tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post597063677777443196..comments2024-03-29T12:03:37.344+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Gerry Anderson's puppet shows (and Barry Gray's music)Bruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-51762669945626008262019-01-09T08:40:08.944+00:002019-01-09T08:40:08.944+00:00@A probst - Thanks for that excellent comment!
I...@A probst - Thanks for that excellent comment! <br /><br />I agree about Anderson. I sensed an underlying seriousness and striving about his early and middle work that made it more than the sum of its parts; and ideal for boyish gamplaying and fantasy. Success and freedom came a bit late for full realisation. <br /><br />Terry Nation is another person, a scriptwriter, of that era who I felt was always pushing against the constraints to try and say a bit more. I am quite keen on Blake's Seven, for its characterisation and storytelling (at least of Blake, Avon and Servilan), and a mid-seventies, post-apocalyptic TV series called Survivors made quite an impact on me at the time. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-31336770697359668132019-01-09T08:06:37.552+00:002019-01-09T08:06:37.552+00:00I'm about four years older than you so my earl...I'm about four years older than you so my earliest Gerry Anderson series was <i>Supercar</i> which ran on a local Southern California TV station when I was seven. At the time I did not know the show was made in England any more than I knew that the animated <i>Adventures of Tintin</i> running on that same station was Belgian in origin. A publisher called Gold Key had the comics rights and put out three issues, I think, and I later got a plastic electric toy of the eponymous vehicle.<br /><br />Next year came <i>Fireball XL5</i> which I couldn't see much of until summer vacation because it played Saturday mornings and I was in Catechism class (no Sunday school for us Catholics). Curious cosmography in that show; apparently Earth was situated in a kind of celestial South China Sea with inhabited worlds only hours or days away via rocket-propelled spaceship. A subsequent Christmas gift was a $5.87 set consisting of an 18- or 20" long plastic replica of the eponymous spaceship with detachable nose section like in the show and plastic interceptor missiles fired out of a door in each side of the fuselage, replicas of two other vehicles from the show, 3½" figures of the principle characters, a catapult track with an undercarriage that would flip a smaller plastic XL5 into the air, and a cardboard model of the Space City HQ building. To say I was over-indulged would be an understatement. (I just remembered there was a Little Golden Book based on the series which contained another cosmographic absurdity at the end: "He even let [the boy Jonathan] do one loop-the-loop over the handle of the Big Dipper. Whee! up and over! That was fun.")<br /><br />When I was nine years old I was introduced to a boy two years younger by my mother and his mother. His father was American and in the USAF and his mother was British. I could describe him as 'half American and all English'. He was probably more intelligent than I so it made him easy to relate to, though I could be crankily ungracious at times if I was feeling jealous. His aunt in England would forward him copies of <i>TV Century 21</i> containing cartoon stories of all of Anderson's productions but with the characters drawn in normal human proportions. That was how I was introduced to <i>Stingray</i> and <i>Thunderbirds</i> ahead of their American debuts. It was odd to see the characters in them, already familiar to me from the comics, rendered in the gnomish puppet proportions.<br /><br />That magazine also had the comic rights to some American shows like <i>My Favorite Martian</i>, <i>The Munsters</i>, and <i>Burke's Law</i>. (Amos Burke was chauffeured on his rounds in a Rolls-Royce. Hmm..) It also had <i>The Daleks</i>.<br /><br />I don't recall that any more of Anderson's puppet shows were shown in the US, only his live-action efforts: <i>UFO</i>, <i>Doppelgänger</i>, <i>Space: 1999</i>, <i>Into Infinity</i>, and <i>Space Precinct</i>. (I elected to watch only the first episode of <i>Space: 1999</i> because of the absurdity of the premise. But the sets and effects were good, as I recently confirmed from a YouTube viewing.)<br /><br />David Cronenberg said that one needs "a great longevity of energy" and "a very thick skin" to work in film. "It's not a sprint race, it's a marathon." The few biographic details I find about Anderson more than hint at many professional and personal setbacks, so he certainly had that energy, but his works never look as though he and his collaborators found their making unrewarding.a_probsthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16197411067925016452noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-64701083317090286882019-01-08T16:42:11.343+00:002019-01-08T16:42:11.343+00:00@Dexter - I had a very natty little Thunderbird 4 ...@Dexter - I had a very natty little Thunderbird 4 (the yellow submarine) which I got from a packet of breakfast cereal!Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-91259465249874395502019-01-08T15:55:10.049+00:002019-01-08T15:55:10.049+00:00I fondly remember watching Thunderbirds, Captain S...I fondly remember watching Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and UFO on TV back in the 1970s. "This is the voice of the Mysterons!"<br /><br />My own treasured childhood possessions were the Dinky Toy UFO interceptor and the toy Thunderbird 2.Dexterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07748293799490877339noreply@blogger.com