Thunderbirds

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The Return of the Thunderbird King

That Gerry Anderson, he just won't stand still.

Gerry, the creator of Space 1999, Thunderbirds and more recently, that bizarre 80's puppet-show with alien square robots bashing the heck out of Earth's spherical robots, is planning a little come-back.

The first vehicle for stardom is Captain Scarlet, the puppet driven series where the rather hard to destroy Captain S. fights off an alien invasion force trying to infiltrate Earth.

With only the help of his fellow officers, Captain Brown, Blue - pick a colour of your choice - and a bevy of beautiful female fighter pilots who could have been poured into their Skybase uniforms, the chaps and babes were Earth's well, last best hope.

Unfortunately, Carlton Television holds the rights to all Gerry's old TV shows (apart from Thunderbirds, which the Universal shagwits have been sitting on Buddha-like while they've toyed with the idea of making a movie with real actors).

Poor old Gerry hasn't had a lot of luck with these grand schemes recently, though.

Most of the TV companies seem to have turned a blind eye to GA's talents, and, IMHO, he has been 'resting' for far too long.

We saw him at speak a SF conference a couple of years ago and the impression we got was that he was a bit of an old duffer. He really doesn't seemed to have moved with the times as far as plotting and characters goes.

When you put up Joe 90 against NYPD Blue, you can see how much TV has evolved since Gerry was - forgive the pun - pulling the strings in a TV studio.

Can an old dog learn some new tricks? Well, there is a small glimmer of hope on the horizon. Apparently Gerry has enlisted the help of the FX wizards at The Moving Picture Company to bash out some test footage using CGI animations to impress the Carlton suits.

Hopefully the tidy packet of merchandising loot coming in from the Japanese Thunderbirds cartoon series might be enough make the accountants see the light on this one.

Somehow we doubt if the script is going to move at a modern Pulp Fiction pace though. So don't expect too much shaky camcorder-like footage cutting and "Yo Captain Black, you motherf$*£%^!" repartee, if this one moves into the production phase.

Browse the latest Gerry Anderson books

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