End of the Road

Thunderbirds in the 70s... and beyond

I never grew out of Thunderbirds, although I can recall a time when it seemed to slip back into second or third place amongst the Anderson canon. Captain Scarlet, when he arrived, immediately conferred upon Thunderbirds a sort of dated quality, and it wasn’t merely a question of the new generation of marionettes. Curiously, part of it seemed to stem from the improved asethetics of the series, particularly as regards the use of typefaces. In the first series of Thunderbirds, every item of hardware that demanded a label seemed to be identified in a large, friendly sans serif font that I would later come to recognise as Grotesque No. 9. By the second run of episodes, a new, cooler, futuristic font was in evidence: Microgramma (otherwise known as Eurostile). The ubiquity of this typeface across the later Anderson productions (all the way through to UFO) helped to consign Thunderbirds to a kind of retro-futurist backwater of car indicator bulbs and toothpaste tube caps that had endured since the latter days of Supercar.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Thunderbirds began to lose its grip on the popular imagination. Toys gradually began to disappear from the shelves, and were seen on increasingly rare occasions: I recall finding a glut of mid-60s JR21 models in a toyshop in Paignton, Devon, as late as 1971, but such sightings were a rarity. Only Dinky toys remained widely available, with their FAB 1 and TB2 models continuing in the company’s catalogues for years to come. Adventures continued in TV21, but they became less and less like what I remembered from the TV series, with some quite out there artwork and psychotic villains more suited to a superhero comic. These strips still looked extraordinary thanks to the bravura artwork of Frank Bellamy, but the writing was, frankly, mental. Scripts were, I believe, the work of TV21 contributor Scott Goodall, who took every available opportunity to trash Tracy Island and the Thunderbird craft, having done the same with Fireball XL5 a few years earlier. Thunderbirds annuals continued through to 1969, when the series doubled up with Captain Scarlet, and saw a ‘slight return’ courtesy of Polystyle publications in 1971, but the contents were increasingly a disappointment.

The Tracys’ last hoorah came with the release, in summer of 1968, of the movie Thunderbird 6. We saw it at the Odeon Sutton Coldfield and even at age seven I recall a sense of feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. I’d half expected a Captain Scarlet movie – and at the very least I was hoping for a cool new piece of hardware to fulfil the promise of the title. Granted, Skyship One looked great, and went out in a blaze of pyrotechnic glory, but did anyone my age care about an aeroplane of WW1 vintage? Indeed we did not. Was Gerry Anderson slipping? Further evidence arrived a few months later when Joe 90 made his TV debut. I was all in favour for a few weeks, but it somehow never quite lived up to the sheer explosive excitement of those earlier series.

Thunderbirds remained a staple of children’s television until around 1971, when my earliest diary entries record a new run of repeats, beginning with Trapped in the Sky before jumping to the mid-series episode The Imposters, and thence to a run of second series stories. Despite being broadcast in colour, I was still viewing in black and white, our first colour TV set being still three years in the future.

Seeing the series in colour for the first time was a minor milestone, but I had to wait until Easter 1975, when ATV in the Midlands ran a one-off broadcast of the episode Lord Parker’s ‘Oliday. Richocet followed at Christmas, but for me, this would prove to be the last sighting of International Rescue on the small screen for the best part of a decade. But there were other ways of watching Thunderbirds...

In the era before home taping of television programmes, the only way to see your favourite shows when not on air was via the medium of 8mm home movies. As far back as 1965 I recall seeing a 4-minute extract from a Fireball XL5 episode on my uncle’s Standard 8 projector, and several such films were available, some of them complete with soundtracks. At Christmas 1977, I was bought an 8mm movie projector and I quickly acquired the few Thunderbirds movies that were available in the format: Day of Disaster and Thirty Minutes After Noon came in 1-reel black and white silent editions lasting around eight minutes each, with captions burned into the picture. I later acquired some 50ft colour shorts of highlights from Trapped in the Sky and Attack of the Alligators, all of which was a far cry from owning the entire series as a DVD box set.

During the 1970s, I also brought my collection up to date by acquiring the Thunderbirds paperback novels that had appeared in the mid-60s and were still relatively easy to find at jumble sales and second hand shops. Toys were a different matter. Aside from a board game and a couple of jigsaws, I didn't find any old Thunderbirds merchandise available to buy, with the sole exception of a Thunderbird One-shaped pencil sharpener, a new old stock item that turned up at Birmingham's Nostalgia and Comics (also an excellent source of vintage TV21 comics).

 

'Sharpenings are go!' That TB1 pencil sharpener sits today in a cabinet of other vintage goodies

Strange as it may now seem in this era of never-ending über-fandom, by around 1980, to declare oneself a grown-up fan of Gerry Anderson was to belong to what felt like a very, very small clique of individuals, scattered across the globe. At this time, I enjoyed a correspondence with Amsterdam-based Anderson aficionado Theo De Klerk, who might easily have been the only person on the planet who shared my enthusiasm. Through his good offices, I was able to acquire photographs, film prints, audio tapes of episodes and even occasional video tapes on the recently-arrived VHS format. A few fellow enthusiasts gathered one evening in my parents’ back room to watch 16mm prints of Captain Scarlet (Seek and Destroy) and a stunning colour print of Stingray (Rescue from the Skies). Amongst those in attendance was Starlog writer David Hirsch, future Network CEO Tim Beddows, and the late modeller and prop collector supreme, Philip D. Rae. Sitting there in the dark with the projector clattering away, we felt like the last of the faithful. Fanderson hadn’t yet got going, and hooking up with fellow collectors was a tenuous and difficult business. Did anyone still care about Supermarionation? Fortunately, we now know the answer to that question, but back in 1980 it all felt a bit niche, frankly.

It was through these channels of tentative fandom that I acquired my first video copies of Thunderbirds. The series had made its last on-air appearance on British screens in the Yorkshire TV area, circa 1979, where a number of episodes were diligently committed to Umatic Video Tape by a college video technician by the name of Rod Oldfield. From this source, I was able to acquire decent (for the time) transfers of episodes including Sun Probe, End of the Road and The Uninvited. Compared with what came later, they barely qualified as ‘standard def’ but next to some of the barely watchable bootlegs I’d seen of other material, they were good stuff. The colours were a bit over-saturated and unsteady, but this was still emerging technology, and one had to be prepared to cut it a generous amount of slack. And, after all, this was Thunderbirds.

Acquiring these precious copies confirmed what I’d secretly known all along. Never mind those brief dalliances with Fireball XL5, Stingray or Captain Scarlet: Thunderbirds was the best and would never be beaten. You couldn’t keep a good thing down, and sure enough, within a year or so, a set of nice new 35mm prints saw the series restored to television for the first time in almost a decade. I spared no expense in acquiring a full set of off-air recordings in what was then seen as pristine quality. The colour grading of these prints (and the subsequent Carlton DVD release) was in fact superior to the later HD remaster.

Exciting though this revival was, it pales into insignificance compared with what was to come. In 1991, the unthinkable happened. Well, it seemed unthinkable to someone who’d grown up with Thunderbirds on ITV. Suddenly, the BBC had acquired the series, and a new, clean set of prints began to appear in a prime early evening slot (ITV’s 1982 screenings had been confined to lunchtimes and mornings). A whole new generation discovered the series and presumably experienced the same insane rush of excitement that I’d felt at the same age back in the mid-60s. Before you knew where you were, the whole merchandising phenomenon was starting all over again. History, from my own childhood, was repeating itself. Aged 30, I found myself visiting the local branch of Woolworths’ to see what new toys had been added to the range. Some of them were very nice indeed – one might even venture to say they were too good for their own good – but all were let down by the too slick, too shiny packaging, none of which managed to recapture the lovely retro aesthetic of those 1960s toys. I bought, and still own a few of them, but I’d trade the lot for a battery-operated, mid-60s J Rosenthal Thunderbird One.

Of the subsequent revivals and reboots, I will offer no comment except to say, simply, ‘not for me, thanks.’ For me, the whole point of ‘classic’ Thunderbirds is its real-world aesthetic of models being blown to bits with fireworks, and ‘real’ characters in ‘real’ rooms, all of them crafted by model makers of peerless talent and vision. This was a unique way of making television films and it’s a shame that Gerry Anderson allowed it all to be dismantled when the chance came to do it all with actors. Shame too, that the puppets had to ‘evolve’. So they bobbed around a bit, their heads were too big for their bodies, and their mouths went up and down in a fairly unrealistic way: but that was why we loved them, and what set them apart from any number of live actors, CGI creations or cell animations. A unique art form found its ultimate expression in Thunderbirds and this is why, I believe, there will still be kids watching it in 2065. And it won’t be the 2015 version they’re watching, either. 

F.A.B.!