Thunderbirds Are Go… Finally

Picture, if you will, yourself as a child, curled up in front of the television - a cutting edge set with wooden cabinet and a Rolo-sized knob to tune in the channels. You know you should be out, frolicking in the fields with your friends, but you don't because Jeff Tracy and his intrepid band of puppets are saving the world once again. Forget Stingray, forget Joe 90, Thunderbirds was always where the action was and, after a forty year wait, the Thunderbirds movie is finally underway. Languishing in pre-production purgatory for what seems like an eternity, the film has finally landed in the lap of Star Trek star and sometime director Jonathan Frakes. For those of you who can't cast your mind back as far as 1964 when the series first aired (neither can we but the repeats were a regular staple throughout the seventies and eighties), the Thunderbirds were a fully mechanized rescue service headed up by Jeff Tracy and his five sons. Aided by High Society's Lady Penelope, her driver Parker and Brain, the team would regularly do good works aided by the various Thunderbird vehicles (Thunderbird 2 was the best). Casting off dodgy puppetry in favour of a live-action take, the film will be squarely pitched at under-10s and work is scheduled to begin early next year.