Thunderbird Sixty

TV21 counts down to Thunderbirds, December 1965

1: Early Days - 1965-66

You’ll need to be in your mid-sixties or older to remember seeing Thunderbirds the first time around. I was four and a half when the series burst onto our screens in September 1965 in a blaze of publicity, of which I retain some distant recollection. Over the next few blogs, I'm going to look back on some sixty-year-old recollections of how we experienced Thunderbirds for the first time.

The promotional trails began maybe a week or so before the series went on air. I vividly recall watching these with my mum – the Thunderbird 2 launch sequence was shown, along with a clip from the episode The Perils of Penelope showing Parker rescuing Lady P from a locked room using rockets in the back of FAB1. I’m sure other clips must have been shown as well, but these were the ones that most impressed themselves on my imagination. Lady Penelope herself was interviewed, on our local news magazine programme ATV Today: I remember very clearly how she described the new series as being ‘like Stingray, Fireball and Supercar all rolled into one.’ As a sales pitch, that rather put me off: I had bad memories of being scared of Supercar – or, more specifically, the series’ bald-headed bad guy Masterspy. Thunderbirds had its own bald baddie, and he turned up in the first episode – but even with his glowing eyes, the Hood never bothered me.

The Hood should, in theory, have been the first character we saw on screen when Thunderbirds made its TV debut on the last day of September 1965 – but I remember that premiere broadcast of Trapped in the Sky somewhat differently. In my recollection, the first scene showed the Fireflash airliner on the tarmac at London Airport. I don’t remember the establishing scenes in the Hood’s temple at all. That’s not to say they were missing – but script editor Alan Pattillo’s diary made reference to the first episode being ‘hacked to ribbons’ when it was shown on ITV London two days later, so maybe they were. I always felt it was an odd choice to start the series by introducing viewers to the bad guy. Anyway, we’ll never know for certain unless someone, somewhere has kept an off-air audio recording.

We did actually record part of the soundtrack of a Thunderbirds episode from that first run. On Friday 25 March 1966, our dad had purchased a Fidelity open-reel tape recorder, and the following Thursday, he taped parts of that evening’s episode – which also happened to be the last in the original series, Security Hazard. That tape confirms that ATV’s presentation of Thunderbirds was less than reverential – the opening titles were hacked off after the episode preview section, depriving viewers of the Thunderbirds theme. Likewise, the end credits were faded out early (over the caption of Thunderbird 2) and the continuity went straight into a commercial. This was somewhat ironic given that our dad had set up the recorder specifically to capture the music on tape.

Returning to that first broadcast, we find ourselves on the evening of Thursday 30 September 1965. It was 7.00pm – for some reason, ATV decided that the Gerry Anderson series deserved to be shown in this ‘family viewing’ slot and the first runs of Fireball XL5 and about half of Stingray had been scheduled the same way. It wasn’t just our family who sat down to watch Trapped in the Sky – we were joined by a lad from down the street, whose parents didn’t hold with television (they were teachers). Not having a TV set, I’m not sure how he even knew about Thunderbirds, but he was there on that first evening and on many weeks to come, and would be back when Batman began in the spring of 1966.

Thunderbirds was an immediate hit with me. I particularly liked the episode Pit of Peril and when it was repeated the following year, recorded my own version of it on our dad’s tape machine, with me doing all the voices. But how did we play at Thunderbirds in those early weeks on air, when toys had yet to arrive in the shops? Simple – we used our imaginations.

I had a box full of plastic aircraft, of which the most futuristic looking was the delta-winged Gloster Javelin. It looked nothing like Thunderbird One, but that didn’t matter – in my imagination it became the International Rescue scout craft. I’m not sure if I had a substitute for Thunderbird 2, but it didn’t really matter – TB1 was my favourite, and Scott Tracy was my favourite of the Tracy brothers (where everyone else tended to prefer Virgil). Century 21 Toys – or rather, J. Rosenthal Ltd – were already on the case, however, and at the beginning of 1966, a friction-drive Thunderbird One arrived in the toyshops. It had a blue plastic fuselage, but we were watching in black and white  so that hardly mattered. What did matter to me (aged almost five) were the toy's red plastic wheels. Thunderbird One didn’t have wheels! Especially not under the nose cone. This bothered me so much that I managed to get our dad to hack them off with a Stanley knife. The toy soon lost its brittle plastic tailplanes, broken in action, and was replaced a short while later by a grey version which I subsequently  customised into a more, ahem, ‘realistic’ model...

Rosenthal's Thunderbird One is announced in TV21. A year later it would cost two shillings less!

Thunderbird 2 was a much more successful toy, and, just like it did on TV, the toy took rather longer to reach the shops than Thunderbird One: indeed, it was beaten to the punch by Thunderbirds Three and Five which arrived in toyshops during March 1966, whereas TB2 wasn't announced until early June, when a half page ad in TV21 alerted readers to 'stand by' for the new release, which would be on 'limited sale in the shops'. This, together with the extended production timeline suggests problems behind the scenes. With its folding legs and detachable pod, TB2 was by far the most complex of the Thunderbirds toys to go on sale, and batches were made in both Hong Kong and the UK.

Being another friction-drive model, TB2 of course had wheels, but this time they were integrated more successfully into the design and the toy was a good representation of the ‘real’ thing. The un-numbered pod (I got our mum to rub on a numeral from a sheet of Letraset) contained a green plastic jeep. Thunderbird Four would have been a better pod vehicle, but a few months later a Smiths Crisps promotion allowed one to send away for snap-together model kits of the International Rescue craft. As luck would have it, their Thunderbird Four scaled perfectly with the Century 21 model of TB2.

The same but different: JR21's Thunderbird 2– on the left, made in England, on the right, made in Hong Kong.

The TB2 toys came in two slightly different versions (above), according to whether they were manufactured in England or Hong Kong. Mine had white plastic feet on the fold-out legs, and pierced foil inside the rear engine nacelles. My brother’s example was a slightly darker green, had red plastic feet and a grey plastic grid inside the nacelles. It also had the Mole in the pod, which was a distinct improvement on the jeep.

Although it had been released in March '66, I didn’t get Thunderbird 3 until a visit to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Birmingham’s Bingley Hall much later in the year. Until then, my games of Thunderbirds in toys made use of a 'JR21' X60 space rocket which, with its three booster nacelles, made a passable stand-in. The toy, which came on a blue roadgoing trailer, retailed at 8/11d. There was a giant-sized TB3 exhibit at the Ideal Home Exhibition, which you could go inside if you were prepared to wait ages in a queue. We didn’t wait, and all I saw of the interior were a few flashing lights. Thunderbird 5, modified from a flying saucer toy and only slightly resembling the real thing, came at Christmas 1966, and I had to wait for my sixth birthday to get Thunderbird Four. 

This, then, was how Thunderbirds left its impression on those of us who saw it first time around. I’m sure my experience must have been typical. Whether it was a good impression is less certain: the endless explosions and destruction certainly found their way into my childhood games and drawings. I recall smashing up a perfectly good plastic garage in the course of a game of Thunderbirds, and my drawing books became pages of scribbled explosions. I didn’t grow up wanting to plant bombs in airliners or steal the secrets of atomic power stations, but the series certainly seemed to foster an appetite for scenes of explosive destruction. And what of the friend from down the street whose parents didn’t own a television? He went on to become a barrister in London, whereas I ended up designing advertisements and DVD sleeves. That’s where too much television will get you…

In the next part, I'll revisit some of those early Thunderbirds toys in more detail.

A tabletop of Thunderbirds toys that have survived from childhood: Clockwise from bottom left: 'Repeater' water pistol; Lincoln International snap-together motorised TB4; battery operated TB5; friction drive TB2 (UK version); friction drive TB3; TB2 (Hong Kong version); TB3 'conversion'; Dinky FAB 1; friction drive TB1 'conversion'; battery operated TB4; dart gun. Centre: cap gun, hat, head of John Tracy doll, half a 'Mole' and, er, The Mighty Atom (okay, it was really a toy for cats...)