Thunderbirds

THUNDERBIRDS
Made by: Gerry Anderson
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1965-66, plus many repeats

Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia were responsible for a string of successful and completely unique TV series, including Super Car, Fireball XL5, Captain Scarlet and Stingray - but the boys at International Rescue will always be the best loved. When Anderson was first approached to make a series with marionettes, he was less than enthusiastic because he had designs on being a big movie director - so, as a compromise, he tried to make his puppet shows as close to live action as he could, which included those cut-scenes with real hands replacing the hands of the puppets. To give the programme more commercial appeal and cool factor, British Anderson decided to employ American voice-over artists for his starring family.

Set in 2065, multi-millionaire Jeff Tracy lives on his own private Tracy Island, in the Pacific Ocean, with his squad of sons and servants. As the story goes, Jeff was one of the first men to walk on the moon and, in his middle-age, decided to be philanthropic and set up the International Rescue organisation, designed to protect the world from James Bond-type villains. Concealed within his island were a fleet of state-of-the-art machines, driven or piloted by each of the Tracy brothers, poised to be called to an international emergency.

Scott Tracy, 30, was the oldest of the boys; he was the sensible, responsible (read: boring) one, and wore the light blue sash on his uniform. He piloted the vanguard vehicle, Thunderbird 1, an ultrasonic rocket, and Scott was usually the first at the scene of a disaster. His vehicle launched from beneath the family’s swimming pool, which could be unfortunate for anyone taking a dip at the time.

Virgil Tracy, operator of Thunderbird 2, and wearer of the yellow sash, was 27 years old and considered to be the most serious and bookish of the brothers - he also entertained his family with his expert piano playing, confirming that it really was a barrel of laughs on Tracy Island. Thunderbird 2 was a huge, green behemoth of a machine with its own atomic pile, and was often employed to do some serious damage; it had a variety of different ‘pods’ which Virgil chose between, depending on the nature of the mission.

Twenty-one year old Alan Tracy was blond, baby-faced, liked potholing, and fancied himself as something of a ladies’ man. When he was not on a mission, he was romancing Tin-Tin, the daughter of the Tracys’ chef (and not a Belgian boy-reporter), which was not surprising, as she was the only female on the island besides Grandma Tracy. Alan caused all kinds of damage at university, including crashing a home-made rocket into the science lab, and instead of cutting his allowance, his benevolent dad decided to send him for astronaut training. The slightly reckless Alan, with his off-white sash, was given far too much responsibility in all honesty: he co-piloted Thunderbird 2 when needed, and he was the sole controller of Thunderbird 3, a bright orange spaceship designed for space exploration. He was also supposed to take turns in manning Thunderbird 5, Jeff Tracy’s very own space station, but more often than not he left John Tracy stuck up there for months at a time.

Now, if Alan was his dad’s favourite, then Gordon had to be the black sheep of the Tracy clan, perhaps because he was under the impression he was a great comedian, and his sober father seems to lack a sense of humour. Gordon, 22, clearly felt the need to be the clown to make up for the fact that he was the least good-looking of the boys…and ginger. He wore the orange sash (to compliment his hair, perhaps) and was a trained aquanaut, piloting Thunderbird 4, the subterranean craft. Tiny, yellow Thunderbird 4 was contained in one of the pods of Thunderbird 2, and was hardly ever used, meaning that Gordon spent much of his time lounging around the house and getting under his father’s feet.

Somehow (probably via a golden handshake to someone), Jeff Tracy managed to get permission to build a space station, and he put his middle son, John, in charge of it. The most intellectual of the brothers (he was a Harvard grad, don’t you know), blond, blue-eyed John spent most of his life isolated hundreds of miles above earth, where he supposedly monitored all of the emergencies happening at ground level. John (bearer of the rather fetching lilac sash) was a great dreamer, which was probably as a result of being on his own for too long, and it was just as well that his favourite hobby was astronomy. It was Gerry Anderson’s original intention that John be the hero of the piece, but when his puppet didn’t come out as envisaged, he was given a peripheral role, and Scott was boosted up the ladder to replace him.

So that’s the boys, but not the extent of the team. Also lodging at Tracy Island was Hiram K.Hackenbacker, better known as Brains, a 25 year old Cambridge University graduate, who designed and modified most of the International Rescue vehicles, including the Mole (a drilling machine) and the Firefly (a robust fire-extinguishing vehicle.) To be brutally honest, he looked like a complete nerd with no social skills and bad glasses, but he was sometimes required to leave the safety of the island to advise on some of the missions.

And if Brains was the, er, brains, then Lady Penelope was the beauty (and brains.) Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward, who took much of her style from Honor Blackman in The Avengers, was a sophisticated British socialite, who also acted as an agent for Jeff Tracy. She began her career in the British Secret Service, and lived in Creighton Hall in Kent. The 27 year old blonde (elegantly voiced by Sylvia Anderson) always enjoyed some flirtatious banter with Scott Tracy, and was clearly having some kind of affair with him, which his father would no doubt have heartily disapproved of.

Lady Penelope’s chauffeur and confidante was the middle-aged Aloysius Parker (how many servants are called Aloysius?!), a former safe-breaker and a top-rate mechanic, who spoke with an accent that Gerry Anderson obviously approximated British working class. He drove ‘M’Lady’s’ pink Rolls-Royce, registration FAB 1, which had been customised to conceal various pieces of weaponry behind its silver grill, including a machine gun, laser cannons and missile launchers. That would surprise the Kwik-Fit mechanics. Lucky for Jeff Tracy, much of the world’s criminal activity seemed to be centred in the south of England, so Lady Penelope was often right in the thick of things.

As previously mentioned, the Tracys had a chef called Kyrano, a Malaysian with a pretty young daughter he dogged with the name Tin-Tin. Unfortunately for Kyrano, he had an evil half-brother, an alleged master of disguise known as The Hood, who was Jeff Tracy’s arch enemy. The Hood was a bald slap-head who lives in a secret temple somewhere in the Malaysian jungle, from where he practised voodoo and black magic; he could control people with his weird, glowing eyes, and had some bizarre, supernatural hold over Kyrano, meaning he could control him to gain access to Tracy family secrets.

Thunderbirds has an unwavering appeal, and although it was originally broadcast in the sixties at the cost of the equivalent of £1 million per episode, it enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the early nineties (the dolls were the must-have toy of Christmas 1992 ,and Blue Peter showed us how to make Tracy Island from a pile of boxes and some paper-maché), and again nearly a decade later. Thunderbirds was essentially like a succession of great spy films, and with its boys-and-their-toys gadgetry, it was a hit predominantly with young males, but had enough ‘human’ drama to garner a wider appeal. The one element that does age it, though, was the fact that the Tracys and Lady Penelope all smoked like chimneys and drank like fish, which is no way for good all-American boys to behave, and no way for Lady Penelope to keep her youthful complexion.

By the way, you might think that Jeff Tracy burdened some of his sons with pretty appalling names, but each of the Tracy brothers were named after American astronauts: Malcolm Scott Carpenter, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, Alan B. Shepherd, Gordon Cooper and John Herschel Glenn.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 9/10