that the Spectrum agents were all named after colours, but what colour, exactly, was Captain Scarlet? His uniform had appeared black in the photo I’d seen in the Daily Sketch, and on screen it looked dark grey. I’d never heard of a colour called scarlet (nor, for that matter, the colours ochre and magenta, the codenames of two other Spectrum Captains), and at the time the first episode went out, I hadn’t yet seen a colour picture of our hero. My mum supplied the answer. and soon I would be drawing the good captain with the assistance of coloured pencils.

Merchandise was still a good way from hitting the shops, so as a stopgap, I drew and cut out a paper figure of Captain Scarlet. I used ruled writing paper, but the presence of parallel blue lines across the Spectrum agent’s uniform didn’t trouble me unduly. Indestructible he most certainly wasn’t. In fact, the paper Captain Scarlet met his end through being eaten by a hamster. We didn’t even own a hamster: the rodent lived in our school classroom, and I’d been given the honour of being able to take it home during the half term holidays. Paper Captain Scarlet just ventured a little too close to his cage... if only the Mysterons had known...

It always took a few weeks to acclimatise to any new Gerry Anderson series. Everything was new and different, and with all the different bits of hardware, there was a lot to take in. I’m not sure I quite understood that Spectrum’s headquarters Cloudbase was actually supposed to be suspended in mid air. On a black and white screen, the blue sky backdrop was less obvious than it appears in colour. It also took a few weeks before I realised what the name of the base actually was. Just nine days before the debut of Captain Scarlet, there had been a lot of hoo-hah in the media surrounding the launch of the QE2. I remember our class at school was even allowed to listen to a special live radio broadcast, and there had been a lot of talk in the media of ‘Clydeside’ and ‘Clyde bank.’ Thus it was that, for the first couple of weeks, I thought the name of Captain Scarlet’s operational HQ was ‘Clydebase.’ It was only much later that I realised the name ‘cloudbase’ was just another Gerry Anderson pun.

Captain Scarlet annexes the cover of TV21 – January 1968

The series had been on air for about six weeks when my brother and I were taken to the dentists’ for a check-up. This detail may seem irrelevant, but bear with me... As in all dentists’ waiting rooms, there were a number of back issues of magazines and comics lying around, one of which, a copy of Lady Penelope comic, included a big photographic article about Spectrum, focusing on the Angel pilots, who were given their own spin-off strip. Heedless of the fact that Lady Penelope was a comic for girls, I asked my mum to obtain a copy next week. She did better than that. On arrival home from school one afternoon in late November, I was presented with that week’s copy of TV21, complete with a Captain Scarlet story on the centre pages and a colour photograph of the Spectrum personnel on the back cover. I’d been bought TV21 for a few weeks earlier in the year, but hadn’t become a regular reader until now. From that moment on, I had TV21 bought for me every week until its demise in 1969, and continued reading well into into its ‘afterlife’ as TV21 & Joe 90 and beyond.

After three or four weeks, Captain Scarlet was finally beginning to sink in to my consciousness. I understood the premise of the series, without feeling any urge to throw myself from the top of a car park in imitation of the indestructible hero, and, after hearing it a few times, I knew pretty well how the theme music went, to say nothing of the distinctive drum-beat on tuned tympani. This rhythmical flourish accompanied the transitions between scenes, a unique back-and-forth edit that became part of the series’ visual style to such an extent, that, when playing with my Captain Scarlet toys, I used to ‘imitate’ it, by looking at two different things in quick succession. I know...

Ah yes, those toys…

A cynical observer might have imagined that the format of Captain Scarlet had been designed in order to sell a wide range of different toys, such was the variety of aircraft and roadgoing vehicles employed in the weekly adventures. Not all of the series’ hardware would make it into the toyshops, but even so, there was no shortage of merchandise bearing the Captain’s likeness and logo. One of the first items to become available was probably the most desirable: the SPV or Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle, an elephantine heavy-duty roadgoing machine in which, presumably for reasons of health and safety, the driver faced the rear. It was a particularly good design, and Dinky Toys’ die-cast version, released in time for Christmas 1967, was strikingly accurate, with ‘dynamic action features’ that included a pop-out door with seated Captain Scarlet, rear caterpillar tracks that could be flipped down (despite never being deployed in the series), fold-down aerials and, best of all, a missile hatch which popped open to enable the launching of the same white and red plastic missle that had previously featured in Dinky’s model of Lady Penelope’s FAB 1.

This, however, proved to be a somewhat troublesome feature, with the missile hatch tending to detach itself from the surrounding bodywork. It could be clipped back, with care, but this involved dismantling the toy with a screwdriver. If memory serves, this operation was required as early as Boxing Day... As to the missiles themselves, they had a tendency to disappear beneath immovable items of furniture, to emerge decades later when the living room was being redecorated.

Another highly desirable piece of merchandise (and now extremely collectable) was the Captain Scarlet ‘playsuit’, heavily promoted in TV21 towards the end of 1967. This early example of what would later become known as ‘cosplay’ (awful word) comprised a red gilet, grey trousers, calf-length red ‘gaiters’ (which fitted over your shoes to create the appearance of red knee-length boots) and a very realistic peaked cap with flip-down microphone. This latter item is now the sole surviving element of my own Captain Scarlet playsuit, acquired that same Christmas, and worn during many back-garden games over the next couple of years. The ‘gaiters’ were the only disappointing aspect of the set, and being made of soft vinyl, had a tendency to tear. Personally, I wanted a pair of the proper red ‘kinky’ boots as worn by the Captain himself, but such items were not available in children’s sizes. Perhaps it’s just as well.

The other essential Captain Scarlet toy was a dolly. Well, frankly, that’s what it amounted to, although by this time, the idea of ‘dolls for boys’ had gained in popularity, thanks to the sterling efforts of Palitoy’s Action Man. The Captain Scarlet doll was similarly engineered, almost to the point of contravening copyright, and bore a reasonable resemblance to the hero himself. He came in full uniform, including a pair of proper red plastic boots and a peaked cap, complete with microphone (which, with a bit of persuasion, could be made to flip downwards). The gilet seemed to have been made from bio-degradable felt, and did not survive more than a few years of play before disintegrating, while the hat, more maroon than scarlet in colour, survived intact despite being made from very brittle plastic. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the Captain himself: his interior jointing involved elasticated string and small metal components which, when exposed to the cold, damp atmosphere of the attic, decayed, causing the Captain’s limbs to drop off (all toys eventually found their way up into the loft once their playing days were over). Of the two examples bought for my brother and myself, only one survives, albeit in a semi-collapsed state, with arms and legs barely hanging on, and a number of bits missing altogether.

Indestructible? Pah!

* * *

In retrospect, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons was clearly not up to the very high standards the Andersons had set for themselves with Thunderbirds, but, frankly, nothing aside from more Thunderbirds would have fit that bill. Back in 1967, though, it was a different matter entirely. Any new Gerry Anderson series almost always seemed to eclipse the others when it first arrived on the scene, and there can be no denying that Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons looked extremely impressive when first unveiled. It certainly booted Thunderbirds into touch as far as I was concerned, and it seemed entirely appropriate that the brilliant red upstart should take over TV21 comic. For the duration of its first run on ITV, Captain Scarlet felt like the acme of Supermarionation, and I for one was confidently expecting him to follow Thunderbirds into the cinema.

Looking back with a more jaundiced eye, the deficiencies begin to show through, and it’s clear that, despite later revivals, Captain Scarlet lacked the magic ingredients that had made Thunderbirds such a success. The format quickly became restrictive, with each episode being forced to follow the same basic template: the Mysterons issue a threat, destroy a person and/or piece of machinery in order to facilitate it, and Captain Scarlet must then kill himself in the process of attempting to thwart their plans. Anyone watching the episodes in order will notice that this latter aspect begins to fade out after a while. Despite being indestructible, Captain Scarlet does not end up dead every week, often coming through his adventures without suffering so much as a scratch. Did the Andersons have a change of heart concerning the violence in the series? Or did scriptwriter Tony Barwick simply get fed up with (or forget) the ‘indestructible’ premise? Certainly, the best episodes are to be found earlier in the series, with some later examples being highly derivative of their predecessors, and, accordingly, pretty dull fare.

The lack of humour doesn’t help, either. Thunderbirds was hardly a laugh-a-minute, but there was considerably more depth of character, and a lightness of touch which the Andersons never managed to achieve again. The few attempts at ‘humour’ in Captain Scarlet are generally lame and tedious: ‘Stone Point Village – SPV’ quips Captain Scarlet in a rare attempt at levity as he and Captain Blue trundle through the English countryside. And the scene wherein Colonel White ‘humorously’ sentences Captain Scarlet to death by firing squad is probably the worst misjudgement in the whole series (the effect is partially flattened by the fact that the ‘smiling’ Colonel White head looks anything but).

For all its flaws, there’s no denying that, visually, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is stunning, and whatever your opinion of the ‘properly proportioned’ puppets, it most definitely represented the high watermark of technical achievement from the Supermarionation team. The episodes have just been remastered in high definition for Network’s upcoming blu-ray release, and the results are extremely impressive.

Captain Scarlet may be fifty, but Spectrum is still definitely green.