Pulpmovies Reviews

Weren’t the sixties great.

Thunderbirds was a children’s TV series forged in the white heat of technology and which reflected the optimism of the time that scientists and engineers could solve all our problems. Thunderbirds Are GO is the first of two feature film spinoffs from the series and it has all the same blind faith in the future and excessive use of gagetry which connected the TV series so closely to the spirit of its time - and which makes it appear so dated now.

The plot of Thunderbirds are GO is pretty standard Thunderbirds stuff including sabotages, disasters and daring rescues carried out at high speed by the Tracy Brothers - who with their father and Brains, the boffin, make up International Rescue - a top secret agency, based on an island somewhere in the Pacific, that uses as much hardware as possible to rescue people caught in life threatening situations. The name Thunderbirds refers to their vehicles, Thunderbird 2 - the fat aeroplane with interchangable cargo pods - being the coolest and most collectable of the toys which we fought over as kids.

In fact, the film plays very much like an extended episode of the Thunderbirds TV series and it really doesn’t stretch to 90 minutes. For a while it’s all good clean cheesy fun, but after a while it starts geting very dull and you’re left with a bunch of puppets who, while having a greater range of facial expressions than the average actor in a TV movie, are simply unable to convey any sort of emotion at all. The plot is both simplistic and full of holes big enough for Parker - Lady Penelope’s rough-diamond butler - to drive his employer’s pink Rolls Royce through.

And the big problem with using models and marionettes is that, not only do the special effects look unspectacular, but the moments of high drama are completely undermined by the fact that it impossible to actually care what happens to any of these lumps of wood. Granted, these had a lot more realism than the hand puppets which had previously been the mainstay of British children’s television, but animation techniques have seen huge improvements over the years and, compared to the claymation of Chicken Run or the detailed cel animation of Princess Mononoke, Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation looks decidedly dated.

Thunderbirds, the TV series, was hugely successful in the UK. It was also one of the first TV series made with the lucrative US market in mind. The Tracy family all speak with American accents and Lady Penelope and Parker blatantly play up to American stereotypes of what the English are like. That said, my Canadian flatmate had never heard of the Thunderbirds and the expression F.A.B. meant nothing to her - so it clearly failed to penetrate as far as later and less dated attempts. But this approach reflected the understanding of Lew Grade - the Independent TV mogul who bought Thunderbirds from Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 production company - that the future of TV was in light entertainment and the profits were to be made from selling shows abroad.

Thunderbirds Are GO, the film, reflects the state of the British film industry at the time. As cinema audiences declined, film-makers started to hunt for new ways to get people away from their TV screens and back into cinemas. One of these was to bring already successful TV series to the big screen - the two Thunderbirds films led the way with this approach and were quickly followed by film spinoffs for Doctor Who, On The Busses and Till Death do Us Part. The problem with this approach for Thunderbirds Are GO is that, as a children’s series - even one that had managed to build a cult audience amongst adults - it was unable to attract the audiences it needed amongst the more deeply age-segregated cinemagoing public.

On the whole, I wasn’t overly impressed with Thunderbirds are GO. But it did have some fun moments, including a cameo from Cliff Richard as Cliff Richard Jr. - performing exactly the sort of middle of the road pop that both contributes to Cliff’s longevity as a performer and which makes him popular with the intended audience’s parents. And I laughed out loud when the Band of HM Royal Maries rolled up to play the end title theme.

F.A.B.

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