'Mind the Gap, Alan...'

Remembering (and revisiting) Thunderbirds Are Go!

One of the UK release posters: rather boringly symmetrical... where are the explosions?
And what's the Solar Station from Lord Parker's 'Oliday doing in there?

It’s a shade over fifty years since I was taken, as a five-year-old child, to the cinema to see the first big-screen outing for International Rescue, Thunderbirds Are Go! It was my first trip on a train, too – as if the thought of seeing Thunderbirds on the big screen in colour wasn’t excitement enough – though when the train rolled into Lichfield City station I was somewhat disappointed that it didn’t resemble any of the models in my Triang-Hornby train set. It didn’t look like a train at all, frankly: no funnel, no coal tender, no huge driving wheels...

You probably think you know where this is going... from one disappointment (the end of the age of steam) to another, in the form of the cinematic let-down that was Thunderbirds Are Go! Well, no. Not in January 1967, at any rate. Aside from the baffling and pointless dream sequence in the middle of the movie, my five-year-old self was glued to the screen from start to finish, right from ‘This is Assembly Control’ to the thinly-disguised Tracy family toasting Alan at the Swinging Star. All those models... Zero-X... astonishing... rock snakes... wow! Not to mention the experience of seeing Thunderbirds in colour for the first time. If you’d asked me, even ten years later, whether the film had been a resounding success, I’d have answered in the affirmative. So it was that, much further down the line, it came as something of a surprise to realise the film had been a box office failure. The Andersons, at the time, baffled by the poor reception for their movie, attributed it to over-familiarity. Why, they argued, would people pay to go and see something at the cinema that they could get for nothing on television? Fair point, and maybe they might have thought of it a bit sooner. But it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in addressing what was wrong with Thunderbirds Are Go!

As a child, I was up for any film that featured spaceships, UFOs, or science fiction trappings of any kind. Never mind whether or not it had a story. Thunderbirds Are Go! featured Zero-X: possibly the coolest spaceship yet depicted in any movie or TV series (a title it would soon lose to the Starship Enterprise). Zero-X was cool because it was vast... bigger than Fireflash, Fireball XL5, the lot. It was a cool colour. And perhaps coolest of all, the nose cone was actually part of the control tower (I remember being particularly impressed by this detail). Zero-X was, as the Century 21 merchandising department would later, cannily, point out, five toys in one... those five being, er... the MEV... two lifting bodies... the main body (surely not a contender for a toy in its own right?) and... well, whatever. I left the cinema convinced that I had just seen a preview of Gerry Anderson’s next TV series. How could Zero-X not be given a series of its own?

TV21’s editorial staff were evidently of the same opinion, for even while the movie was still showing at your local provincial flea pit, Zero-X was off on a series of 2-page colour comic strip adventures drawn, for the first year, by Mike Noble (now relieved of duty on Fireball XL5). But as we all know, Zero-X lived and died (twice) in the course of a single feature film. Looking back, it could never have worked on television: this was a spaceship designed specifically to take advantage of widescreen cinema, and back in 1967, widescreen television was technology beyond even Brains’ wildest dreams.

Was this, in fact, the whole high concept behind Thunderbirds Are Go!? Imagine the creative brainstorm as Gerry and Sylvia thrashed out the idea: ‘It’s a widescreen picture so we’ll have a widescreen spaceship!’ ‘Brilliant! What will we do with it?’ ‘I dunno... send it to the moon?’ ‘No, there’ll be men there before the end of the decade. What about Mars?’ ‘Okay, so it goes to Mars. What else do we do with it?’ ‘How about we destroy it in a huge explosion?’ ‘What, again?’ ‘Yes. Except that this time, just to be different, we’ll destroy it twice.’

Gerry Anderson was, by all accounts, a sucker for a big explosion. You’d never have guessed, would you? And, of course, there are plenty of pyrotechnics in Thunderbirds Are Go! But hang on just a moment. What kind of a spaceship is Zero-X that it can’t be returned to base and landed safely just because the Hood’s boot has got stuck in a single elevator control? Does Captain Travers make any attempt to do this? Of course not! We need that big explosion! Likewise, is the ship genuinely incapable of being brought down with a single Lift Body? You’d have thought the designers might have allowed for such an eventuality. But no... we’ve spent billions of dollars on this ship and we’re just going to trash it at the first niggling little technical hitch... and by the way, we’re going to destroy a whole town in the process. Glenn Field’s attorneys must have been on a nice little earner sorting out all those compensation claims...

This may sound like nit-picking, but it’s indicative of what’s wrong with the script of Thunderbirds Are Go! There simply isn’t enough of the right kind of drama, the type that made the TV series so watchable. The technical problems encountered by Zero-X are of molehill proportions, but the script uses them as an excuse for a mountain of destruction, because the script can’t differentiate between a genuinely dramatic situation and a trivial situation that happens to culminate in a bloody big explosion. The dilemmas in the TV series scripts were of a much higher order, knife-edge situations that couldn’t possibly be resolved without a call to International Rescue. The problem with Zero-X is that it’s just crap. It can’t take off or land without crashing. It isn’t even sabotaged properly... the Hood was only taking photographs after all... there’s no bomb in the landing gear or anything of that order. He just put his foot in the wrong place. Zero-X is unarguably an International Rescue just waiting to happen; but the rescue, when it finally arrives, involves nothing more exciting than a quick re-wiring job. No fantastic machinery like the Mole, or the ‘Restraining Outfit’ from The Duchess Assignment (my favourite pod vehicle as a kid). Just a bloody screwdriver...

This is a sterling example of why creators shouldn’t be let loose on their own creations... Thunderbirds was a hell of a concept, but aside from the pilot episode, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson left the writing chores to a variety of hired hands. The Andersons wrote the two Thunderbirds films single-handed, and they wrote them partly to indulge some of their own fantasies... like working with The Beatles (okay, they had to settle for Cliff in the end), and blowing up spaceships on a previously undreamed of scale. Compared to some of the Andersons’ other creations, the Thunderbirds movies feel flabby and self-indulgent, like kids let loose in a sweet shop that they already own.

Now that's more like it… if only the rock snakes had really come to earth on Zero X and destroyed Glenn Field. 

As a five-year-old, I didn’t have many boxes that needed ticking from a Thunderbirds film. It was a film, tick, and it was Thunderbirds, tick. It was in colour (added bonus), and it had most of the Thunderbird craft in it, along with all the characters – what was not to like? How about a dreadful expository scene around the pool table, where Jeff, Scott and Virgil exchange awful, clunky dialogue about what’s been happening on the Zero-X mission. Of course I didn’t notice this at the time. Nor did I notice how much screen time was being wasted on that damn assembly sequence (or the fact that we got a fair bit of it twice). I didn’t notice the rubbish, self-aware humour of Penelope asking Jeff to ‘pull a few strings.’ And I didn’t notice how little time the MEV spent on Mars, or how, instead of getting the crew out on the surface to get down and dirty with those rock snakes one-on-one, they stayed nice and cosily inside the ship while the fiendish thingies ineffectually showered them with fireworks. I still wonder what the point of the rock snakes was, as an actual life form: how did they reproduce? What did they eat? Molten lava? Why were they even there? What did they do when they weren’t attacking Zero-X? Ah, but therein lies the whole point. They were there only to attack the MEV. Bad scriptwriting rears its fire-breathing, rock-encrusted head...

In fairness to the Andersons, they improved significantly on this scenario when scripting the pilot episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons... instead of a pointless life form that has no purpose other than to attack our heroes, we had the titular alien race, peaceful beings given a rude awakening by trigger-happy Captain Black and, naturally, wanting their revenge. It's neat, and it's logical. Mind you, the rock snakes looked cooler than the Mysterons who were, uh… invisible...

Still, TBAG was all good fun for a five-year-old, and it feels slightly cynical to carp at the film’s creative shortcomings. Even so, imagine how much better it might have been if, instead of that bloody Swinging Star dream sequence, there had been a dramatic rescue sub-plot in the middle of the film, something huge and spectacular that could never have been realised on television... maybe one of the boys slips up... for the first time... and redeems himself by saving the Zero-X... ideally with something more than just a screwdriver. And what if the Zero-X had gone properly wrong... MEV holed by the rock snakes and leaking oxygen... crew unconscious... beginning to burn up on re-entry? It’s not hard to imagine how the inert, flabby mass of the script might have been given a few injections of solid drama. Did Gerry and Sylvia not even watch their own TV series? Looking at Thunderbirds are Go!, you might be forgiven for drawing that conclusion.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Thunderbirds Are Go!, given its failure to perform at the box office, is that there was ever a second Thunderbirds movie. I remember being taken to see Thunderbird 6 when it came out, and, on this occasion, feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. Amazingly, the Andersons not only repeated all the same mistakes of the previous feature, but added some new ones (open-mouthed, laughing puppets... an airship... set-dressing self indulgence to shame even the freakiest Carnaby Street trip-out). By 1968, in any case, Thunderbirds was beginning to look a bit tired... Captain Scarlet had been on television for over six months, and the new characters and hardware were a lot more interesting than a world tour of Lady Penelope’s wardrobe... which is what much of TB6 amounted to. The biggest let down of all, however, was saved for the end... the sixth Thunderbird that we’d been promised by the title, and had been waiting for the whole movie to see. Aaand... it was just the bloody Tiger Moth! As Jeff Tracy should have said: ‘Brains, you old son of a gun! Now sod off and build me a proper Thunderbird!’ Of all cop-out movie endings, this has to be one of the worst ever. The only thing that can be said in its favour is that it makes a kind of sense... but that’s not saying very much. Actually, I’d rather not say anything in its favour... I still feel short-changed every time I see that ending.

After those original cinema screenings, it was a long time before I saw either of the Thunderbirds movies again – something in the order of ten years – and it’s fair to say that I didn’t miss them. When they turned up on television, they looked just awful in cropped, pan-and-scan format, and what was worse, I was now watching them as a teenager ,with the first stirrings of a cynical, critical adult beginning to influence my opinion.

Just recently I saw Thunderbirds Are Go! again in its recently-remastered form on Film4, and it scrubs up pretty well. There’s nothing at all wrong with it as eye-candy for a special effects junkie, and that’s all I expected from it. Well, there was something slightly wrong with it... all of the credits were missing... including the Anderson’s own scriptwriting and production credits. The crew credits originally appeared over the Zero-X launch sequence, but somewhere along the line, during the remastering process, they’ve been lost. The technical reason for this is simple... all films and TV series retain ‘clean’ versions of their opening titles, to allow for foreign titling; this footage is always of superior quality to the titled version, which is a generation further away from the negative. Most decent restorations use the clean titles where necessary, adding new captions to match the style and content of the originals. It’s just that, this time around, someone forgot to do it. And while it’s nice to see the launch sequence in its ‘clean’ version, it’s a shameful omission not to have on-screen credits for the many talented people who actually made the film – even more so when the end titles are given over to spurious fake credits, thanking the director of Glenn Field and the Martian Exploration Centre for their contributions. Maybe there’s an option to play the film with or without credits off the blu-ray disc: if so, someone goofed at Film4.

Either way, watching the film again, and in sterling HD quality, only served as a reminder of the gap between an idea and its execution. Thunderbirds on the big screen still sounds like a pretty good idea. So why has there never been a decent Thunderbirds movie? Will there ever be? Not unless someone can write a script and finance a production good enough to bridge the idea/execution gap. As Lady Penelope helpfully says at the end of that dream sequence: ‘mind the gap, Alan.’