Gerry Anderson reported dead
“Anything can happen in the next half hour.”
–from the opening of Stingray
produced by Gerry Anderson
While a lot of people in entertainment may claim to give you the unprecedented, Gerry Anderson, did just that.
Not only did he tell you new and bizarre stories (A mermaid on a submarine that leaps out of the water like a dolphin! The moon ripped from its orbit…and hurtling through space with a still active moonbase onboard!), he did it in a brand new language…supermarionation.
For the uninitiated, that means that means that we watched dramatic television…with a cast of marionettes.
In the case of Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons, one could even argue that it was puppet noir.
I remember watching Stingray and Fireball XL5 (with its rocking theme song) when I think they were first broadcast in the USA. Oddly, Thunderbirds, which is huge in the UK and recently spawned a feature with Ben Kingsley, never seemed to me to be that big here.
Lest you think Gerry Anderson was satisfied pulling the strings, there was also UFO (take a look at the picture on the cover of the DVD set…do you think Niki Minaj and/or Katy Perry were fans?), and Space:1999.
The latter starred Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Catherine Schell, and Barry Morse. There’s still quite a bit of fandom for this odd duck of a show.
There’s no question that Gerry Anderson filled many hours of tube time for geeks…and we were intrigued both by the ideas and the execution.
Good-bye, Gerry Anderson…the world is a little less original without you.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the The Measured Circle.