Animation fans I have reviewed so many American animated shows both old and new that i've pretty much got it down to a fine art well now to mix things up i'm reviewing a show from my home country and a show that was not only apart of my childhood but also would have neen around thirty years old by the time I watched it and that's Thunderbirds.
The basic premise of the show is in the 21st century the Tracy family operate a unique private mechanized emergency response service. Yeah as you can now doubt tell but the plot summery this show is episodic and there's no overarching story but tho I think for this show it would have worked either way so i'm not really going to knock the show for not having a story arc but I am going to knock the show for having pretty bad pacing but i'll get more into that later on.
Now shockingly even tho this is a British made show all of the actors barring two people are all American and there's an Australien so the Americans are Peter Dyneley as Jeff Tracy , Shane Rimmer as Scott Tracy , both David Holliday (series 1) and Jeremy Wilkin (series 2) as Virgil Tracy and Matt Zimmerman as Alan Tracy. The Australien actor is Ray Barrett as John Tracy and The Hood with the British actors being David Graham as Gordon Trach , Parker , Brains and Kyrano , Christine Finn as Tin-Tin Kyrano and Grandma Tracy and finally we have series co-creator Sylvia Anderson as Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward.
The acting in the show is pretty decent at least for the time it was being made I will say that i'm glad they didn't have the cast put on a British accent they actually made this show so it could be sold to American networks but that said I do wish that they had but a little bit more effort into the voices but that's only a very minor nitpick.
Now then most of my animated reviews be they for a movie or a series one of the few things that I can always mention is who animated them but with this show there isn't a company who did the animation and that's because this show was made using puppets in a technique called Supermarionation no I have no clue what that means but from what I can gather basically it means that the lips move in sync with the audio there's alot more to it then that but I don't understand it all myself so i'm not going to bore you by going through it step by step.
The puppets in the show honestly do hold up really well I was worried going into this that the puppets wouldn't be as good as I remember them being in fact they hold up rather well my only issue with the puppets is the same thing that any fan of this show has and that's the fact you can see the strings pretty much all of the time they are on screen but tho it#s not distracting at least for me it isn't.
I couldn't do a review of this show and not mention the film that was inspired by it Team America: World Police because yeah this show and how they used puppets instead of live actors inspired South Park creators Matt Stone And Trey Parker to create there second feature length film except where Thunderbirds is a show made for kids Team America is made for adults so them being puppets and being able to see the string is part of the joke.
For those that don't know or are an American this show first aired on Associated Television in the UK which is a franchise owned by UK channel ITV it ran from September 30th 1965 to Christmas Day 1966 sadly I cannot find where or when it aired in America but the show ran for two series with a grand total of thirty two episodes with series one having a whopping twenty six episodes and series two having six episodes.
Something else that might surprise you is the fact that each episode clocks in at around fifty minuets this was due to Lew Grade who was the shows financial backer and was one of the founders at the shows distributor ITC Entertainment after he was done praising the first episode for it's plot and special effects he said this "That's not a television series, that's a feature film!" and then proceeded to increase the shows budget from £25,000 per episode to £38,000.
It really is refreshing to here news of someone who believed in a show so much that he not only asked the co-creator Gerry Anderson to double the length of each episode but also increased the show's budget which I assume didn't make him popular in the office that day but it goes to show that if someone does have faith in something then they should go that extra mile to make it a huge success and Lew did that.
Even tho i've just this second praised Lew for ordering an increase in length I have to say that there are times when the episodes become boring and I think that's due to the pacing being rather slow especially around say the twenty / twenty five minuet mark and i'm honestly not sure why that is but I don't think that every episode needed to be fifty minuets some of them could have been around forty five minuets.
I have something to admit I was a bit of a Thunderbirds fan growing up in the 90's you see that above picture yeah I had that as a kid and I played with it alot I also had a few of the other toys that they had as well and I also had a few of the VHS tapes that they released and to add to all of that when the episodes where re-aired I would watch them even tho chances are i've seen that episode on one of the VHS tapes but bottom line is i'm a fan and have been since I was a kid.
If your a James Bond fan out there then you might like to know that the special effects for this show were done by the late and great Derek Meddings and I have to say that the special effects in this series are truly fantastic and you can tell that alot of time and passion went into them and it truly is a shame that we don't have somebody like Derek in the industry now.
Just to give you guys an example of how popular this franchise was at the time there was not one but two feature films made released in 1966 and 1968 respectively (both of which I plan on reviewing) no kids show at the time got a feature film but with Thunderbirds it was so popular that it earned two films it also earned a lesser remake which even Gerry Anderson hates so if you hate that film then your not alone.
Before we got the actually decent CGI remake Thunderbirds Are Go there was talk for many years I believe the earliest it dates back to is 2005 but believe it or not it's not the first the first one was a sequel anime called Thunderbirds 2086 well I say it's a sequel since it was produced by ITC but it doesn't feature the involvement of any of the original creators.
Overall if your a fan of what i'm calling puppet animation then I recommend you watch this show but be ready to see all of the strings and to be bored in most of the episodes but it's worth it for the fantastic special effects and the great music by Barry Grey so this original series scores an 8.5 out of 10 from me.