After today I'm almost halfway through the Thunderbirds. I've now seen 15 of the 32 episodes. I have three more discs of shows to watch and a couple of movies. I'm undecided if I want to re-watch the more recent Thunderbirds movie or the CGI remake series that's playing on Amazon Prime right now. The CGI characters look super creepy to me. It's almost as if they tried to make them look like puppets that were based on people, as opposed to making them look like people. I don't always find CGI faces pleasant. It's better when they're creating something that doesn't exist already.
Brink Of Disaster 2-24-66
A crooked businessman goes to see Lady Penelope to try to get her to invest in his new monorail. He's also casing the joint for a robbery, just 'cause he's a greedy prick. Lady Penelope hooks him up with Jeff Tracy even though Parker said the guys chauffeur was a crook Parker had known. Jeff joins the crooked businessman on the high speed unmanned train and takes Tin-tin and Brains along for the ride. Sadly the bridge they're headed for was accidentally made with the most explosive metal on the planet. Routine maintenance causes it to explode. Of course something else causes one delay after another in shutting down the train. They stop on the edge of the broken bridge overlooking a scenic plunge to their death.It will take a while for International Rescue to get there from their Pacific island HQ and that bridge keeps exploding. Lady Penelope and Parker rout the burglars and all of the crooks get locked up with the crooked businessman.
The Perils Of Penelope 10-14-65
That monorail makes a return in the 12th episode of the series. It's been re-painted to be another train, this time in Europe. Lady Penelope is on the way from London to Anderbad on the Anderbad Express. There's some spies on board and she's kidnapped. The IR guys come to her rescue, at the very last minute.
Terror In New York City 10-21-65
Thunderbird 2 gets shot by the Navy and is out of business for a while. A plan to move the Empire State Building fails when the ground softens because of an underground river. The Empire State falls over and traps a reporter and his camera guy in a cavity that is filling up with water. I know, it seems impossible but hey, it's the future. Who knows what shit can happen. International Rescue sends Thunderbird 4, the submarine, to follow the underground river to the site so they can rescue the men. It takes hours but they save them at the last minute.
End Of The Road 11-25-65
Some road builders are blasting a pathway through the mountains when the side of the mountain begins to crumble. Eddie heads up there with some explosives to blast it away from the road. His explosives go off and the road is saved but Eddie is in trouble. IR comes to the rescue but they have to keep from talking to Eddie because he knows them in their rich family ID not as members of International Rescue. They really spend a lot of time on the secrecy aspect of their business but they never explain why it matters. They don't seem to have any way to make money from the project either. Very troubling in it's own way.
Day Of Disaster 11-4-65
The Martian Space Probe is being moved to the launch facility. For some reason they're building the rocket at a location that requires them to move it along a highway and across a suspension bridge. How nuts is that? Hard to know if it's just poor writing in 1965 or is 2065 filled with incredibly stupid people. I'm going 70/30 on the future being dim. Here's why: the rocket is filled with fuel, while they transport it. Kind of dumb, huh. And it has an automatic launching system. One that you can't override. Oh, and there are a couple of engineers stuck int he ship while it's being trucked to the launch site. Why would they need to be there, it's the future, they should have computers watching everything. Or realistically the rocket would all be shut down and you there wouldn't be fuel loaded. There's trouble on the bridge and the rocket falls into the river. Of course the auto launch system goes on. Now the two poor saps in the ship, for no real reason, are sitting on a ticking time bomb disguised as a rocket to Mars. They can't get out because there's too much bridge debris all around the ship. Now we're all waiting for International Rescue to get there.
There's a whole second story thread that puts Brains in England at Lady Penelope's mansion. They're near enough to the bridge that he goes to help out. He winds up in the bridge control center to see if he can do anything. He can't tell the bridge authorities he's with International Rescue and when he suggests that they call IR the man in charge says they don't need them. All their rescue equipment is out dated and Brains, thinking IR is really needed, calls them on his wrist watch communicator. The men at the bridge authority think he's crazy and at the end of the episode Brains is seeing a psychiatrist. It's kind of funny but it makes no sense at all. It's supposed to be 2065 and a guy is crazy for talking into his watch. I guess none of the writers on the show could imagine a future where people might have portable phones. In fact most of the technology doesn't have much forethought. It might have been nice if they hired a science fiction writer or something like that who could have figured out a bit more futuristic future. Either that or I could just care less.
I do find my attention wanders when I'm watching Thunderbirds, more than it did on the previous Gerry Anderson shows. Perhaps it's just rescuing people is less interesting than fighting aliens, undersea dwellers and spies. The half hour format for the other series meant the scripts didn't have room for much more than the bare bones. Sometimes they just ran out of time and wrapped things up quickly at the end. I kind of liked that better. Oh well, only a month to go and then I'm done.
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