Sci-Fi Storm

Sylvia Anderson, who was the voice of Lady Penelope and co-creator with her husband (at the time) Gerry Anderson on Thunderbirds, passed away after a brief illness at home at the age of 88.

Describing her as “a mother and a legend”, daughter Dee Anderson said, “Her intelligence was phenomenal but her creativity and tenacity unchallenged. She was a force in every way.”

She worked for years with Gerry on the various supermarionation shows they were famous for as a writer and producer, but also on live action productions such as UFO and Space: 1999, including designing the “future 1980s” fashion in the former.

For Space: 1999, she was on record as against the casting of American lead actors, but was overruled by Sir Lew Grade, then head of ITC Entertainment, as they wanted to insure an American TV market. She capitulated, but threw her vote for Robert Culp (I Spy) and Katharine Ross (The Graduate) – instead her husband went with then-hot husband and wife team of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. It was between the first and second seasons of the show that the Anderson’s separated and later divorced.

I’ve mentioned before that the Andersons were among the architects of my childhood, having grown up with Thunderbirds and Space: 1999. Their influence has been great, and will be greatly missed.

The Thunderbirds will finally fly into the U.S. (legally that is), and it will do so via Amazon. The streaming video giant has ordered up four 13-episode seasons of the remake of the classic Gerry Anderson supermarionation show.

Two seasons are already in the can, having aired already on ITV in the U.K. Seasons 3 and 4 are expected to air on ITV later this year, but it isn’t certain when Amazon will have them available.

It was almost two years ago that Gerry Anderson stated very matter-of-factly that a new Thunderbirds series was going to be made. Since then we heard nothing, and Anderson himself passed away in December.

Now ITV Studios announced that it will co-produce a new Thuderbirds are Go! series with New Zealand based Pukeko Pictures and Weta Workshop, with 26 half-hour episodes to be aired on ITV and CITV in 2015. Presumably it will be shopped to international markets as well.

The new show will be a combination of CGI and live-action models, paying tribute to the Supermarionation style Gerry Anderson made famous.

The Thunderbirds follow the Tracy family of five brothers who are part of International Rescue, and pilot a variety of spectacular vehicles to come to the rescue of people around the world.

Here are some of the big and our favorite stories we covered in 2012…

In January, rapidly rising British actor Benedict Cumberbatch joined Star Trek: Into Darkness, while CW’s Arrow dropped “Green” from the name and named Stephen Amell the lead actor.

We lost actor Ian Abercrombie and the voice of the Robot from Lost In Space Dick Tufeld.
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Gerry Anderson, the British television writer/producer who loved to imagine the near future, died today at the age of 83, after suffering from multiple dementia for the past couple years. His death was announced by his son on his blog.

Anderson is perhaps best known for both his Supermarionation projects such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, as well as his live action series UFO and perhaps his most well known series in the U.S., Space: 1999.

Fanderson, the Gerry Anderson fan group, has a nice obituary.

I remember seeing Thunderbirds as a kid…my mother was familiar with it and some of his previous efforts, having come from Ireland by way of England, and she always insisted one of the “rag tag” fleet ships in Battlestar Galactica came from Thunderbirds – I never quite saw that.

But Space: 1999 was one of the first SF series to garner my attention. The details of the base and the Eagles really drew me. It seemed that there was at least some attempt at realism in certain areas – the Eagles appeared relatively functional if not depicted in realistic flight – provided a level of detail that I love.
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There weren’t a whole lot of details, but at a BBC press conference for a line of stamps based on Gerry Anderson’s various “Supermarionation” shows like Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, and others, Anderson said: “I am going to make a new series of Thunderbirds. And that’s official.” Now that the bird is out of the bag, hopefully more details will follow…

I still want to see what can be done with Space: 1999…

I’ve been having fun creating ringtones (MP3 files) for The Avengers, Stingray and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

If you’d like to check out the selection, go to http://dailyspace.blogspot.com/2010/03/this-is-voice-of-mysterons-ringtone.html.

I also take requests, from those series as well as Thunderbirds.

While doing the painstaking work of fixing all the self-referential links on the site, I checked on the upcoming UFO feature film, to find out that Fringe star Joshua Jackson will take on the role of Paul Foster, who if memory serves is a pilot more or less forced to join SHADO.

Unlike most TV pilots that never resulted in a full series production, this Gerry Anderson production did at least wind up on TV – and at least in the U.S. it did so several times, and for some reason memory of this show stuck in my mind. I even had to ask you what it was, with the memory having been corrupted over 30 years. I recently had the opportunity to watch this again – Read More about it, and you can get even more details about this and other Gerry Anderson productions (and DVDs) at the Fanderson web site.

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