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Thunderbirds Are Ughhh!

R

Robot_man

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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Mar 24, 2004
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161
I've just been watching the feature film 'Thunderbirds are go' from 1965 (ish) & it has the weirdest, almost surreal section in it that I've ever seen. I'm not sure if its an 'in' joke or just an innocent piece of entertainment but its got to be seen to be believed.

Let me explain. Two thirds through the film young Alan Tracy has a dream that he & Lady Penelope (the older woman) go to the stardust Club (a nightclub in space, if you will).

They are sat having a cup of coffe & a fag (everyone smokes on Thunderbirds - must be the pressure of the job) when the cabaret for the evening is introduced. Lo & behold it's ....Cliff Richard - Junior (remember we're well into the 21st century here).

The puppets of Cliff & the Shadows are a good likeness but they have the corpse-like appearence of all puppets as the features (except the mouth) don't move & the inevitable universal joints in the arms.

The song is a simple '60s beat track but it describes how Cliff thinks his girl is cheating on him, that she has to watch out because he 'has friends' & then goes on to describe the various forms of inter-galactic punishment she can expect if she gets caught with her pants down.

Can anybody beat that for celeb/puppet oddity.

The Steele Cliff.

PS: Alan does'nt cop off with Lady P & has to settle for a ménage et un. (Well, I made that bit up)
 
odd yes ..but still looks better than the one they are makeing now. i saw it a the picures, first time id seen it in colour, and i noticed john gets a pink sash..is that whyhes always alone up in the space station?
 
Gerry Anderson hated the one in the space station - John? so much that he always stuck him there and never had him really involved in any of the episodes.

Ben Kingsley plays The Hood in the film and makes a pretty good likeness.

Everyone smokes and the pollution made by all the Thunderbird crafts is really shocking.

And isn't Stingray shit?
 
I really cannot belive that they have made a live action film of this utter s***e.

Mind you my ex always enthused about Thunderbirds so maybe I am a bit prejudiced. :D
 
whatever happened to the terrahawks?:confused:

I've never seen the episodes repeated for years:(

The live action version of Thunderbirds will suck though, unless they get actors as wooden as the original versions . . .
 
Thunderbirds is quite cool. One of my earliest memories is watching it aged about 2 years old. My son was really into it for a while too when he was about 3 and a half. We've got loads of videos and we purchased a Tracey Island in swappsies for his dummy.

Some of the plots and inventions are completely bizarre and Jeff Tracey is a complete control freak.

Bit odd when they have to blindfold 2 young boys when they take them on a secret mission. You just wouldn't get away with it these days.
 
jima said:
whatever happened to the terrahawks?:confused:

I've never seen the episodes repeated for years:(

The live action version of Thunderbirds will suck though, unless they get actors as wooden as the original versions . . .
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The actors they've got look too young.

Oh no I must be old, first it was Policemen now actors.:(
 
And isn't Stingray shit?..but posibly the most exiteing bit of intro music ever!

terrahawks was really pants!


I like Thunderbirds. in a world where death and violence is "entertainment" they got the exitement from saveing people..and it had lots of explosions...

For wooden acting see the film Anderson made (name excapes me)...boy did those actors suck!


Bring back UFO!
 
But Stingray was so crap. And blatantly sexist.

An ideal woman that Marina bird: sexy (apart from being half fish or whatever and bright green) she was obviously up for it, adorded her man, always new when there was a dastadly plan and best of all SHE COULDN'T SPEAK!!!! No nagging or anything. She could probably grunt in appreciation when getting a good shafting but really, it was complete sexist and mysonginistic tripe.

And the plots, sets and everything else were crap too.

Captain Scarlett though... All the Angles were totty, Captain Black was an ancestor of Alan Hansen and the Mysterons are now appearing in benefit fraud adverts.

Who came up with the names though? Captain Ochre??? Captain Magenta??? Bleeding hell. Not quite the same ring to it as Scarlett and Black.
 
This bloke never gets the credit he deserves, I mean, he invented everything...
 
Stingray was always such a let down after the theme music. Troy was such a twat Marina and Atlanta should have gone off together.

Thunderbirds was cool but the group dynamic never really seemed authentic. Was Lady Penelope secretly the mother of at leas some of the Tracy boys?

Captain Scarlett rocked. It's even better than I remembered it. When I was 6 I wanted to grow up to be an Angel and marry Captain Scarlett. These days I'd settle for looking good in the white leather flight suit and buying Niles a Captain Scarlett outfit.

Cujo
 
When I was at Portmericon in '92 a woman I met there had made herself the most amazing Thunderbirds uniform for the ball, spray painted wellies, hat, sash, really it was spot on.

So we're outside the hall with strains of the band soundchecking and we hear them doing the song that the Cliff puppet performs in the film, and she just has to open the door and wave to them.

Apparently jaws dropped and almost several instruments too :D
 
Tyger Lily said:
And in the new film he's about 14!
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Actually, that's Brains' son, Fermat.

What a stupid concept.

Brains is actually played by Anthony Edwards, who is a good choice, really. And Ben Kingsley as The Hood is also a good idea, but everyone else is too young. (Except Parker.)

Then again, it's set 50 years earlier than the original.

I do like some of the re-modelled Thunderbirds, though.

Stingray was shockingly bad. I saw half an episode while I was in the UK (it just happened to be on).

Terahawks is out on DVD, here. But the puppets look worse than anything else he's done. Don't know anything else about it.

What I want to know is, what's happened to Fireball XL5?
 
Don't diss Stingray - as a (very) young and impressionable girlie, my first crush was on Troy Tempest (!) and I could never understand what he saw in ole cod-breath Marina

Re: Thunderbirds - my cousins and I broke my auntie's ironing board sliding down it playing Thunderbird 2
 
Mummy said:
Don't diss Stingray - as a (very) young and impressionable girlie, my first crush was on Troy Tempest (!) and I could never understand what he saw in ole cod-breath Marina

Re: Thunderbirds - my cousins and I broke my auntie's ironing board sliding down it playing Thunderbird 2
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Here, here!

I was brought up on Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. As a young kid, it was the first three that really stuck with me.

Perhaps, you had to have been really young and watching telly in the early Sixties, to appreciate them.



Does anyone also remember the close rival kid's series, 'Space Patrol' ?
 
Anybody remeber the Japanese cartoon version of Thunderbirds with conpletely different craft, if I remember correctly it was called Thundebirds 2086 - what a pile of crud that was!

And what about Joe 90, nobody seems to have mentioned that yet. Always thought that was briiliant when I was a kid. Bit trippy when you look back on it when he used to get inside that revolving cage and that music would start up along with the psychedelic light show. I remember getting a model of the car one christamas and being really disappointed that it didn't fly like in the programme. I'd love to see it again now, not sure what I'd make of it though.
 
Cujo said:
Stingray was always such a let down after the theme music. Troy was such a twat Marina and Atlanta should have gone off together.

Cujo
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i always admired Phones... not terribly heroic and a little incompitant..... the real story was Marina love for Tempest and the tension between her and the bird back at base (who was the bosses daughter)... i always wonderd if one was going to build a whole town that went under ground when in danger....why not build it underground inthe first place.
 
Bunny, aka Isacc Sprilbach, had a college technician who had worked for Gerry Anderson as the creator of all those great Thunderbirds explosions.
I used to really love the noughts and crosses game at the end of Terrahawks.
And Stingray had that brilliant 'Anything can happen in the next half-hour!' at the beggining.

:D
 
Perhaps, you had to have been really young and watching telly in the early Sixties, to appreciate them.
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Yup, there wasn't much on TV for kids once you grew out of Muffin the Mule and Andy Pandy.

Things were especially bad for girls. If Thunderbirds etc were the most exciting things on TV for kids, they criminally short-changed us!

Things had moved on a bit by Captain Scarlet. The Angels were cool, they were all gorgeous and sat around in their very own luxury lounge until they had to do a bit of flying. I wanted to be them! They were of different nationalities too, including an Oriental, but no black faces. That would have been mindblowingly progressive for the time. ;)

The ironing board incident, yup, rings a bell. My brother and I built a Tracey Island setup in our back yard using planks, a wheelbarrow, old pram etc. Great fun.
 
escargot said:
Yup, there wasn't much on TV for kids once you grew out of Muffin the Mule and Andy Pandy.

Things were especially bad for girls. If Thunderbirds etc were the most exciting things on TV for kids, they criminally short-changed us!
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you had Folly foot, and White Horses (now i got that tune in my brain all day!)
 
StellaBoulton said:
And Stingray had that brilliant 'Anything can happen in the next half-hour!' at the beggining.
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As long as it's underwater.

There's always an inlet, or a river, or a fjord...
 
Fireball XL5 had a really workable rocket-sled launch system; looks like they had a few experts working for them in those days;

the science wasn't consistent, though, as XL5 used tiny rockets to bomb around the solarsystem without ever refuelling.

I haven't a clue what the spaceships on Space Patrol used to propel themselves- looks like a rotating superconductor antigrav device of some sort; Podkletnov would be proud.
 
Mike P said:
They do bring it back on DVD. I bought it. What a F****** waste of money.
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oh dear i saw an odd eposide last year and thought it creepy and quite good.. the Alien and the Blind lady and the one where the guy gets "converted" to breathing liquid... anyway I WANT AN OFFICE THAT GOES DOWN LIKE A LIFT!.
 
Eburacum45 said:
I haven't a clue what the spaceships on Space Patrol used to propel themselves- looks like a rotating superconductor antigrav device of some sort; Podkletnov would be proud.
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Funnily enough although 'Space Patrol' (a.ka. Planet Patrol for our American friends) was way off into fantasy science in many ways, it did show that travelling between planets, even within the solar system, could be lengthy journeys of weeks or even months.
The crew used to go into suspended animation for the journey (which was a pretty radical concept for a kids show in the 60s).

The cityscape and the Galisphere launch sequence were pretty imppresive , though the rest of the special effects and the puppetry were a lot more basic than the Gerry Anderson series.

(I admit I bought the series when it was issued on video a few years ago, and finally found out the ending to 'The Robot Revolution')

As kids we were never quite sure whether Slim (the Venusian crew member) was a boy or a girl.

Slim:
 
I think they were all androgynous anyway, my niece had a Captain Scarlet doll and pulled down his pants to prove it.
 
UFO was rubbish, except for Peter Gordino, in a string vest, piloting the flying sub.

Other than that, nowt happened & as far as I recall there was no conclusion to the story. (I'm big on conclusions, me.)
 
escargot said:
Things had moved on a bit by Captain Scarlet. The Angels were cool, they were all gorgeous and sat around in their very own luxury lounge until they had to do a bit of flying. I wanted to be them! They were of different nationalities too, including an Oriental, but no black faces. That would have been mindblowingly progressive for the time. ;)
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Ah but Leutenant Green was black. He was kind of a male Uhura but he had one of the best personalities of all the Spectrum staff. He also went out and had proper adventures with Captain's Scarlett and Blue. He even went to the moon.

Cujo
 
Green had a neat chair that slid up and down too.... big on slideing chairs was Anderson...cos the pupets couldnt walk properly.
 
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