1965 Thunderbirds Episodes In The Frickin’ Cinema!

Year: 2025
Director: Alan Pattillo, David Elliott, David Lane

“Thank you, Meddings”

After twenty minutes of ads firmly aimed at an under 12 audience*, I, and the fifteen other 40-plus-year-old BLOKES in the cinema, finally got to see OUR Thunderbirds up on the big screen. And what a joy it was to behold.
The pilot episode Fire In The Sky shows the boys’ first rescue. The Fireflash, a new atomic passenger plane is sabotaged on its maiden voyage when The Hood, who will be the Tracys perpetual tormentor attaches a bomb to the landing gear. Why? Not because he’s a terrorist, holding the world to ransom, but because – no less than the rest of us – he wants to see the Thunderbirds in action, although in his case he wants to know their secrets so he can make himself rich.
Hood apart, the other thing that kept the lads busy was hubris, as in the second episode when a crazy scheme to move the entire Empire State Building a little bit to the side results in an unfortunately-timed catastrophe, requiring some improvisation by the Thunderbirds team.

Although the Fireflash is their very first public essay, Scott Tracy, charismatic and strong of jaw (apparently modelled after James Garner) immediately takes control of the rescue. It helps that the crew on the ground have abandoned hope for the 600 passengers in the sky, saying only a miracle can save those people now. They’ve just watched Bob Meddings plunge from the plane while attempting a Tom Cruise-style stunt, trying to dislodge the bomb from under the plane by hand.

Now, I had a record of this episode as a child, severely truncated to fit on one side of an LP, utilising Scott’s narration to whizz through the story and – if I can trust my memory fifty years later – my recollection is Scott (or more properly Shane Rimmer) in relating the attempt, mentioned Bob falling from the plane, but never told me that he had a parachute and survived the fall. So, after all these years it was a delightful surprise to see his unlikely survival.
There’s another great Tom Cruise stunt in Terror In New York City, when a journalist tries to outrun Thunderbird 1 in a car while his cameraman is still standing on the roof, holding onto the giant tv camera for dear life.
Between these two episodes you get to see all the Thunderbirds in action, apart from Thunderbird 3, which had a pretty rubbish sofa-bound launch sequence compared to the others. And no-one really likes Alan. Except maybe Tintin – which is just another reason to hate Alan.
And London agents Lady Penelope and Parker get to do their bit for England, of course. (on an M1 motorway that’s 1960s-level empty – took me right out, that did..)

This 60th anniversary 4k restoration looks great and sounds terrific although, if such a thing bothered you, the strings are really conspicuous on a massive screen they way they were not when I first watched the Andersons’ masterpiece on a small black and white tv.
It was Thunderbirds (and soon after Spider-man) that instilled in me the belief that there’s nothing better than helping others when you can and because it’s the right thing to do. (And it made me think of Americans as a people as like a friendly, cooler big brother who used his superior wealth as a force for good in the world. This very idea was spoofed so successfully, decades later in Team America: World Police.

The episodes are each fifty minutes long (an hour in commercial tv time) which was a lot for a kids’ show, and much of that time is spent detailing the procedure of rescue and dwelling on those magnificent machines. Even for very young Thunderbirds fans all the explosions and the thrill of split-second rescues was always secondary to the show’s real money shot: the launch sequences of the Thunderbirds themselves. The emphasis in worldbuilding here reminds me a lot of 2001: A Space Odyssey – deliberately slowing the narrative to take the effort to make the machines believable and show exactly how they work and what they do.

Great credit must go to Derek Meddings and his team, who helped to bring Gerry Anderson’s ideas to life.
Although Del and Gerry didn’t lean so much on scientific rigour as Kubrick’s crew; how can Thunderbird 2 take off like that, in fact, how can it fly at all? You might as well ask the humble honeybee how it defies conventional principles of aerodynamics. Who cares? It’s the coolest mofo-ing thing you’ve ever seen.
A lot of blinking lights and a lemon squeezer on the wall – that was enough to convince me. And Nick Park.
The Fireflash, in particular, is a magnificent design, which looks fantastic on the big screen.

It’s truly surprising, finally paying attention to the credits, to see that only two puppet operators worked on each episode. This show really hit the sweet spot with the features of its marionettes. Later attempts to give their faces more realistic proportions just seemed to drain them of character. Seeing Captain Scarlet now, they all seem to have exactly the same inflexibility of facial expression as many contemporary botoxed or digitally de-aged actors.
It’s genuinely astonishing how much you can achieve with a head tilt or eyes that can only move from side to side.
And the voice acting is great. Dad Jeff, voiced by Peter Dyneley booms that 5..4..3..2..1 like no-one else could, but David Graham as Parker (he also did Brains, of course) is undoubtedly the pick of the bunch.
All that being said, I sat down to watch these episodes hoping the bigger screen would allow me to easier scrutinise the details employed in making these shows, but just got immersed and invested in the stories almost from the get-go and any finer points of production were only picked up in passing.

There’s no denying that this release is about nostalgia now. (While I expected the old BLOKES at the cinema, I was a bit disappointed no-one had a kid in tow). The future the show imagined back in the day was all “we were promised jetpacks” level exciting, but watching it now you ache for the optimism, the belief that progress was inevitable and the new technology would improve life.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Wide-eyed heroism, nail-biting excitement, the crafts of Supermarionation, modelling and special effects.
A positive take on the future.

5