Thunderbirds are go go go

Thunderbirds crew battled all sorts of adversity during the 1960s, not least ofwhich was being attached to bits of wire and being unable tomove their lips properly when they spoke.

One week they’d be overthrowing an evil warlord with astonishingly large eyebrows, the next they’d be nabbing some equally hirsute villain who bore a grudge against those damned nice Tracy brothers and wanted to wipe them out, if only he could hold his papier-mache rocket launcher steady long enough to blow up their polystyrene headquarters.

The makers of the new, real-life adventure movie based on the puppet series may be wishing that cardboard bombs and baddies with uncontrollable knee joints were all they had to worry about.

Indeed they may have thought they had eradicated any chance of criticism by re-creating the story of the Tracy family and their crime-fighting organisation International Rescue using real people to portray the characters created by the godfather of the puppet hero genre, Gerry Anderson.

Instead, the film has sent Anderson into a rage and since its release overseas in July has prompted reviews that have been far from complimentary.

“It’s something of a feat to miss two target audiences with one movie, but that may just be Thunderbirds main claim to fame,” wrote one reviewer.

There’s a moment in the new film when Bill Paxton, who plays patriarch Jeff Tracy, assembles his five clean-cut, eager young sons to explain to them in sombre tones: “We save lives. It’s dangerous, but this is what we do.”

It’s a line he delivers totally straight. It’s also the line that gets the biggest laugh from adults in the audience, struck by the corniness and camp hilarity of the scene.

What Paxton and the film’s makers, Working Title Films, are offering is a family action movie based on the cult television series, one that carries a moral message in today’s terrorist age.

“When Jeff speaks to his sons, it will echo wonderfully back to 9/11 and the firemen [who entered New York’s bombed World Trade Centre],” says US director Jonathan Frakes, better known as Commander Will Riker in the Star Trek franchise. “By honouring those who rescue, the timing is quite good. At least I hope so.”

Frakes may well need to be hopeful. The $US65 million ($92 million) project, billed as Working Title’s most ambitious to date, is audacious for two reasons. First, it represents a bold cinematic remake of one of TV’s most enduring classics. Second, it takes the altruistic theme of the original show and attempts to sell it to today’s sophisticated and fickle early teen and pre-teen audience.

The film has been made without the endorsement of Anderson, 75, who reveals himself to be “disappointed, shattered but also deeply offended” by his apparent exclusion. “It was always my dream to make a feature film version,” he says.

It’s a shadow that hangs over the set of the film at England’s Pinewood Studios where, coincidentally, Anderson is making a pound stg. 20 million ($50 million) computer-graphics version of his Captain Scarlet series, and is clearly an uncomfortable subject.

“He [Anderson] was right down the hall, so I went and introduced myself,” says Frakes brightly, talking amid the palm trees and bamboo of the exotic Tracy Island set. The Tracys’ home and headquarters are re-created in dazzling pastels, all curves and colourful Perspex furniture, ready to be transported by computer-generated imagery on to its tropical hillside hideaway in the Seychelles.

“I’m amazed at the positive reaction that the people in England and Australia, where we scouted for locations, have to Thunderbirds. It retains a fond place in their hearts and it’s to Gerry’s credit that he somehow created something that people still hold near and dear.” Asked if Anderson had wanted to be involved, he quickly replies: “I don’t know.”

Working Title’s urbane co-founder Tim Bevan is more forthcoming, saying: “We spoke to him on a number of occasions and he was not particularly interested in talking to us.

“I feel sorry for him,” Bevan continues. “He sold his rights to Lew Grade [then head of Independent TeleVision] in the ’70s, and when you sell your rights to anything you lose control, and he always felt for some reason that that wasn’t fair. Thirty years later, through nothing to do with him, I bought the rights. If I bought a house designed by an architect of great fame 30 years ago, would I feel it necessary to invite that architect through the doors? No, is the answer to that.

“We absolutely offered him a role, but he turned it down when he saw the car.”

The car in question is the fragrant secret agent Lady Penelope’s iconic FAB1 which, in the series, was a candy-pink Rolls-Royce, and which, for the film, has become a state-of-the-art six-wheeled Ford with bulletproof glass canopy roof.

“Ford is a great company and I don’t direct any criticism at them, but the car itself is an absolute monstrosity,” says Anderson. “I thought if that’s the showpiece, then I can’t go along with the mind-set that created it.”

His explanation of events differs from Bevan’s. “I was invited to a meeting with Working Title and the producer [Bevan] said: ‘Hi Gerry, lovely to meet you. I have to go.’ They offered me a huge sum of money to praise the film – pound stg. 750,000 – and I turned it down. I couldn’t bring myself to say something was wonderful when it wasn’t.”

Anderson insists he’s not opposed to the idea of someone else making a film version and would have been “highly honoured” if the likes of Lord of the Rings director and Thunderbirds aficionado Peter Jackson had taken on the project. “For anybody to make a good Thunderbirds picture, they’ve got to be in love with the basic idea,” he says.

Frakes admits that he’d never seen the original show until invited to direct the film, when he then watched nine or 10 of the total 32 episodes on DVD.

The only two previous Thunderbirds movies, both made with puppets in the mid to late ’60s, were flops.

Set in 2010, the film stars Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley as the Tracy family nemesis The Hood, Anthony Edwards as Brains Hackenbacker, the creative force behind International Rescue’s fleet of craft and gadgets, and newcomer Sophia Myles as the unflappable vision in pink, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward.

The only invented character is Brains’ son Fermat (Soren Fulton), who joins with Alan Tracy, aged 14 and played by American Brady Corbet, and Tin-Tin (Vanessa Anne Hudgens), the daughter of the Tracys’ housekeepers, in foiling The Hood’s quest to take over Tracy Island while Jeff and his other sons are trapped in space on Thunderbird 5.

The five Thunderbirds craft remain faithful CG replicas of the original Thunderbirds Are Go vehicles. As in the series, Thunderbird 1 spectacularly emerges through the swimming pool, Thunderbird 3 through the library and the palm trees still bend on cue when the green leviathan that is T2 rolls out.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the film has not been acclaimed in the US. The series failed to take off there after Lew Grade overplayed his hand in negotiations with the three main networks and it was shown only regionally for a brief spell.

There is no doubt about the ongoing popularity elsewhere of the series, which continues to play 39 years after its TV debut. Asked the secret of its appeal, Anderson is quick to offer its non-violent, international rescue theme. “My series are shown to millions of children all over the world and I’ve always avoided jumping on the political bandwagon, something of which I am very proud.”