> dissing glorious Thunderbirds

NO! You villain.

lol, in all seriousness though, have you heard they're trying again with a TV show this time? (We can pretend the 2004 one just... never happened.) This one will be all CGIed. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3138604/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds_Are_Go!
The effects are going to be done by Weta (the guys behind the Lord of the Rings CGI) so... it could be great.

Whether or not I like it, the Thunderbirds seem to have a large fan base. They have a lot of work ahead of them bringing the show back -- the brothers had no more personality than so man slices of Kraft cheese. Maybe that's an opportunity for the writers, though?

I'm sure I would have loved XL5 if I had been introduced to it at a young age, but my dad only showed me Thunderbirds. He gave me his stockpile of toys he had collected from when he was just a boy. And watching the show... it was like my toys coming alive (complete with pyrotechnic displays).

I don't know whether there were many toys at the time... but they kept making them even after the TV show had been cancelled I think. I have one small Thunderbirds 1, made by Corgi. I also have a couple of cheap plastic Thunderbirds associated with that dreadful movie a few years ago.

this was one of my all time favorite cartoons growing up... it takes me way back...

V.

...And if you've read "The Black Dossier" the Fireball XL 5 was proceeded by the "Pancake XL 4."

The Anderson puppet creations were amazing for their time and still interesting to watch. Thunderbirds, Stingray, Fireball XL5, Captain Scarlet etc

They are among the classics of TV kid's fare, regardless of which is your favourite. I liked Stingray well enough, though it needed a bigger stage and more characters. I did't see much else, unfortunately.

Fireball XL-5 was the ONE Science Fiction television show in the 1960's for young people, sadly it showed in San Antonio on Saturday Mornings, VERY early, so I had to get up before dawn. I liked Supercar as well but Thunderbirds? That one always felt contrived, as if Andersson decided what happened at the end then wrote a script to reach that end from some standard beginning script. Of course my absolute favorite show was Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, a short lived filmed cliffhanger. After that was Men into Space, which the US Air Force worked on, then XL-5. I'm not really a fan of things like Star Trek, Babylon 5, Space 1999 (another Anderson badly contrived story) though Project UFO was, at times, interesting.

Having moved to San Antonio in 1961 I was now living to far from the nearest theater to go alone, as I had Saturday mornings at Keesler AFB, thus I missed most of the movies released in the 60's unless my parents were interested. Those were things like The Naked Jungle (army ants) and old Elvis the Pelvis (Elvis Presley) and of course damn near any WW2 movie that ever came out.

Very nice design, I might look at working on it, as soon as I finish Devils Paw.... if ever.



Reese
Member of The Solar Guard

I remember Men Into Space, vaguely. I wanted to see it, but it was my bedtime... Never saw Rocky Jones ... at least not until two or three years ago, when I watched some DVD's I bought in a dollar store for dollar. Hum... a product of their time, I guess. Too primitive to watch for the fist time at age 60, 60 years after the were made.

I like Star Trek -- from TOS up to DS9, after that it gets problematic. Other TV SF has left me cold, though, for some reason.

I think that I may have fairly good copies of the entire Men In Space Series that I received from another Solar Guard member years ago, including the last, un-aired episode. Let me look around, I certainly do not need them anymore.

I had no idea they were ever recorded.

Thunderbirds ruled, sir. But so did Fireball XL5 - in fact, it was the last Anderson show where they weren't afraid to do light-hearted stories and not take themselves so seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ifS2nP53Zs

I consider myself fortunate that I have the complete XL5 on a huge DVD set. Cost me $100 nearly, but it was worth it!

I Have the complete Supercar, Fireball XL-5, Stingray, and Thunderbirds on DVD.

I wouldn't mind the Stingray ... and I'd be able to see Supercar for the first time. I'd probably give a pass on T-Birds, though. I saw enough of those, long ago, and have a videotape of that cheap "movie" they made (by splicing together some episodes) to remind me of them.

Supercarrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I would like to have seen more of that series, but I think about 3 minutes of one episode was all I got.

'Fraid I was too young and ingenuous to really appreciate Fireball XL-5. Or Supercar, or Thunderbirds, or Stingray. By the time I'd grown a s**t-detector, Gerry Anderson was up to Joe 90, which I found kinda boring. If any station was airing Captain Scarlet, I missed it. It seemed to me back then that Space City's system was a more fuel efficient way to launch a spaceship than NASA's. I occasionally watch episodes on Youtube now; they must have treated those rocket carriages as expendables! (I liked the mid-air transfer system Anderson's team came up with for Project UFO, too. I always wondered how Skydiver re-attached to Sky One after a mission, though.)

I could have watched Joe 90 but, like you, found it kind of dull. By then, Anderson had begun his decay into overly-serious, bloated budget turkeys like UFO.

NASA's way into space was never the best way, just the quickest way the US could get men into space. As the space shuttle proved, we still don't have the "best" way perfected yet.

I like that it's not a flying bar of soap or something that's stepped out of a squeaky-clean iFad commercial. Today's art designers seem to forget that today's idea of futuristic as smooth, white, and personality-less is only a trend that will be superseded by other ideas of "futuristic" in the future, just as it has shoved aside older, no less feasible ideas of futuristic.

Yep. The XL5's universe also reflected the times. Although Fireball might spend weeks flying to another planet, other times it seemed to get there in a matter of hours, and in some episodes you can see the flash of explosions in other solar systems from the widow of Space City! Very strange concept of space-time. Also, the XL5 could apparently hover when convenient for the plot. So why the explosive take off and risky landings with rockets? Making sense of the show would be a challenge for Einstein, let alone a ten-year-old kid.

Nicely done! I hope you do more of your versions of Anderson hardware.

Maybe I'll dig up the XT-1 sometime... if it isn't already posted somewhere among the 1800 or so images I have on FurAffinity.

Mind if I throw a splash of colour on?

It has directions. Assume primary colours.

You might also need to know that the whole body is silver, not just the center section. The annular rings are red. The tail lettering would likely be white, outlined in black, but red outlined in black on the nose. Same on the wing surfaces. Swim suited femme on the nose is optional (and definitely not on the prototype).

I wish I was a spaceman, the fastest guy alive... ;3

I'd fly you 'round the universe, and charge a buck ninety-five!

Someone actually built a flying model rocket of Fireball XL5, but it pranged. The fins on Fireball Junior may have been an issue.