When a revamping of Thunderbirds was announced there were many people who raised an eyebrow and thought that a CGI version of the classic Gerry Anderson all-ages action classic was a questionable evolution. They were sure there'd be strings attached - but not in the good way. However with half a season under its belt and a decent critical reaction from both young audiences and those old enough to remember the original's first run, it seems that Thunderbirds are, indeed, go.
On the day that his episode 'Heist Society' hit the screen, IMPACT talked with screen-writer writer Peter Briggs about the FAB power of nostalgia...
IMPACT: Peter, you’ve always been a fan of Thunderbirds. What is it about the whole concept that seems to keep generation after generation ‘finding’ it?
PETER BRIGGS: Yes I was. I guess that’s the “Impossible Reverse-Engineering” question: if you had the definitive answer to that kind of alchemy, you’d be churning ingots out by the pallet-load and chortling. I don’t think there is one, a definitive answer, but it’s still great to see the perennial fascination with this show, with Thunderbirds, cycle around again. Like anything successful, I guess it’s the whole sum of its parts. A combination of beautiful craft design, a family-unit you like and care about. And, hopefully, corking plotlines. Mostly, I guess, it’s because it fuels imaginations.
Back in the '60s and '70s, aside from stuff like Doctor Who and the American import shows, this was all we in Britain had. I was just a smidge too young to remember the very first run of Thunderbirds: I hadn’t been born when the show started airing, but it was reran pretty immediately on ITV at that time, so I grew up with those cycles of reruns.
IMPACT: Classic question - which was your favourite Thunderbird craft and why?
PETER: Ha-ha-ha! That is the classic, isn’t it…you don’t ask “which brother?”, you say “which craft?” Two years ago on my first Skype conversation with Rob Hoegee, our showrunner on the new series, that was the first fanboy thing I asked him, and he was leaning towards Thunderbird 1…now he flies the flag for “2”. Which is the right answer, of course! Richard Taylor says it’s “4”. But we all know “4” is just a Dinky Toy accessory for “2”, so “2” still wins anyway. Okay, I’m kidding a bit…Thunderbird 4 was always the one you got excited for seeing, because it was such a rarity. As you’ll have seen, she did herself proud in my episode today. But our Thunderbird 2 is a beauty. I love her. I bought some of the toys already. I had to!
IMPACT: The show’s back and a little reinvented (though not too much). There’s been talk for a while - something to wipe away memories of the movie - so why ‘now’?
PETER: Well, this year being the 50th Anniversary of Thunderbirds, it’d be lovely to say it was as a tribute to the show…but I guess the reality is it’s just taken this long to happen, and it’s just coincidental it’s now. I know Weta Workshop have been itching to launch this project for something like 12 years.
I was lucky enough to know Gerry Anderson personally a little bit, and he was very vocal in his dislike for the 2004 movie. I saw it on opening day in Los Angeles, actually first performance, as a movie I’d co-written (Hellboy) had just opened, and I was over in the States for that. I genuinely missed all the British publicity backlash against the movie as a result, so I went to the movie 'cold'. I had no idea people disliked it so much back home. I think there was maybe one other person in movie theater in Los Angeles that day. Just to play Devil’s Advocate, there are some pluses for the film. I think the vehicles look fine, and there’s some nice production design and effects work. The oil rig and monorail rescue sequences are both nice. And I actually liked that Ford-sourced FAB 1, which I know isn’t a popular view! Sophia Myles’ Penelope was absolutely the best thing in the movie. But, yes. It’s a shame the story wasn’t better.
IMPACT: Can you talk a little about your direct involvement in the new show and how you came onboard?
PETER: It dates back - pre-dates the project, really - a good 5 or 6 years, to when I’d approached Weta Workshop to provide physical effects for a project called Panzer 88 I was starting to put together. I spent some time in New Zealand as a result - had an office at Weta Workshop, and everything, which was a lot of fun. If you walked into the reception at the Workshop — and this was even back before Thunderbirds was even ever a firm likelihood of a project for Weta - there were all these lovely little Japanese Konami vending machine Thunderbirds figures in glass cases, and all these fantastic, big, studio-scale miniature reproductions the Workshop’s made of Gerry Anderson vehicles.
One day, Richard Taylor, the head and owner of the Workshop, popped his head into my cubicle and said he was going out on a location recce to where they were going to be shooting an effects sequence for a New Zealand TV movie about the Tangiwai rail disaster, and asked if I wanted to play hooky. We’re friends and Richard’s a pretty interesting guy to be in a car with. And so during that drive, one of the things that inevitably came up was our mutual love of Thunderbirds, which is something we’d spoken about before. I recounted to Richard the story of how, a few years before, I’d met with Gerry Anderson at Pinewood and subsequently tried to help him set up a couple of projects with various studio executives I knew in L.A.; and Richard in return told me the whole fascinating and tortuous history of how he’d tried to pitch and set-up a new series of the show over the years. I said to Richard that if a new version of Thunderbirds ever happened, as a fan I’d happily write one for him for nothing. And, so, that’s pretty much it and here we are. It was a blast writing this: like a slice of my childhood revisited. I can’t speak for the American contingent, but I think we UK writers on the show have this in their DNA from the outset. If I was asked, I’d do another one, in a heartbeat. Working with Rob Hoegee and the ITV producers was fun, and coming from writing for films for the past 20-some years, an interesting learning curve too. I’d never worked with a show-runner before, and Rob is sort-of a force of nature. We blasted through tweaking the plot I’d come up with quite quickly. Rob’s pretty amazing.
IMPACT: Did you get to ‘act-out’ any of the ideas you’d always wanted to try?
PETER: Oh, yes. Actually, I submitted about twenty-something ideas to ITV in order of preference of what I wanted to do, and the plot ITV selected for 'Heist Society' was I think third or fourth down my list. I got to use all the craft in mine, except Thunderbird 3, which at the time didn’t worry me unduly, as Thunderbird 3…well…it wasn’t very exciting in the original show, was it? This time around, I cursed loudly when I saw what was being done now with Thunderbird 3, because it gets involved in some very cool stuff. I’m a little jealous I didn’t get to write her. But it was my own fault!
I also had-and-lost The Mole from my story: that was a disappointment to see that go, but simply down to design logistics. I had The Mole in the original plot, when the story was set in the Channel Tunnel. Thunderbird 4 would have acted as a tug to have taken The Mole down to the seabed. If you’ve seen the episode 'Crosscut', the storyline that aired already on ITV which introduced the new Mole, you’ll know The Mole is now this smaller two-person capacity pod vehicle, far smaller than it was in the original 1965 show. So, I had to lose The Mole and tweak the story-line, not only because of its reduced size being unable to do what I needed it to do, but also because the subterranean tunnel became an above-ground tunnel. Actually, between the recording of the episode and the production, the North Atlantic Tunnel went from being something that was suspended above the ocean floor from cable-tethered hydraulic stabilized towers, to an ocean floor tethered hyperloop tunnel, which I was sad to see go. On the bonus side, I did get to indulge my 'The Spy Who Loved Me' Lotus Esprit kid obsessions and turn FAB 1 into a submarine instead, so it all worked out!
IMPACT: What’s your message to anyone nervous about this reworked concept - or, indeed, those totally new to the Thunderbirds experience?
PETER: Well, viewers have now had half a season now to adjust. If you’re new to the whole Thunderbirds experience, you won’t come encumbered with any baggage, so I’ll just say 'Enjoy Yourself...' And that’s great, because that means there’s a whole new generation that can make this their own Thunderbirds, in much the same way a lot of the Doctor Who or Galactica fans don’t need to look back to what has come before when they got their reboots.
I mean, look; there’s always going to be a percentage - whether you’re an old timer like me who saw a vintage show, like Thunderbirds, around the time of its original transmission, or to a lesser extent if you viewed the BBC reruns in 1991 - who’ll hold onto that safety-blanket of their childhood and their nostalgia, with rose-coloured glasses. They’ll flat-out refuse to empathise with Thunderbirds Are Go because of that and because this is a new show with differences that don’t correspond to that aesthetic their inner child cherished. I can understand that, and I somewhat respect that.
Thunderbirds Are Go is a show made on a schedule, and made on a budget. And a children’s television budget today isn’t comparable to the kind of prime-time budgets that Lew Grade was giving Gerry Anderson back in 1965, when those shows were going out at 5, 6, 7 o’clock in the evening. It’d be great if money and manpower wasn’t an issue. But, to balance that out, there’s things that can be done with CG now that can un-tether the puppets and have the ability to make things more dynamic. Some of the minority outlook feels to me a little like looking in a cake shop window and denying yourself a chocolate eclair out of stubborness because it won’t taste like it did when you used to stop-by grandma’s after school. Unfortunately none of us are ever going to be 10 again, and because of that deep-seated but - you know - understandable love for the original, some will refuse to look at Thunderbirds Are Go with that same level of enthusiasm. They, and us, will still have those original episodes to enjoy regardless…that’s not going away. I know some die-hard fans already folded their arms and planted their feet stubbornly against this show a year before the first image from the show was even posted. Happily, though, it seems the majority of the Anderson-fan community have embraced Thunderbirds Are Go and for them, that’s at least 52 more brand new Thunderbirds stories now to enjoy weekly. It’s like any TV show: you’re going to really like some episodes, and you’re not going to like others so much. At the end of the day, the writers’ voices and the directors’ storytelling are going to influence how the fans rank the episodes.
But beyond adult preconceptions, the show exists primarily to fuel kids’ imaginations and inspire them, just like the 1965 version did for us. I read Facebook, and I read Twitter. And there are kids out there - lots of kids - who because of the technology available to replay shows instantly now, are watching Thunderbirds repeately the same day they’re aired. That’s wild. All the stories about kids playing with the toys and making up their own adventures…it’s like 50 years never changed. That’s what Thunderbirds is about. That’s the spirit of it. What we did as kids, what they’re doing now. And hearing those stories just makes it all worthwhile.
