South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
TV TRAILBLAZER
Documentary traces life of Anderson, who created ‘Thunderbirds’
We recently saw the American DVD release of “Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted,” a new documentary on the British producer, writer and director best known in the United States as the man behind “Thunderbirds,” the 1960s slow-action puppet adventure show — “filmed in Supermarionation” — and, among viewers of a certain age (or inclination),i) for fit sip re dec es so rsd“Su per car,”“Fi reba l lib ll XL5” and “Stingray.”
Boy and man, I was and am a fan of these fanciful series, which are not like anything else television has ever offered, and which, along with later highlights and midlights of Anderson’s career, are still in circulation, a decade after Anderson’s death in December 2012, on home video and to stream, legally and otherwise. Some have lived on through novels, comics, soundtrack albums, radio dramas, model kits and action figures; to date, there are nearly 250 episodes of the cheery, cheeky “The Gerry Anderson Podcast,” co-hosted by youngest son Jamie Anderson.
None of Anderson’s series lasted more than a season or two (not even the flagship “Thunderbirds,” though it also produced two theatrical ffeatures).) But thishi turnover meant thath a variety i of programs, several co-credited to second wife Sylvia Anderson, were brought to fruition.
These included the live-action “Space: 1999,” with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, in which Moonbase Alpha and the moon itself go hurtling into deep space after a nuclear explosion, and the post-“U.N.C.L.E.” Robert Vaughn international detective show “The Protectors,” and “Space Precinct,” with Ted Shackelford as a former NYPD lieutenant fighting crime on the planet Altor. There was the sci-fi drama “Terrahawks,” with its Muppet-style puppets, and the stop-motion fantasy “Lavender Castle.” But marionettes are what made him.
Television’s first puppet superstar was a marionette, Howdy Doody. There are advantages to that sort of figure — you can frame them from head to toe, place them bodily into a set. But where a hand in a sock can become something quite expressive and convincingly alive, marionettes — with their knees-up walk, their floating arms and bobbing heads, their fairly fixed expressions and utter lack of dexterity — have to work hard to seem at all natural. But those limitations also determined the structure of Anderson shows, which feature moving sidewalks, hovering chairs and scooters and place the characters in cockpits and at consoles, putting the emphasis on the aircraft and submarines and super-cars, the impressive sets and miniatures — blown up or set afire with satisfying regularity. They used the tools of cinema — lighting, camera movement and angles, and clever editing — to make something new and unpredictable.
The Anderson oeuvre proper begins in 1961 with “Supercar,” about a nifty land-sea-air vehicle. It began Anderson’s relationship with Lord Lew Grade, who would habitually greenlight his projects until the executive’s own power failed. “Fireball XL5,” a space opera, was next, and then “Stingray,” essentially an underwater “Fireball XL5” and the first Anderson production (and British program) to be made in color.
Then came “Thunderbirds,” in 1965, the work for which Anderson is most celebrated. If his science-fiction shows had been all about the machines, “Thunderbirds” offered five big craft (and a host of smaller diggers and bulldozers) tooled to accomplish large-scale rescue operations — their enemies were industrial accidents, natural disasters and sabotage — plus a six-wheeled futuristic pink Rolls-Royce. Operations were run from the stylish midcentury modern island headquarters of International Rescue, home to chief Jeff Tracy and his five sons. As in earlier Anderson productions, the main characters were made American, the better to penetrate our insular market.
These shows evince a house style as quickly identifiable, domestically speaking, as the candy-colored, costumed fever dreams of Sid and Marty Krofft — the team behind “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” — or the stop-motion holiday specials of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass. But for a generation of Britons, they were even more culturally potent. The crafts and characters and catchphrases permeated the national consciousness; the vehicle-stars were, and for some segment of the public are, as familiar in silhouette as the James Bond Aston Martin, the “Star Trek” Enterprise and the Batmobile.
Although Anderson described being “embarrassed” by working with puppets — he would have preferred to direct conventional films — it led him as a result to strive for greater realism in his productions, and to tackle more adult stories and themes. It was this ambition, and its limits, that form the heart of his legacy. What makes his shows permanently wonderful is the way in which their reach exceeds their grasp; they can never be naturalistic, though they are entirely real. Even as you surrender yourself to the story, you’re aware of the artifice, the art and craft and invention that went into creating these worlds.
Directed by Benjamin Field, “Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted” presupposes a familiarity with Anderson’s work, which is seen only in brief clips to comment ironically on his life. But it has plenty to recommend as a story of the British television industry in the 20th century, a turbulent personal drama and an examination of the way in which even unhappy personal experience may be transmuted into appealing popular art. Jamie Anderson is its quasi-narrator, on a journey to understand a father who “produced 18 series and four feature films, owned six Rolls-Royce motor cars, had three children across three marriages, and made and lost his fortune twice over,” but who in many ways remained a mystery to him. (Anderson speaks for himself here, with some “deep fake” visuals to accompany tape-recorded interviews.)
Gerry Anderson was the product of an unhappy marriage whose idolized older brother was a Royal Air Force pilot killed in World War II. (His mother told him she wished it had been Gerry who died, a sentiment Anderson himself distressingly echoes.) That Anderson found success making shows about heroic pilots is a point not left unmade, nor is the fact that mothers are significantly absent from his series. In the end, it was all moot. Alzheimer’s disease erased both the trauma and triumphs from his memory, if not from the public’s. An overflow crowd attended his funeral, and a flower arrangement in the shape of the big green Thunderbird 2 sat atop his casket.