Thunderbirds: Trapped in the Sky/Terror in New York City review – delightful fashion puppets are go

Double bill of the beloved 60s animations sees International Rescue coming to foil a supervillain and save some hapless journalists from disasterAttention all nostalgia buffs infatuated with 1960s kids’ TV: get ready for a serious wallow. This package offers a reissue of two episodes, about 50 minutes each, from the first 1965 season of Thunderbirds, the sci-fi/adventure series performed entirely with puppets and scale-model sets, a format that creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson called “Supermarionation”. Most readers will probably already be familiar with the basic premise, but for gen Z and Alpha types out there, the idea is that the all-male Tracy family, led by former astronaut paterfamilias Jeff (voiced by Peter Dyneley), operate a private international rescue business with mysteriously unclear sources of funding that sends various super hi-tech vehicles (the titular Thunderbirds) to bail out people in jeopardy. Indeed kids, this is what inspired Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s spoof movie Team America: World Police.In Trapped in the Sky, an evil Asian supervillain called the Hood plants a bomb on a Concorde-like supersonic plane making its maiden voyage so that he can lure out the Thunderbirds and thereby study their mechanics in order to sell them on. It’s a delightful hark back to an era when industrial espionage just involved covert photography rather than hardcore hacking and intellectual property law. Also, this episode contains posh spy totty extraordinaire Lady Penelope (voiced by Sylvia Anderson herself), and her trusty manservant Parker (David Graham) with his almost prehensile bushy eyebrows. (Parker has to stand up coachloads of guests to Penelope’s stately home in order to help out with the rescue, a shocking violation of etiquette, but needs must.) Continue reading...

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