26 December 2012 4:00 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Thunderbirds creator who made some of the most popular children's TV shows of the 1960s
Gerry Anderson, who has died aged 83 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was the main mover behind a number of puppet series commissioned by Lew Grade's Independent Television Corporation. They made the company a fortune from the space age: perhaps the best known was Thunderbirds (1965-66), and among the others were Fireball XL5 (1962-63), Stingray (1964) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68).
Anderson embarked on Thunderbirds in 1964. For Grade, international sales – particularly into the Us market – were a key concern. So Thunderbirds focused on the Tracy brothers, with first names borrowed from the Us astronauts Scott Carpenter, Virgil Grissom, Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper. Enormously popular in its time, the series is still being repeated today.
Scott and the others were members of International Rescue, based on a south Pacific island, set up, »
- Nigel Fountain
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