Gerry Anderson Menu
Gerry Anderson
Anderson's television career began in the mid-1950's when he and colleague Arthur Provis formed AP Films. Their first television venture was The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-1958). Created by Roberta Leigh, Twizzle was a series for young children about a doll with the ability to 'twizzle' his arms and legs to greater lengths. It was Anderson's first work with puppets, and the start of his long and successful collaborations with puppeteer Christine Glanville, special effects technician Derek Meddings and composer/arranger Barry Gray.
During production of Twizzle, Anderson (then still married to his first wife) began an affair with secretary Sylvia Thamm and eventually left his wife and children. The Adventures of Twizzle was followed by another low budget puppet series with Leigh, Torchy the Battery Boy (1958-1959). Although the APF puppet productions made the Andersons world famous, Gerry Anderson was always unhappy about working with puppets, and made them primarily as a means of getting a foot in the door with TV networks, hoped to use them as a stepping stone to his desired goal making live action film and TV drama.
AP Films' third series was the children's western fantasy-adventure series Four Feather Falls (1959-1960). During production, following his divorce, Anderson married Thamm in November 1960. Four Feather Falls was the first Anderson series to use an early version of the Supermarionation process, though the name hadn't yet been coined.
Despite the success of Four Feather Falls, APF was in financial trouble, and the company was struggling to find a buyer for its new puppet series. They were rescued by a fortuitous meeting with ATV boss Lew Grade who offered to buy the show. This began a long friendship and a very successful professional association between the two men, during which Anderson and his collaborators created some of their best work.
The new series, Supercar (1960-1961), was created by Anderson and Reg Hill and marked several important advances for APF. Sylvia Anderson took on a larger role and became a partner in the company. The series was also the official debut of Supermarionation, the electronic system that made the marionettes more lifelike and convincing on screen. The system used the audio signal from the pre-recorded tapes of the actors' voices to trigger solenoids installed in the puppets' heads, enabling the puppets' lips to move in exact synchronization with the voices of the actors.
APF's next series was the futuristic space adventure Fireball XL5 (1962), and it was the company's biggest success yet, becoming the first Anderson series sold to a US TV network (NBC) — a rarity for British TV programmes at that time. After the completion of the series, Lew Grade offered to buy AP Films. Although Anderson was initially reluctant, the deal eventually went ahead, with Grade becoming managing director, and the Andersons, Hill, and Read becoming directors of the company.
Shortly after the buy-out, APF began production on a new puppet series, Stingray (1964), the first British children's TV series to be filmed in colour. For the new production APF moved to new and bigger facilities, which allowed them to make major improvements in special effects, notably in the underwater sequences, as well as advances in puppetry, with the use of a variety of interchangeable heads for each character to convey different expressions.
A German mining disaster inspired Anderson to create a new programme format about a rescue organisation, which eventually became his most famous and popular series, Thunderbirds (1964-1966). APF—now renamed Century 21 Productions—enjoyed its greatest success with Thunderbirds and the series made the Andersons world-famous. The 32-episode series was not initially successful in the United States because it was only given a limited release, although it later became hugely successful in syndication. But it was a major hit with young audiences in the UK, Australia and other countries and retains a huge and dedicated international following that spans several generations. During the production of Thunderbirds the Andersons' marriage began to come under increasing strain, and the company also had a setback when the Thunderbirds Are Go feature film flopped.
By that time, production had started on a new series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967), which saw the advent of more realistic puppet characters which, thanks to improvements in electronics which allowed miniaturisation of the lip-sync mechanisms, could now be built closer to normal human proportions. Century 21's second feature film, Thunderbird 6, was an even bigger failure than the first, and the problems were compounded by their next (and penultimate) Supermarionation series, Joe 90 (1968). This series returned to more 'kid-friendly' territory, depicting the adventures of a young boy who is also a secret agent and whose scientist father uses a supercomputer called 'BIG RAT' which can 'program' Joe with special knowledge and abilities for his missions. Its relatively poor reception made it the last of the classic Anderson marionette shows.
In 1969 the Andersons began production of a new TV series, UFO, Century 21's first full live-action television series. This sci-fi action-adventure series starred American-born actor Edward "Ed" Bishop, who had also provided the voice of Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet & The Mysterons, as Commander Edward Straker, head of a secret defence organisation set up to counter an alien invasion. UFO was decidedly more adult in tone than any of the previous puppet series, and it mixed the classic Century 21 futuristic action-adventure and special effects with some very serious dramatic elements. UFO was moderately successful on first release, but built up a strong cult following over the years, although it too fell short of the global success of Thunderbirds and was the last series made under the Century 21 Productions banner.
Elements of the abandoned second series of UFO were eventually turned into what became the most expensive television series ever made at the time, Space:1999. Another futuristic sci-fi adventure, it was based on the premise that a huge thermonuclear explosion on the Moon's surface (caused by dumping of nuclear waste) projected it out of orbit and into interstellar space. It starred American husband-and-wife actors Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who had gained international TV fame in Mission: Impossible. Gerry and Sylvia's marriage broke down irrevocably during the first season of this series.
In the early 1980's, Anderson formed a new partnership, Anderson Burr Pictures Ltd, with businessman Christopher Burr. The new company's first production was based on an unrealised concept devised by Anderson in the late seventies for a Japanese cartoon series. Terrahawks marked Anderson's return to working with puppets, but rather than marionettes this series used a new system dubbed 'Supermacromation' which used highly sophisticated glove puppets - an approach undoubtedly inspired by the great advances in this form of puppetry made by Jim Henson and his colleagues.
Other television and audio-visual productions followed, but the period between the 1950's and the mid-1980's are considered the heyday of Anderson's career. Since the advent of the Internet and their release on DVD, many of Anderson's earlier efforts are being rediscovered by older fans, and eagerly embraced by newer ones as well.
A List of Gerry Anderson Productions
Television
* The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-1959)
* Torchy the Battery Boy (first season only) (1960)
* Four Feather Falls (1960)
* Supercar (1961-1962)
* Fireball XL5 (1962-1963)
* Stingray (1964-1965)
* Thunderbirds (1965-1966)
* Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons (1967-1968)
* Joe 90 (1968-1969)
* The Secret Service (1969)
* UFO (1970-1971)
* The Protectors (1972-1974)
* Space: 1999 (1975-1977)
* Terrahawks (1983-1984, 1986)
* Dick Spanner, P.I. (1987)
* Space Precinct (1994-1995)
* Lavender Castle (1999-2000)
* Firestorm (2003)
* Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet (2005)
Feature films
* Crossroads to Crime (1960)
* Thunderbirds Are Go (1966)
* Thunderbird 6 (1968)
* Doppelgänger (1969) aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (US title)
Other
* The Investigator (pilot episode - never broadcast)
* The Day After Tomorrow (a.k.a. Into Infinity) (1976)
* Space Police (pilot episode - never broadcast)
* GFI (pilot episode - never broadcast)