Supermarionation Tuesdays: Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons!

Theme: The Eve of the War - Chris Brookes

It's been a while since we checked in with Supermarionation, partly because I'm still lethargically rewatching Thunderbirds in between drawing stacked chicks fighting Chinese-Incan skeletons and treating my elderly neighbours to the Kubrick stare from my window, but time and my ƃl¢gg wait for no man, so let's skip ahead to the DARKEST and EDGIEST entry in the whole puppet cycle: Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons!!!1

Holy shit, Gerry.

The year is 2068. Earth has a single government and the first manned expedition to Mars is now underway, led by Captain Black, who is on the Spectrum. The Spectrum is Earth's comically understaffed counterintelligence agency, whose elite agents are colour-coded and go by Captain [insert colour], except for Lieutenant Green and Colonel White. They also have a jet fighter squadron crewed by supermodels known as the Angels, and they all live together on a floating cloud base.

I love their see-through helmets so you can appreciate the time they put into their hair.

While this likely isn't really any sillier than the arrangements in previous series, Captain Scarlet generally has a more srs bsns tone and the puppets are more realistically proportioned, so it seems moar silly by contrast, but none of this occurred to Colonel White, because he's on the Spectrum.

You have to be a colonel to get a chair with a back to it. Lower ranking officers sit awkwardly on little bar stools.

Anyway, on Mars, Captain Black encounters a mysteeeriously glowing city populated/haunted by the disembodied(?) Mysterons, so named because they are very mysteeerious. If they have any corporeal form, it's never seen, and their presence is indicated only by two little glowing circles, like this:

"WooOOOoooOOOooo" - the Mysterons.

In a misunderstanding worthy of Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, the Mysterons turn a camera or telescope or something toward the Earthmen, which Captain Black takes for a weapon, so he fires first, blowing up their city. The Mysterons then rebuild the entire city in like five seconds with their mysteeerious powers, and declare eternal war against Earth in retaliation for our completely ineffectual attack. It's not even really clear why the Mysterons needed to use the machine Black mistook for a weapon to view the humans anyway, because throughout the show they seem to be able to see things happening as far away as Earth just fine, but the catch-all excuse is that they're so mysteeerious that trying to make sense of any of this is a waste of time, which is definitely true, but then, I'm on the Spectrum.

The Mysterons then somehow turn Captain Black into their permanent zombie agent, and briefly do likewise to Captain Scarlet, but he gets better and in the process becomes "indestructible", allowing the writers to kill him off and bring him back constantly. What, if any, limitations this regenerative ability has are about as unexplored as the extent of the Mysterons' powers. If he were cut down the middle, would both halves regenerate, leaving two Captains Scarlet? I don't know, and nor did Gerry Anderson, and I don't care, and nor did Gerry Anderson.

The Captain puts his feet up on the boss's desk. Like what are you gonna do, kill me?

Each week the Mysterons would come up with some new terrorist scheme to wreak havoc on Earth, which involved killing or destroying a person or object, often a vehicle, and then replicating it and using the fake and gay version to carry out an even more devastating attack somewhere else. Captain Scarlet and his colleagues on the Spectrum would attempt to stop the second attack, usually succeeding, although there were a few episodes where the Mysterons just won outright, and even when they failed, they still killed or destroyed the original target, so the stakes were noticeably higher than in other shows.

I hope they're alright.

Earth had very little recourse to strike back against the Mysterons, but there were a few episodes in which our heroes would learn something that would help even the odds, like Mysteron copies of people they had killed not showing up in photographs, like vampires. It was vaguely implied that the skinwalker people they created were actually inhabited/possessed by Mysterons, which presumably died when the body was destroyed, which was entirely deserved, especially since Earth arranged peace talks in one episode only for the Martians to betray them and keep waging their deranged vendetta anyway. I feel there's an important lesson here: if someone feels entitled to unlimited revenge against your civilian population, and won't be satisfied no matter what you do to try to please them, stop trying; they're just evil.

You Earthmen, A. Mysteron, pub. 2068 (colourised).

There are some pretty striking stylistic elements in Captain Scarlet, like the signature transition that quick-cuts back and forth between one scene and the next to the beat of a musical motif, sometimes interspersed with the logo of the Spectrum:

No, not that one. This one:

You can definitely appreciate the team pushing the boundaries of the format. There's a lot less intentional humour than in Fireball XL5 or Stingray, and the opening titles seem to evoke the spy thriller and even horror genres. If Scarlet is only a partially successful variation on a theme, the scope of the ambition behind it easily absolves it of its odd bum note. Just like previous shows, Scarlet ended with a fake-out dream sequence episode in which they got to blow up all their sets and a clip show, but no real resolution to the central conflict, meaning it continues to this day, so pour one out for all our brave lads on the Spectrum.

Supermarionation Tuesdays: Stingray!

Theme: Ocean Man - Ween

I once had little toys like this from Burger King or someplace. This was exactly how I looked playing with them too.

The overwhelming consensus is that Gerry Anderson's insane puppet fixation peaked with Thunderbirds, but, as I am allergic to consensus, I say Stingray was the best. Stingray transplanted the basic plot of those old Flash Gordon serials from my late adolescence to an underwater realm, with Troy Tempest as Flash, Titan as Emperor Ming, and Marina as Princess Aura, who vied for Chad's affections with his earthling gf Dale Arden/Atlanta (who was not a city). I appreciate you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about because unlike me you weren't around during the Great Depression, but the parallels are uncanny, or, at any rate, not noticeably canny.

The great debate: smoking hot redhead puppet gf or amphibious mute puppet gf? >inb4 the muteness is the clincher.

Both the love triangle and the off-again, on-again war with Titan and his gargling fishbros remained unresolved, as the series began yet another trend in Supermarionation by bitching out and giving us a clip show for its finale, but this is good insofar as it allowed young minds to come up with their own stories of how things might have ended. But the one-off episodes were fun too, and wildly imaginative: one had Troy and Phones discover a second ocean underneath the floor of the familiar one, which sounds like the plot of something Jules Verne might have written, or a 50s scifi kino like Mars The Angry Red Planet.

If you don't look back at her, you can't see her signing that you should have stopped to ask directions one ocean ago.

But as I recall everyone's favourite character was X-2-0, Titan's alternately creepy and long-suffering spy sidekick whose voice actor made him sound like alternately creepy and long-suffering character actor Peter Lorre. X-2-0 lived on a creepy island with a seemingly innocuous house whose furnishings flipped around to reveal a high-tech HQ like something out of a James Bond movie.

I'd be bummed I don't have this setup in my house but, for all you know, I do.

As the show went on, X-2-0 became the foil for Titan's potent combination of incompetence and megalomania, and the brains to his oddly statue-of-liberty-looking heavies' brawn, or, if you prefer, prawn.

Don't forget to tip your waiters!

This made him halfway between the land-dwelling heroes (I think the Innsmouth set referred to them derisively as "terraneans") and Titan's people, mostly referred to as "aquaphibians", which sounds suspiciously like a word made up by Gerry Anderson by splicing "aqua" into "amphibian", which makes no sense because amphibians live in and out of water; the "am-" part is like in "ambidextrous", meaning they can do both. An "aquaphibian" should only be able to survive in water, but this doesn't seem to be the case, or else Marina would have quickly been less hot exotic waifu and more decomposing globster. F for linguistics, but A for entertainment. Watch Stingray you oaf!

Actual frame from Stingray.

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.

Supermarionation Tuesdays: Supercar!

Theme: Supercar - Barry Gray

Gamers will be shocked to learn that Supermarionation is not a strategy game starring Nintendo's Italianest plumber, but instead refers to a process of filming puppets in sci-fantasy action shows for kids' TV invented by Bri'ish madlads in the 1960s. While the most famous of these was Thunderbirds, the journey of refinement that led up to it saw various prototypes aired, including this week's showcase: Supercar!

What would you do for the flying car?

The premise is simple: German Professor Popkiss and Bri'ish Doctor Beaker have invented the titular vehicle, piloted by nominal protagonist Mike Mercury. All the Supermarionation protagonists had these space-age cool-guy names: Fireball XL5 had Steve Zodiac, while Stingray had Troy Tempest. None of the protagonists really did much except be easygoing Chads, except for Captain Scarlet, who was more of a sarcastic dick Chad. In fact, Mike Mercury barely did anything at all, since Supercar could be piloted remotely by the Professor. Nor had they quite figured out the Chad phenotype later modelled by the Tracy family marionettes: Mike had gap teeth, a gargantuan proboscis, and the browline of an archaic hominid.

Mike looking like he's about to club the Professor with a bone.

Just as Mike served as a prototype for later heroes, the Thunderbirds fan will see early sketches of stern-to-cantankerous patriarchs like Jeff Tracy and Commander Shore in the more genial Professor, and of stuttering savant Brains in Doctor Beaker, with his catchphrase "satisfactory, most satisfactory". "Don't have a cow man" it ain't.

Beaker rocks the world's most optimistic combover.

Another trend they wisely phased out in the later shows was the "cute" animal companion: Supercar's Mitch the Monkey begat Fireball's Zoonie the Lazoon, both of whom were more annoying than cute, though the fault always lay with their human costars, who would gift them free run of the labs and control rooms, which they would invariably trash. These were toned-down into the more endearing seal from Stingray, and finally dropped.

Science genius Doctor Beaker asserts authoritatively that Mitch is a chimpanzee, which is wrong. Chimpanzees have black fur, no tail, and are not known to make good pets or roommates, because they're insanely violent.

Another motif that made it as far as Fireball was the evil yet inept eastern bloc spy duo: in Supercar, Master Spy and his hapless sidekick Zarin; in Fireball Griselda and her hapless husband Boris. Master Spy followed the classic trajectory of recurring villains, at first being somewhat credibly menacing, but quickly becoming a joke after his failures began to stack up too high. Fortunately, the Supercar crew went easy on him: each appearance would end in his capture, but then they seem to have just let him go in between episodes, as he would always show up again later with a new whacky scheme.

A good way to subtly disguise yourself is to dress like a pirate from the neck up.

But the most perplexing thing about the show is that the opener has Mercury & co. rescue little Jimmy, Mitch, and Jimmy's pilot brother from a raft after they bailed out of their crashing plane, only for the older brother to disappear from the show, never to be mentioned again, while Jimmy and Mitch are basically adopted and tag along on missions for the remainder of the show. What became of Jimmy's brother? Did our heroes whack him and harvest his organs? Is he in Jon's basement with Lyman? You decide!

Lyman is still missing since his last sighting in 1983. If you have any knowledge of his whereabouts, leave a comment and subscribe to Heavy Metal Classic Albums on You Tube Dot Com.

While Thunderbirds was mainly focused on rescues and Captain Scarlet on stopping the Mysterons' schemes against Earth, Supercar alternated freely between rescues, treasure hunts, crimefighting and the surreal: the final episode concerned Mitch swapping places with a giant ape who played drums in a band he saw on television. While it's obvious that Supercar was more of a stepping-stone to greater things, it's still fun to revisit 470 years on. From these modest beginnings, Supermarionation was to reach heights still unmatched in small screen action entertainment.