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.