In the early 1960s, kids craved action adventures and looked forward to a trip to the Saturday morning picture show as the highlight of the week. Excited to find out what would happen to your favorite hero in this week’s installment after last week’s cliffhanger ending, you could barely contain yourself and households across Britain would be woken early, sleepy parents dragged from their beds and the breakfast would rush in. to be number one, to be first on ‘The Queue’. For anyone unfamiliar with ‘the queue’, this is the standard method by which ‘civilized’ people take turns waiting for something (anything) to happen.

Queuing for Saturday morning photos was our first introduction to how the ‘cheerful foreigner’ behaved when waiting his turn. The glass doors of many picture palaces bear the impression of crushed young faces as the crowd behind swooped in as the first door opened and a tsunami of little people swept through the hall, all looking for tickets first, then candy.

Understand this; Saturday morning’s photos gave the nation’s youth more than a treat. This was a multi-layered treat! Firstly, they freed you from the confines of parents, teachers, and school regimens – see the lines as testimony that, secondly, you were provided some time to legitimately gorge yourself on Kiora orange and popcorn before, during and between the third and the most pleasant pleasure, the staple food. diet of cartoons and action and adventure movie shorts. With the attention span of a goldfish, for kids, cartoons and short films were just the right length, bringing you so many high points that you left the footage exhausted for, well, at least 10 minutes until the next one came along Kiora wave.

Taking advantage of this style of film presentation, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson created a succession of successful television shows, including the now world famous Thunderbirds. They took their young and excited audience (and their not-so-young audience) through a series of suspenseful events just like the Saturday Movie shorts.

Thunderbirds built on the popularity and success of the Andersons’ previous successful shows, which included Supercar, Fireball XL5, and Stingray. Thunderbirds, like its predecessors, was a new take on the old puppet show and was made using a process called ‘Supermarionation’ that combined great production values ​​with highly skilled puppetry. As the latest in a line of increasingly successful shows, Thunderbirds enjoyed a larger production budget that allowed the writers to experiment with larger and more dramatic suspense plots, nearly all of which involved the Thunderbirds team saving the world from one threat or another.

The basic premise and plot of Thunderbirds revolves around the Tracy family, who, some 100 years in the future, operate International Rescue, an organization that responded to and resolved natural and some unnatural disasters. International Rescue had a number of fantastic vehicles at their disposal, including various spaceships and other futuristic machinery, and for many boys and girls these machines, along with another vehicle we’ll get to in a moment, were the real stars. from the shows rocket planes; a moving heavy-lift aircraft; a space station; reusable and submersible space shuttles, fantastic machines for everyone, and all developed in the early 1960s.

The main characters of International Rescue were the billionaire father of the clan; Jeff Tracy, his sons Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon and John, who along with his servants operated out of Tracey Island. There were two more characters who were equally important to the show; London’s international rescue agent, Lady Penelope, and her faithful butler, driver-eater, ‘Nosey’ Parker. And as a special treat for the girls, Lady Penelope was driven around in a futuristic pink Rolls Royce.

Anyone who grew up with the original programs will now be in a state of memory overload. For anyone too young to remember the show, well you should outlive the old ones so that should be a tradeoff and you should remember the movie. The degree of merchandising around the original television series was immense, as there was almost everything in Thunderbirds. All of which has made Thunderbirds one of the most memorable and recognizable retro TV series, making it a perfect costume theme for your next costume party.