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Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - The Fabulous Thunderbirds
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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They don't need to change the Space 1999 title. After all, it's still 1999 on the moon even though hundreds of years have past on Earth since it was knocked from orbit, because science.
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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What angered me about my childhood Thunderbird playthings was that Thunderbird 2's pod was held in place by a most temperamental spring-loaded catch. The comparatively tiny Thunderbird 4 contained therein, consisting only of a hollow cast-iron shell, suffered many undue crash-landings as a result. |
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wingweaver84
Posts: 74 |
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I didn't know Sylvia Anderson died-what a shame. I can kind of picture Lady Penelope and FAB1 on a cloud in heaven now.
On another note,is that manga pic by Osamu Tezuka?It looks like his style. |
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TheAncientOne
 Posts: 1882 Location: USA (mid-south) |
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Despite Thunderbirds easily being the most famous Supermarionation series, for some reason the only one I recall watching when I was young is Stingray, which premiered a year earlier. For some reason, it is also one of the least often mentioned Supermarionation series, beaten perhaps only by Four Feather Falls (which I honestly can't recall seeing mentioned before) and The Secret Service.
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mgosdin
 Posts: 1302 Location: Kissimmee, Florida, USA |
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I became an Anderson fan watching Fireball XL-5 and Stingray ( Which I faithfully got up at 5:30AM on Saturday mornings to catch it's 6 AM airing.) but Thunderbirds never showed on any of the channels we could get back in the day.
Mark Gosdin |
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lemurs
Posts: 103 |
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Thunderbirds 2086 was one of the first anime series I'd seen. It was a nice change of pace because there wasn't any sort of recurring villain in it; the problems were usually natural disaster related, like a bunch of people in a train caught in an avalanche or something along those lines.
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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When I was little XL-5 was being broadcast on tv (we're talking early eighties here  ) . Followed by Thunderbirds, Stingray, and that one with the secret agent that could be micronized. I loved those shows, even UFO and Space 1999 although these 2 weren't really supermarionation.
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Shenl742
Posts: 1524 |
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I was always more into Terrahawks myself, really.
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NearEasternerJ1
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Nice wrestling reference.
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2589 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Especially fitting since The Fabulous Freebirds are going into the WWE Hall of Fame next month. As for the subject at hand, I've never really seen any of Gerry Andersons' work, though I have seen clips & pictures, so I do know his work. Even though FireStorm may not all that good, I still wouldn't mind seeing it with English subtitles at some point. I know that there were fansubs for the first three episodes or so from about a decade ago, but nothing else. I does seem to be available for licensing from Enoki Films, however. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Was always a Captain Scarlet kid myself.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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WRESTLING??? Some lil' kid doesn't know his grandpa's Big 80's rock bands (okay, so I did expect it)--Back when MTV showed 'em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcXT1clXc04 At least Mike's not alone at the old geezers' home in getting the ref. And darn, he beat me to the Thunberdirds parody. 
And while we can now de-historize the '04 US live-action Thunderbirds as "never happened", the only reason we got that one was that it was originally going to be a CGI movie, as the US's photorealistic "virtual actor" answer to Final Fantasy: Spirits Within. You can guess what happened, and why it was downgraded to a live-actor movie. (And was there a reference to that Power Rangers-style reboot, where two live-action 90's kids keep talking with clips of the old show, or did I miss it?) |
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Barciad
 Posts: 131 Location: St Andrews |
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Finding out that 'Thunderbirds' was British felt akin to discovering that the band that did 'Gimme Some Loving' were white. Thunderbirds was grand, dynamic, optimistic, and opulent. And all in a way that British Sci-Fi just didn't do. Either through lack of budget or not enough will power. Thus leaving the end result feeling incredibly cheap. And when they did try and do grand, it was never the cheeriest of affairs.
Now I've just discovered the influence that it had on anime. Wonders never cease. |
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StudioToledo
 Posts: 847 Location: Toledo, U.S.A. |
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It all makes sense now! |
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Bamble
Posts: 130 |
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It's always excellent to see an article which highlights the influence of the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series on anime. Outside of the U.K., Japan is by far the next biggest market for their productions and subsequent spin-offs, and treats all those series with a high degree of respect to this day. As a minor case in point; the newest series, Thunderbirds Are Go, is getting home video releases in both the U.K. and Japan, but the Japanese release will be on Blu-ray rather than DVD, as befits a modern series made in high-definition. And of all the toys produced of the superlative Thunderbird 2 over the years, the very best one is widely regarded as an effort from Takara. So yes, very popular in Japan.
However, it's even more impressive to see Thunderbirds 2086 get some decent space on any article these days, and as a much more obscure series, I'd like to add a few (well, maybe not quite a few!) more words on the series. I've been fascinated by Techno Voyager (also parsed variously as Techno Boyager or TechnoBoyger) for years, ever since I first saw it on television back in the 1980s. The man chiefly responsible for the English adaptation of the series was Robert Mandell, himself of ITC New York (his father was Abe Mandell, who often co-ordinated with Gerry Anderson about how to better sell his older series in the States). Comments from Robert Mandell suggest that Thunderbirds 2086 was originally conceived as a full co-production between the U.S. and Japan, before ultimately being produced entirely in Japan, with the U.S. version only adapting those episodes into English after the fact. And that process alone was quite an interesting one, not the least due to 6 episodes making their debut in English due to TechnoBoyger's cancellation in Japan after 18 episodes. For starters, the original Japanese stories were not simply dubbed into English, but merely served as a basis for the English versions; that is, there was a fair bit of re-writing of the original Japanese plots. Sometimes, these alterations were not simply achieved through the scripting, but by new animation commissioned from the original production company (thus avoiding the pitfalls of the inserted animation in Battle of the Planets, which clearly didn't match with the rest of the animation from Gatchaman). New animation can be seen in the first Thunderbirds 2086 episode, "Firefall", which features numerous examples of cleaned up animation and backgrounds compared with its original Japanese counterpart. And additionally, another interesting point regarding the episode with Mikimoto's character Sakiko, is that she died in the original Japanese version, but lived in the English version of the episode, "Kudzilla". This wasn't achieved with a simple dub-addition to the script, but rather by newly-animated alternate scene. ITC Japan must have considered Thunderbirds 2086 sufficiently different enough from the original to warrant releasing episodes of the series (including "Kudzilla") in Japan on VHS, in English, with Japanese subtitles, when even TechnoBoyger itself was never accorded the same privilege back in the day. In general, ITC seemed to struggle with the series outside of Japan and those initial U.S. broadcasts on Showtime. By late 1983, they'd instructed the SIG Gerry Anderson fanzine to stop any articles on the series, possibly due to abortive attempts to sell the series into the U.K. that year (a hardback U.K. Annual was published in 1983, but ultimately had no broadcast to tie-in with). When the series did belatedly make its way to the U.K. in 1986, only 13 out its 24 episodes were broadcast. Having said that, the U.K. did later get 17 episodes released on home video, with most of those VHS releases occurring around the early-1990s Gerry Anderson boom as a logical cash-in. Both versions of the series languished in almost complete-obscurity until 2005, when reruns of TechnoBoyger began on AT-X in Japan, although, as with the original broadcast of the series in 1982, only 18 episodes were shown. It wasn't until 2008, on Home Drama Channel, when the final 6 episodes of the series were finally given their Japanese debut, some 26 years after their original production (a possible record for an anime television series?), and finally putting to rest the theory that these episodes were originally only partly complete and only finished off for their Thunderbirds 2086 counterparts. The only element unfinished on the Japanese versions was the lack of staff credits. Presuming that ITC still have the rights to Thunderbirds 2086 (and there's no obvious reason why they shouldn't), it's always been slightly puzzling that Thunderbirds 2086 never made the leap to DVD, especially since the series is only 24 episodes long. At least the original version of TechnoBoyger was finally released in its entirety on DVD in Japan, albeit only in 2014. Thunderbirds 2086 isn't the best series in the world, but is perfectly serviceable on its own merits, and it would be a shame if ITC have forgotten it altogether. |
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