Supermarionation Tuesdays: Fireball XL5!

Theme: Fireball - Barry Gray

Mommy rudely interrupts my sacred gaming time to ask if I want tendies. STUPID mommy shouldn't have to ask (2025, colourised).

Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's followup to Supercar began as space opera but largely lapsed into sitcom by the end. The adventures of space Chad & Stacy Steve Zodiac and Doctor Venus, backed by Robert the Robot (every relation to Robby) and Dr Beaker clone Professor Matthew Matic, were the stuff of every schoolboy's idle daydreams in the back of class, but for no clear reason the focus shifted overwhelmingly to side characters like Commander Zero, Lieutenant 90 (possible relation to the later Joe), and Zoony the Lazoon, who mostly bickered away in Space City (whence Fireball launched weekly on railtracks, at the trivial cost of its rocket-powered sledge, which sailed off a cliff).

A good gag would have been to reshoot just this shot with a mountain of these wrecked sledges poking up into frame whence they've accumulated at the bottom of the cliff. I'm in the mood for typing "whence" this week.

This was a tooty move if you ask me*, but those early episodes still slap. It's obvious the puppet-makers had great fun coming up with designs for Star Trekian ayylmaos, most of which were recognisably humanoid, like the Bogdanoffs here:

Whamen: this is what you actually look like when you get that buccal fat removal shit.

The Bogdanoffs prepare to give Venus the Goldfinger treatment.

But other designs were more wildly inventive, like the sinister PLANT MAN:

Oh no look out he's got a syringe! Note that the Plant Man built a model of the Space City tower out of Lego on his workbench. Aww.

Even though the space setting gives pretty much unlimited scope for stories, sometimes the team got bored and wanted to do another setting, like a circus or a western, so they just did. Matic invented a time machine just so they had a pretext for a western episode, which nodded heavily to their OG work, Four Feather Falls:

Sadly, they didn't rig up a squirty flower from a prank shop to the puppet's mouths so they could spit in a spitoon, so you'll just have to pretend they did.

Fireball also introduced a trend of dream episodes that allowed the creators to blow up all their key buildings and vehicles without having to permanently bum out and/or traumatise their little kid viewers, but if you're feeling mean you can always shut the TV off before the reveal so they think that's just how the series ended.

Now, son, what did we learn from the horrific 9/11ing of Space City? That's right: violent death can come for you at any time. Now, off to bed! You've got preschool in the morning.

*"Tooty" is space slang for whack/crazy in the show, and possibly in the 60s when it was made.