"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Thunderbirds

Yesterday we saw what Adrien Brody was doing 10 years ago (he was playing the villain in DRAGON BLADE). Now let’s jump back another decade-plus and check on his future director Brady Corbet (core-bay). In 2004, a long before Brody was felled by the Silk Road Protection Squad, his THE BRUTALIST director was rolling with a more high tech protection squad called International Rescue.

That’s right, before he was a director Corbet was an actor, and his third movie (after the edgy indies THIRTEEN by Catherine Hardwicke and MYSTERIOUS SKIN by Gregg Araki) was the Hollywood non-puppet remake of the ‘60s British “Supermarionation” TV show Thunderbirds. He’s not top-billed, but he’s the lead, playing 14-year-old Alan Tracy, son of Thunderbirds founder and leader Jeff Tracy (Bill Paxton, THE DARK BACKWARD). His thing is he goes to a boarding school and dreams/whines about wanting to grow up and join the team with his dad and his three older brothers.

(I wonder if they ever considered a non-puppet version of The Muppet Show?)

This is a prequel, set in the futuristic year of 2010, while the show started in 2065, when Alan will be almost 70? I’m not sure about the timeline. If you haven’t seen the show, or only remember that they are funny puppets, the premise is that they live on a cool private island in the South Pacific and each pilot advanced flying machines called Thunderbirds to rescue people from disasters. In this movie that makes them so famous that when they’re in Russia fighting an oil rig fire Alan’s entire school runs into a room to watch it live on TV and cheer. (It’s unclear if everything we’re seeing is somehow on the news or not. If so, amazing camera crew they got there.)

Immediately after Alan sees his entire family almost die horribly on live television (but luckily surviving as Forest Taft style firefighting heroes), a bully kid says with withering sarcasm, “Ooh, I wish I could be a Thunderbird one day.” And then the coup de grace:


He calls him “Thunder-turd.” Cold-blooded.

Just like his dad in that Russian fireball, Alan should have been burned alive by such a deadly blast. Luckily he has two devastating comebacks:

1) calling that kid “diaper boy”

and

2) like one second later his hot blond adult undercover agent friend Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward (Sophia Myles, UNDERWORLD, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL) comes to pick him up for Spring Break and acts all flirtatious with the whole school so they almost die of boners.

Alan’s best friend is Fermat Hackenbacker (Soren Fulton, 1 episode of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue), son of Thunderbirds engineer Brains (Anthony Edwards, MIRACLE MILE). Both are cartoonish nerds/engineering geniuses who wear big glasses and stutter. There’s also a girl on the island, Tin-Tin Belagant (Vanessa Hudgens, also in THIRTEEN, later in SPRING BREAKERS), who’s the daughter of Jeff’s, um, manservant Kyrano (Bhasker Patel, “Temple Guard,” INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM).

Meanwhile there’s an openly sinister bad guy with mind powers called The Hood (Ben Kingsley, SECURITY). Oh shit, yeah, I recognize him from the puppet. He discovers the location of Tracy Island, invades their house/fortress, and reveals he’s the brother of Kyrano, previously believed dead, now alive with a grudge against Jeff for rescuing Kyrano from an earthquake but not him. He has some henchmen, but who cares, I only remember his henchwoman Transom (Rose Keegan, FIRST KNIGHT), who seduces Brain by being a sexy nerd (hot redhead but with big teeth). Also he traps the adults in their Thunderbirds, but the kids hide so they can figure out how to rescue them. In my opinion the kids should call themselves The Underbirds and then once they’ve proven themselves they ceremonially remove the ‘e’ and squeeze the other letters together.

According to the credits the screenplay is by William Osborne (GHOST IN THE MACHINE, THE SCORPION KING) and Michael McCullers (AUSTIN POWERS 2 and 3, UNDERCOVER BROTHER), story by Peter Hewitt (director of BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY) and Osborne. The director is Jonathan Frakes in his fourth theatrical feature, second non-Star Trek (after CLOCKSTOPPERS). They all seem to have recognized that by 21st century standards a family that has flying ships that just put out fires and stuff is not a very exciting idea for a movie. So instead they focus on… well, children who only dream of some day being able to do that thing that we just agreed was not enough to justify a movie. If I may skip ahead, THUNDERBIRDS was considered a big bomb and got poor reviews, and I doubt it was only because it came out against SPIDER-MAN 2. Did they really think there was someone who would know what Thunderbirds was and be excited for a non-puppet version? If that guy really was out there he must’ve been bummed when he found out it wasn’t even that.

By the way, here is an ordinary light-up wall display that the family has in their house, being that they are an ordinary family and not a weird one.


It seems like it’s trying to be kind of a kiddy event movie. It was released in July and has a big score by Hans Zimmer a couple movies before he reinvented what that means with BATMAN BEGINS. There’s an “additional music” credit for Ramin Djawadi (BLADE: TRINITY, DRACULA UNTOLD) and I can only assume Hans made him do the techno dance music type action parts whenever they want to simulate what it might sound like if something exciting happened. The kids do get to ride bulldozer things in one part, they’re pretty excited about that. One of them has a water cannon. I guess to be fair they’re also trying to do some adventure movie stuff: there’s a CG scorpion, a CG bee swarm, some underwater feats, a hover-sled chase through the jungle that is very, very, not as good as the RETURN OF THE JEDI speeder bike chase or the later chase in INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, no matter how bad your attitude is about that one. There’s also a giant drill thing.

They escape onto a neighboring island and try to hack into a satellite feed or whatever and regain control of the Thunderbirds. Fermat stole “the guidance processor” to stop the bad guys from launching, so he solders it to an antenna tower. There’s a weird joke where he’s wondering where he can get metal to solder with and it cuts to him pulling Alan’s braces out with pliers, seemingly non-consensually.

Alan kinda deserves it, though. It’s fairly standard for the main kid in a family movie to be a whiny brat who says something mean to his friend, but usually they repent and learn a lesson. This guy has a scene where he mocks Fermat’s stutter, and it stops everybody cold, it’s so harsh.Tin-Tin looks at him like what the FUCK dude, this is rated-PG, I wish we were in THIRTEEN again so I could tell you how out of line you are.


But he doesn’t apologize! The moment just passes. It’s weird.

Occasionally the movie cuts to the much more delightful Lady Penelope, who takes bubble baths, always wears pink, rides in a flying car, and in one scene busts out a bunch of high kicks and flips (stunt double: Nikki Berwick, also doubled Sonya Blade in MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION).


She beats up all the henchpeople, but The Hood telekinetically blocks her kicks and her butler Aloysius Parker (Ron Cook, HOT FUZZ)’s punches and kind of does a SCANNERS on them until Alan gives up the processor thing and then they’re all locked in a freezer. The end. We wish.

I don’t find this a very entertaining or well made movie, but I want to say something nice. Some of the sets and vehicles, inspired by the original show, have kind of a nice retro look to them. (Production designer: John Beared, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, HACKERS.) I like that while flying a Thunderbird Lady Penelope has a pink headset. I guess I sort of respect the weirdness of including one shot where Fermat has a marionette hand. Obviously it’s an homage to the show, but there’s no other context to it and I think it’s cg?

By the way, at the end of the movie Dad answers a call from “Madam President.” As a country we’re failing to live up to a not very good movie from over 20 years ago. Jesus. Anyway, it was the aughts, so the end credits have a pop punk “Thunderbirds Are Go” song by the British band Busted, fresh off their 2003 wins for Favourite Newcomer at the National Music Awards and Best Band at the Disney Channel Kids’ Awards.

Much like the architect László Tóth before him, Jeff Tracy is a man who followed his dream, found a way to construct his vision at a massive scale, and fought to do it his way. Also he’s the father of a whiner who is a very bad friend but does later learn to fly a plane type vehicle.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 26th, 2025 at 9:56 am and is filed under Reviews, Family, Science Fiction and Space Shit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

47 Responses to “Thunderbirds”

  1. Ah yes, the movie that sadly killed Jonathan Frakes’ theatrical directing career. Remember when FIRST CONTACT made him for a short time a hot property in Hollywood (Rightfully so. This was absolutely one of the best looking and and directed ones of the 20th century STAR TREK movies)? He even was supposed to do TOTAL RECALL 2 with Arnie, but that one ended up in development hell and after the “Are we sure that was directed by the guy who made FIRST CONTACT?” ST: INSURRECTION and his two Nickelodeon box office bombs, he became a busy TV director. (Which is also an honorable job, so please don’t take it as me throwing shades.)

    I admit that I still haven’t seen that one, despite having the DVD on my shelf for a while and it constantly popping up on every single streaming service over here. I do remember the Supermarionation show from my childhood and how I thought it was the coolest shit. Or one of the coolest shits, next to MUPPET BABIES. They surely advertised the movie version a lot. The trailer was for a while attached to every single movie and I remember for some odd reason the detail that Frakes and Kingsley were supposed to be guests in Germany’s biggest Saturday evening game show WETTEN DASS…? , but when they didn’t show up without any mention from host Thomas Gottschalk (SISTER ACT 2, DOUBLE TROUBLE, TRABBI GOES TO HOLLYWOOD), I realized that something was up. And sure as hell the movie got buried as a low-key DTV release here.

  2. Haven’t seen this since I covered the press junket. All I remember is Sir Ben was completely committed and considered his role Shakespearean. God bless Sir Ben.

  3. Holden, interesting point about Frakes. Being a “hot director” probably involves waiting around a lot for the right project to come together, and when/if it falls apart, you’re left broke. I think our man Brady Corbet talked about that recently, how he made just about no money for The Brutalist and his primary income recently was commercials. I imagine shifting to TV means there’s ALWAYS a gig waiting for you, you’re ALWAYS working. Kind of suggests being a film director is a job of a certain level of privilege, because you have to be willing to not make a movie for a while, not earn a paycheck, find a bunch of side jobs maybe. We’re all gonna be stunned when Ridley Scott passes on and we found out most of his money was made with Danish diaper commercials.

    As for this, yeah, never saw it. The villain has mind control powers? Might be worth it to watch for Kingsley. Mind control powers are the ultimate plus/mind, because it’s great to have them, but you have to decide HOW to use them. If I had mind control, I’d be walking around all day with regrets, like, “I should have made him do this, I should have made that happen, I could have hypnotized that lady, that would have been simpler, etc.”

    Corbet had a really interesting acting thing going on there for a while, didn’t he? I really liked him in the downbeat SIMON KILLER from a few years back, kind of like “what if HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER but scared and dumb.”

  4. Yup, even in the age of “prestige TV” people still look down on TV directors, but let’s be honest: That’s a good job! Despite being in theatrical director’s jail, Frakes has been steadily working behind the camera in the last 20 years and probably would’ve done so without having the benefit of being associated with being a SciFi icon. Plus: You need some real skill to do that. Even the most expensive TV show is on a tight schedule without much room for reshoots and every show is different. You basically have to adjust your style week after week. Frakes directed episodes of 90s TREK and modern day TREK! That’s already visually a huge difference. Seasoned TV director Paris Barclay once said it best (Paraphrased from memory): “Directing TV is an exciting job. One week I am shooting a violent torture scene for SONS OF ANARCHY, the next week some teenage kids singing pop songs for GLEE.”

  5. I was only vaguely aware of this because of the Jonathan Frakes connection. And I remember seeing clips of the original Thunderbirds show. Somehow, I always assumed that the movie was also puppet based.

    As a Star Trek lifer, it feels like any episode directed by Frakes is about 20% better than normal. But that could be that they also give him the best material. There’s nothing wrong with being a TV director. I just wish that those same directors were given the chance to go off and occasionally make a mid-budget thriller now and again.

    I should probably put this in the Conclave thread, but I guess I’ll do it here. What’s kind of refreshing about that movie is that it feels like a thriller that would have been near the top of the box office heap in the 80s or 90s. Being up for best picture is going to cause a massive backlash, and maybe it is somewhat middle brow, but there are so few solid middle brow films that are well crafted that I find myself enjoying them more than I normally would.

  6. I give mad respect to the actual job of TV director, but I admit I’m a little shaky about TV directors leaping to film. Clark Johnson helmed legendary episodes of “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life On The Street”. You’d think that skill set would lend him well to directing the “SWAT” movie, but that may be the most generic movie of all time. And there’s a lot of Clark Johnsons out there.

  7. Hans Zimmer was pretty into electronic music before he made it big! He played synth for The Buggles (Video Killed the Radio Star!) and some other electronic-y new wave bands. Even his early sound tracks are are pretty techno; Check out his theme song for THE WIND, for example, which sounds like the best Amiga videogame soundtrack ever.

  8. I agree Glaive, but THE FIRST OMEN made me wonder if that could start to change. I wouldn’t have guessed Arkasha Stevenson had only done TV, but it makes sense when you realize it’s all very visual stuff like Chapter Zero and Legion.

  9. You’d think it’d be more common career path, but the only ones I can think of are Danny Boyle and Robert Altman. There’s got to be more. Spielberg’s first two movies were TV movies, weren’t they?

    And Stevenson’s season on Channel Zero does indeed look incredible – there are some scenes (I specifically remember one with one of the actresses stretched out on the bed, her hair all splayed out) that seem like a dry run for scenes in FIRST OMEN.

  10. Frakes pretty much ended up in the correct place. As a director he’s basically okay. Guys like that get a few chances and then they tend to burn out because they don’t really bring much interesting to the table…unless they have a HUGE hit. Frakes had hits but they were Star Trek so no one was counting that. You want him for your kind of generic actiony thing, so once those die out you just toss him into the tv mill where he can shoot a show in eight days and make it look fine. That’s where people like Mary Lambert go, we need someone to crank out this stuff.

    There are plenty of tv directors who can step into film, like peopel were saying a show like Channel Zero really has the feel of a movie…and at this point some tv shows aren’t much different than movies. The battle scenes on GOT were cooler than most big castle siege kind of things I’ve seen especially once they started really getting the budget to do them big. The battle of the wall was amazing. But kinda interesting for their first two giant battles they brought in a movie director to steer the ship, then after that stuck to their own stable like Miguel Sapochnik but he had still directed films before he did tv.

  11. And who would have thought the dudes directing episodes of Community would end up making the biggest movies of all time. I feel like now the line has really blurred a lot because SOME tv shows are so cinematic.

    Oh and Dread…there have been a ton of tv directors who went into films. Spielberg made a few episodes of shows including sort of hybrids like Columbo, where are movies but still a formula tv shw…although I think Spielberg shot the pilot (really well too) so that’s almost a bit different. He did the middle segment of the Night Gallery movie which is good, but actually the first part with Roddy McDowell and Ossie Davis is really well directed for tv from the 70s. But hat director Boris Segal made a few movies including The Omega Man which…looked like a cheap tv movie. Joss Whedon was a decent enough director for films, and his musical of Buffy for the time especially was above and beyond. Richard Donner did a lot of tv.

  12. @Vern, good call on Stevenson. Haven’t seen Channel Zero yet, but Legion really blew my mind. It’s sorta why I hope Noah Hawley still has a cool movie in him after doing all that TV (and writing novels!), because Lucy In The Sky wasn’t it.

    @Muh, Russo and Whedon are pretty iffy visual storytellers. I waited my whole life for that big Avengers Endgame finale sequence, and it looked like CGI sludge within a squeezed frame. Marvel loves their TV guys (a TV guy is doing Fantastic Four) because usually those guys are writers as well as directors, so they can come up with an on-set quick fix if they have to change plans to fit another upcoming movie, or if an effects sequence isn’t working up to par. That’s the sort of decision-making I worry about long-term as far as filmmaking.

  13. Not really saying they are great directors, just tv guys who went on to have big movie careers. Whedon is okay as a director, he’ll do some stuff that looks really good then we get seven minutes that look like a tv show. But Firefly had some really well done bits…and then some tv bits. As for the Russos, what are you gonna do…they made a giant CGI battle movie and they all pretty much look like that. Shit Peter Jackson went from LOTR to The Hobbit, he literally went backwards in quality. I saw one of those final Avengers movie and all of it looked fine enough to me, in terms of what that genre looks like in general.

    Marvel likes tv directors so much I imagine because they have a visual style and panache, but also know how to take orders. They ain’t running the show they don’t start thinking they’re Spielberg. No way was Edgar Wright going to downplay his style and what he wanted to do with the story to conform, I bet he didn’t want to include all of the tie ins.

    I’m not concerned in the least for the future of movies based on some Marvel crap. It’s be like in 1995 worrying about movies because Judge Dredd was lame and Batman Forever sucked. Or go earlier and IOrwin Allen makes The Swarm. Those movies are sometimes gonna be good, and sometimes gonna be bad, they ain’t made to be art but to make a lot of ka-ching. There are plenty of good movies being made, sometimes less interesting ideas because those turned into tv, where directors can make more interesting cinematic stuff and can now reject doing movies. Hawley’s Fargo was as good as a lot of crime movies I’ve seen.

  14. Muh – sorry, I was thinking about directors known for a sense of style. Didn’t know Spielberg shot Columbo!
    The other one I found later was Ridley Scott, didn’t know he started out doing TV. And Michael Mann. As you say, I’m sure there’s a ton more.

    Most marvel movies look so-so, which is one of the reason I run lukewarm on the MCU as a whole; They’re spectacle movies where the spectacle tends to look just ok. You can see they spent a lot of money on it… maybe appreciate the cool ideas behind it… and that’s about it. It’s usually when they bring in someone with a vision (or a willingness to hire people with a vision) that they stand out – Derrickson or Zhao, I’d love to say Raimi but other than his usual energy and visual humour I don’t remember his MCU entry looking particularly good. Gunn managed some great-looking scenes on GoG2, as did Waititi (of all people) on his films. All of them seem to have made a concerted effort not just to put cool stuff up on the screen, but to pull it off with style as well.

    To give credit to the Russos, their Community stuff was very cinematic for TV at the time – but their actual movies look like crap to me. A lot of these directors (see also: Shawn Levy, Colin Trevorrow) seem to be hired solely for their ability to manage to finish huge blockbusters, which is understandable, especially when they’re consistently commercially successful – it’s not a skill to sneeze at.

    Sorry for the tangent. The only thing by Frakes I’ve seen is FIRST CONTACT, which was severely oversold to me as the most exciting shit ever by a trekkie friend. Not that it’s bad, but it was only great by way of the lowered expectations; I don’t remember it feeling particularly cinematic, especially past the first battle scene. Maybe I should revisit it.
    As for this, it looks dire… I salute your sacrifice, Vern. The appeal of all the Supermarionation stuff was seeing the tiny, hand-sculpted sets, the pyrotechnics, the clever way they’d do effects. I have a lot of fond memories of watching them as a kid. I’ll join the chorus here (and everyone I know who knows about this movie) in wondering what the hell were they thinking by making it live action.
    Nostalgia chasing really leads execs down some weird paths.

  15. Irony of the knock against TV directing is early days of tv, most of the directors plus other technicians had worked on film specifically that golden age of Hollywood era and many stuck around until the 70s or so.

    That’s where Clint learned his on-set techniques from on RAWHIDE.

    Weirdly of the knocks against Marvel (because what is an online cinema discourse without the big M) people forget how they’re like TV: house style. For better or worse* they expect people to follow what is expected of that brand. Then again this is franchise filmmaking in general. If you do Fast & Furious, you’re not going to stray from what Lin did too far.

    *=As much as the Russos get shit and their egos demand a good smack here and there, they did shift that house style with their schtick on WINTER SOLDIER which other people have tried to emulate including the newest toothless Cap film. Maybe Marvel instead of nostalgia self-sucking needs to be looking for a similar “hey it’s that thing we like but feels fresher now somewhat!” soft reset in terms of tone/plot?

  16. I dunno RRA, for all the glazing on the Russos for Winter Solider and them making a 70s styled paranoid thriller, it was pretty much same old same old for me. Fights looked the same, big CG fest at the end…it’s like when they keep claiming the first Marvel horror movie but they’re just regular Marvels with a creepy scene at best. A lot of the old tv directors may have been old style technicians, but watch the typical b-movies they worked on. They look like tv. Even a show like Alfred Hitchcock which ought to come with a visual template ready to go, is pretty straight up.

    Yeah Dread, Spielberg shot the first Columbo that was part of the series. There had been a tv movie a few years before. It’s a good one! The opening shot is really bold, some great stuf in there…and some weird trying to hard tv style bits that look like shit. I’d been watching some of those lately, they’re so good. Russos are interesting, they had some of the coolest episodes because they got the big action ones…but then a lot of their eps were pretty typical and look like any other. No problems there, it’s a tv sitcom sometimes they just need to be about the jokes and characters, what are you gonna do.

    But I agree, the boldness of First Contact is way oversold. It looks…fine, like a Star Trek movie.I don’t think it looks much different than Generations, but at least that movie had some big desert scenes. FC was just a good fun b-movie, like a lot of them are. But you give Frakes a dog script like Insurrection and you see there’s not that much he can do. Even the fights and battles are terrible in that. Saw that in the theater as a youngin and it was so dull. And I liked the first two Next Gen movies.

  17. Come on, now you two are underselling FIRST CONTACT. It’s no secret that Paramount at that time treated the STAR TREK movies after the overambitious THE MOTION PICTURE a bit like mid-budget B-movies and they always looked like that. At least FC looks way more expensive than it looked and has a great PG-13 zombie movie atmosphere. Visually it’s already more “This is an actual theatrical release” than the TV-movie looking GENERATIONS, before we see any Borg. And while INSURRECTION is one of the low points in the movie series, even that one looks nice. Although that might be, because the alien planet was actually shot on location with a beautiful scenery, instead of a very obvious fake forest in a studio.

    Also the Russo’s inability to shoot action instantly disqualifies them. You look at the behind the scenes video and see all these cool stunts and then in the movie it’s all shaky and overedited. Just sad. The internet mocked the scene in TAKEN 3, where Liam Neeson climbs a fence while the director cuts to 75 different angles, but the Russos let a stuntman jump over a moving car for real and the only way to actually see him do this with a fixed camera and zero edits, is the making of.

  18. *looks more expensive than it WAS.

    Sorry, just waking up.

  19. Trek is one of those odd franchises where it’s popular but not TOO popular*, it’s why it was foolhardy to go big budget with them because the folks who like it are really into it and everybody else is like “ok maybe if nothing else is on?”

    It’s fascinating how with VOYAGE HOME and FC, you had Trek installments that did better than usual Trek film business because something about them worked for folks who don’t know a red alert from a Tribble. And with FINAL FRONTIER and INSURRECTION after both crossover hits, both “ok we know what non-Trekkies like!” and tripped over their dicks.

    I would love Vern to review SECTION 31, because it’s such a fascinating trainwreck. “Hey how do we make a Trek film that anybody could enjoy, even if they haven’t followed the Trek spinoff shows on our streamer? Why make a shitty GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY knockoff in a film plot that was byproduct of a planned series cancelled in favor of just a movie and said season’s plots got crushed together into a 90 minute movie?”

    I have it as the worst Trek film I’ve seen. And I saw FINAL FRONTIER in theaters.

    *=Paramount has something like that now: the Sonic movies. Aimed at kids and adult fans of the property, including some who are REALLY into talking animals and draw fan art of them possibly doing adult stuff if you know what I mean. Anyway those films don’t cost a fortune and do good business, like the recent APES films for Disney. Incidentally SONIC 3 was Paramount’s biggest grosser last year, which is more indicative of what a shitshow the mountain is lately.

  20. I do intend to review the STAR TREK movies in the future, but I think I’ll stick to theatrical. I actually watched all of Discovery (a very mixed bag) and enjoyed her character but that movie was quite bad. (Glad she got to fight a little, though. And use a sword.)

  21. @CJ – yeah, I very much agree that the Russos suck. Even the vaunted airport scene on CIVIL WAR, something I want to like because the stuff going on in it is so cool in theory (and they tapped some real talent to help with the action) left me cold. It’s poorly edited and peppered with cutesy crap that deflates it at every turn. Despite all the insane stuff that goes on, their movies have so little that’s visually interesting.

    I don’t really buy the whole ‘house style’ thing, since so many directors (including Derrickson, who’s good but not a huge visual stylist, or even Whedon) managed to do so much more than the Russos on the films they helmed. I do think trying to manage umpteen big characters and storylines messes the Russo movies up, specifically, but I have little sympathy for that as it’s a self-inflicted problem, and it still doesn’t explain WINTER SOLDIER. Maybe it’s on their DP, who’s only done stuff with them and Blomkamp… but say what you want about ELYSIUM, it looks way better than any Russo movie.

    And shit, there I go flogging that horse cadaver again. Sorry.

    The worst case of a director screwing up action for me is… well, not really surprising: Uwe Boll’s DUNGEON SIEGE. They got motherfucking Ching Siu-tung as an action director (the director of one of my all-time favorite martial arts movies), you watch the behind the scenes and they get some really cool stuff in… and then you watch the shambles left in the finished product. It’s infuriating.

    Maybe I do need to rewatch FIRST CONTACT – I sincerely can’t remember any of it besides the big space battle scene other than some rote earth-bound drama. I didn’t dislike it, but I came out wondering what all the excitement was about… and almost all that excitement came from a couple of my friends who were very much into Trek already. Hmm : )

  22. I recently rewatched all of the classic TREK movies and I must say, FINAL FRONTIER has aged pretty well. It’s still incredibly flawed (including but not limited to some dumb comedy bits and of course if you know Shatner’s original plans for a rock monster finale, you can see how he had to edit around the shot footage before the money ran out), but it feels the most like a real TREK movie, with its plot about a false prophet who is more misguided than evil, an actual villain who pretends to be (a) god and Kirk teaching everybody about the good and bad parts of humanity. It’s actually most of the time a quite competent movie.

    Now that SECTION 31 movie? Oof. I said it before, but I love modern day TREK’s will to take actual risks and try different things with its universe, instead of slavishly sticking to the formula (which, as we all remember, was one of the things that Trekkos actually correctly complained about during the VOYAGER and ENTERPRISE era). But that one didn’t work at all. Not even if you decide to look at it as a standalone movie, without any TREK connections! It’s like they listed everything that did not work about the current incarnation of the franchise and squeeze it into one movie.

    The thing that pissed me off the most however was how it completely misunderstood Section 31. They aren’t some loveable (?) rogues who go on fun (?) spy missions to safe the universe, they are at best supposed to be a metaphor for the tough decisions that even good people have to make in times of crisis, but basically they are a bunch of war criminals who pretend that everything they do is for the greater good. (The greater good!)

  23. CJ Holden – Thematically speaking FF, to give Shatner credit, has something rich with the televangelist angle…but the execution was rubbish. Even the scene of Kirk and “I need my pain”? On paper, I like the idea but again in action it comes off unintentional or not as Shatner ego stroking. It’s lost in translation but I get the idea that Kirk’s pain for better or worse defines him, and having friends is how he’s able to carry the burden. Shatner just couldn’t thread the needle unfortunately.

    As for S31, yup.

    I don’t agree with folks who complain about it being unTrekky, a potentially gatekeeping position. The way I see it is, trying a new angle on an old property and at best you can go wow I never knew I wanted this story told until now.

    A S31 story that’s about the struggle between idealism and (evil) pragmatism, cloak and dagger storytelling? Potential gold here. Instead it’s BORDERLANDS 2. And I don’t mean the video game.

    My fav part though is the cliche of a character giving a monologue before their dinner party dies from their poisoned meals. Very considerate of them to wait to croak until after that speech, not being rude.

  24. Hey, I never said FINAL FRONTIER was perfect, but in retrospect much of its hate was overblown, probably coming from being the follow up to the ultimate STAR TREK crossover crowdpleaser hit, plus Shatner being an ego trippin’ has-been punchline by that point. It’s definitely not one of the high marks of the (movie) series, but also not a full blown low point. IMO it’s a solid mid-tier, that actually captures the spirit of TOS surprisingly well in a bunch of parts. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it on my rewatch. Way more than 3 of the 4 NEXT GEN movies!

  25. I watched all the TREK movies for the first time over the last couple years, and I will also go to bat for FINAL FRONTIER. But I also really dug THE MOTION PICTURE, INSURRECTION, and NEMESIS, so I may just be a weird contrarian.

    I can’t defend SECTION 31, though.

  26. At least we can all agree on the crappiness of SECTION 31. Seriously, when it came out and Trekkos were hating on it, I was so sure that it must be actually great! Turns out this was one of the rare cases were angry internet assholes were absolutely correct.

  27. I haven’t really been feeling like posting recently, but I am mostly still reading, and I feel duty bound to give a first-hand account of what exactly THUNDERBIRDS (the show, the brand) meant to a lot of Brits when this film was produced and released.

    Perhaps it had faded a little even by the time this was shot but for about 30-40 years in the UK, THUNDERBIRDS was not just a popular and beloved children’s and/or family show, but an institution, in tandem with but clearly in front of Gerry Anderson’s other Supermarianation shows. Obviously it was huge on its original run, but specifically in the early 90s it had a revival of a kind I’m not sure has happened before or since with any property, and certainly simply could not happen now. It got very, very popular, and what was notable about this was it was entirely on the back of reruns (“repeats” as we call them here), no new material. Sure there were comics (one issue of which *may* include a photo of a 6 year old Pacman2.0 on the letters page), there was a new toyline, chocolate bar wrappers, Pizza Hut glasses etc, but these were all the result of the resurgence, not the cause, and there were no new episodes, new movies or even video games (apparently there was a NES game but I’m not even sure it was released here), and yet it was holding its own and perhaps even exceeding the NINJA TURTLES and the Bart Simpsons. I don’t know if I can think of anything that ever happened quite like it. Obviously there are plenty of Bullwinkles and Fred Flintstones and so forth who maintained decades of popularity largely on a few years of initial material, and I guess the closest comparison you could make was the flurry of Looney Tunes merchandise a couple of years later, but it really showed just how far the continued popularity of older material could potentially go in the world of terrestrial TV (for reference there were 4 channels in the UK at the time, syndication was never a thing here, and Satellite and Cable subscriptions were still quite rare). Nostalgia no doubt played a part, but it was young kids that took it back into the stratosphere.

    To give you an idea of how big a deal it was, the Tracy Island Playset was the hit Christmas toy for 1992. To give you an idea of how big that was, it sold out quickly and BLUE PETER (another UK kids’ institution, I guess the not-close-but-closest US comparison I could make would be Mr. Rogers) had an episode dedicated to how you could make your own Tracy Island, which was a big enough deal in its own right that it got a dedicated VHS release.

    The THUNDERsaince led to an almost as big revival for fellow Supermarianation show CAPTAIN SCARLET (a more conceptually rich show), and a moderately successful STINGRAY revival. This success allowed Gerry Anderson’s mostly live action long-gestating show SPACE PRECINCT 2040 to finally get the go ahead, and it was an infamous flop on screen and on toy shelves, if a fairly well remembered one, and I’m guessing this film started production in that timeframe too.

    This film lasted a bit longer in UK cinemas than it did in the US, but wasn’t really a hit, and no one really liked it, which I don’t think was a surprise as this was in the era where people just assumed the Hollywood/”Hollywood” version of something would be awful, and usually they at least had a point. I don’t think there was much enthusiasm for it after it was clear this would be closer to SPY KIDS than the original show, but enough kids (the show was still getting high profile repeat slots every few years) and parents were no doubt attracted by the name and other elements for it to hold on for a while.

    Some UK-and-or-me-specific-memories-of-its-release and aftermath;
    – Perhaps the best known/remembered part of the film is the tie-in song by Busted, who were a sort-of-boy-band dismissed or even loathed by most people above the age of 12 (and certainly by teenage boys), but were very popular for about two and a half years before the lead singer flounced off to concentrate on his “credible” band who were, of course, far worse.
    – There was a kind of proto-meme national recognition about the original show featuring close up shots of human hands doing things that would have been a lot more fuss with a marionette hand. That one shot that’s the reverse is kind of a homage(?). I knew about this because Jonathan Ross asked Frakes if there would be such a shot on his radio show. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but this was very obviously a suggested question.
    – It was reviewed on the upper-middle-brow Friday nights at 11ish show Newsnight Review. On the panel that week were James Brown (not that one, the editor of “ironic” “lad’s mag” Loaded) and a Yorkshire poet. In my memory the poet had his cat with him, but that *can’t* be right, surely? Nobody had much good to say about it. On the same episode they reviewed SPIDER-MAN 2. Not That James Brown pretty much gave away the ending of SM2 even though he was warned not to and then said he wouldn’t.
    – Gerry Anderson was quite vocal about how his input was initially sought then refused, and he declined to go to the premiere even though he was offered a substantial amount of money to attend. His former marital and creative partner Sylvia however did attend the premier and seemed to like the film.
    – A couple of years ago Sophia Myles (GUEST HOUSE PARADISO) and David Graham (the original voice of Parker, latterly Peppa Pig’s Grandpa, died last year at the age of 99) were a team on a celebrity/charity fund raising episode of the quiz programme POINTLESS
    – A whole stack of the Making of Books turned up at my local mostly-cheap-but-not-as-cheap-as-it-sounds-anymore shop £1land a month or two before the Pandemic; I guess they’d been sitting around a warehouse somewhere for 15 years.

    Oh, and I did see the film, about a year after it came out. I didn’t mind it. Ben Kingsley was good. That was Vanessa Hudgens? Huh, never put that together

    THUNDERBIRDS hasn’t exactly died in the UK since the film came out; there have been adverts/commercials using the characters, a moderately popular CG animated series and a one-off new episode made in the style and technique of the original show. I don’t think it’s as recognisable to the general public as it was in the late 20th Century, but very little still is.

  28. Thank you Pacman, that is exactly the type of stuff I like to know! Not to the same extent, but I can think of similar nostalgic revivals in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s. It sort of happened with Rocky & Bullwinkle, and I for some reason loved t-shirts of Gumby skateboarding and surfing even though I didn’t much know who he was. I hope they had t-shirts of the Thunderbirds skating.

    So, do you remember, as a kid were you invested in the premise and characters of Thunderbirds to the point where a good live action or animated version would’ve been exciting, or was it all about the puppets?

  29. Oh damn, I remember SPACE PRECINCT (or SPACE COPS as it was called here). Mostly because I loved the concept of it just being a crime procedural, but of course with aliens and SciFi tech. Kinda like the first season of FRINGE, it wasn’t “Who shot the vicitim?” but “Who made his heart beat so fast that it exploded and how?” (Also Simone Bendix was at that time my 2nd biggest SciFi actress crush after Terry Farrell, but before Claudia Christian.)

    Didn’t know how popular THUNDERBIRDS was in the UK. Like I said earlier, it was more of a late 80s obscurity over here.

  30. Pacman, THUNDERBIRDS and/or other Supermarionation shows did get some play here in the US, and were known enough for TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE to parody their style.

    And to add to your list of things that similarly endured in pop culture without much actual new material, I would add Popeye, Star Trek during the 1970s, and Doctor Who during the 1990s.

    Speaking of which, it amused me that you explained David Graham as the voice of Peppa Pig, when to me his name is more familiar from the credits of early black-and-white Doctor Who as one of the Dalek voices. He also played the comedy sidekick to Julian Glover’s guest villain in the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who serial “City of Death” (aka “the one John Cleese had a cameo in”).

    I don’t know what GUEST HOUSE PARADISO is, but Sophia Myles guest-starred on the revived Doctor Who during David Tennant’s time – missing Graham by about 27 years by my reckoning – so I know her from that and from the UNDERWORLD movies.

    As for SECTION 31, and BORDERLANDS to which it’s been negatively compared here … I like grungy trashy space opera, especially with disreputable rogues as protagonists, so I guess I enjoyed these a bit more than most people seemed to (see also ALIEN RESURRECTION).

    I’m guessing most of us here are of the age and/or taste to have grown up watching equivalent schlock like STARCRASH, ICE PIRATES or SPACE TRUCKERS. I can’t help but wonder if SECTION 31 or BORDERLANDS had been made back in the day by Roger Corman or Albert Pyun or whoever, and we had watched them on late-night TV with Joe Bob Briggs or Gilbert Godfrey cracking jokes between commercials, we might remember them with some fondness. Is it just the bigger budgets and the burden of belonging to corporatized franchises that makes us regard them more harshly?

  31. (Gottfried, not Godfrey – apologies for the typo.)

  32. GUEST HOUSE PARADISO is basically an unofficial, British, R-rated, live action CLEVER & SMART movie. That’s all.

  33. I’m afraid I don’t know what CLEVER & SMART is either.

    But I looked up GUEST HOUSE PARADISO and was pleased to learn that it’s a feature film spinoff of Bottom, a sitcom I haven’t seen but have heard of because it stars half the cast of The Young Ones.

  34. Vern- You’re welcome, and you know I was wondering when reading the review what it was about it that appealed so much to me in the flashier age of turtles and hedgehogs and robots and such, and I couldn’t really remember, however I think it must have been more than just the puppets, because while I was as much or more into CAPTAIN SCARLET I always found STINGRAY quite dull even though I really wanted to like it (it was an underwater thing, I think 60s kids really liked underwater stuff in a way future generations didn’t, see also THUNDERBALL). There were also other attempted Supermarianation revivals for shows like JOE 90 and FIREBALL XL5 that didn’t seen to go anywhere with me or my fellow mini millennials, so you have to think there was something in the concept or world that appealed to us then. Plus I was also consuming it in Comics form, even if I can’t remember anything about them beyond turning up on the letters page.

    Would I have liked this movie if it (or a 90s equivalent) had come out 10-12 years earlier? Probably, but I might be the wrong person to ask. At the time of the THUNDERsance I saw NINJA TURTLES III and SUPER MARIO BROS at the cinema and didn’t have any issues with them, didn’t think about there being a lack of talking brains or mushrooms or whatever (admittedly I mostly knew Mario through cartoons and LCD games at the time), I think at that age if I liked something I was prepared to take whatever it threw at me. Part of me admires young me’s attitude there, on the other hand given the proliferation of franchise extensions in the 21st Century, part of me is relieved I no longer feel that way.

    I actually did see the second of the two 60s THUNDERBIRDS movies (THUNDERBIRD SIX, the confusingly named sequel to THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO) on the big screen as a kid, I’ve never been able to find out if this was a national re-release or just a one-off revival screening.

    Curt- Most of the news stories about Graham’s passing last year focused on Grandpa Pig and occasionally Parker, but I “know” someone through an artist discord group who is a big Supermariamation fan (big in has made impressive recreations of the models and such) who was upset they didn’t focus more on his work with Anderson and on WHO. I know the feeling (I was annoyed Leslie Phillips, a comic actor who was very popular in the mid-20th Century, was referred to as “Harry Potter actor” for voicing the sorting hat), but I like to think he’d be happy that he’d be remembered for a role he spent the last 20 years of his life working on (he was also a main voice on the same company’s BEN & HOLLY’S LITTLE KINGDOM, the thinking toddler’s PEPPA).

    I’m actually pretty much *exactly* the wrong age to be much in DOCTOR WHO; my earliest memory is my third birthday, which was a month or so after the last “classic” episode aired, and had been legally an adult for a couple of months when the first new episode aired. There was the Paul McGann movie in 96, which I did like and made me interested for a bit, but that was a one-off and repeats were mostly limited to UK Gold.

    I know it’s in not the case elsewhere (and certainly not in the US) but I think BOTTOM is now more beloved and better known in the UK than THE YOUNG ONES, however even here GUEST HOUSE PARADISO is “divisive” (I like it, but I’m easy when it comes to those guys)

  35. Pacman, that’s interesting to hear that UK audiences know BOTTOM more than THE YOUNG ONES. I’ve never heard of BOTTOM airing here in the US at all. The DVD release of THE YOUNG ONES included a BOTTOM episode as a bonus feature, and I’m sure I watched it but I remember nothing about it. I’ll have to track that show down someday.

    Reminds me of how John Cleese claims that Monty Python isn’t remembered so fondly in the UK compared to FAWLTY TOWERS. Personally I find that claim difficult to believe, and seems like it was disproven when the Pythons’ farewell show at the O2 sold out immediately.

  36. Also, for what it’s worth I once saw an online Doctor Who poll asking people which era (i.e. which Doctor) was the era that they got into the show. To my surprise the Paul McGann “era” was the biggest spike, even though he only had the one made-for-TV movie you mentioned.

    Maybe that movie got people interested, maybe those UK Gold repeats helped, plus I believe more and more of the original series had been released on home video by that point.

    Maybe a thing needs to be over and done with before a new audience feels ready for the challenge of catching up with it all. Also, like Star Trek and Star Wars the brand was being kept alive by spin-off novels, some of them quite acclaimed, so maybe that also drew some new fans in at the time.

  37. Say what you want about the McGann movie*, but it was the first time that DOCTOR WHO seemed to actually have a budget. So I guess the slicker, more professional up-to-the-standards-of-American-TV look made many people watch it, who were turned off by the extreme low budget feel of the classic series.

    *I still chuckle when I remember that the first person who encountered that incarnation of The Doctor, was played by no other than Will Sasso!

  38. @Curt – speaking from limited experience (living in the UK for two decades) and anecdotal evidence (friends and co-workers), I’d say Cleese’s claim doesn’t sound like total bullshit as long as he was specifically talking about the TV shows only. More people I know would say they prefer FAWLTY TOWERS over FLYING CIRCUS. But they would also agree Monty Python as a whole (records, individual skits, movies, the institution itself) blows TOWERS out of the water, no contest.

  39. @Dreadguacamole – FAWLTY TOWERS is of course great, I just find it hard to imagine 12 episodes of well-constructed farce outweighing 45 episodes that literally changed comedy as we know it. But perhaps FLYING CIRCUS really was more influential in the US and Canada – I can’t imagine KIDS IN THE HALL, MR. SHOW, etc. existing without it.

  40. To use an analogy I would say MONTY PYTHON is like Pink Floyd to FAWLTY TOWERS’s Queen. Everyone knows about the former, they’re iconic and they are able to sell out huge venues instantly, but the average person might struggle to name or recognise more than a few songs, while the later is maybe taken a little less seriously but has a huge repotiore of songs that the average person recognises instantly. That’s not a perfect analogy, but it somewhat sums up my experience; to be honest I’ve never particularly cared about FAWLTY TOWERS, but I was a big Python nerd in my early teens who was always frustrated that even here by the early 00s people only seemed to care about BRIAN and HOLY GRAIL.

  41. At least for my part of the world I would reverse the roles in that analogy. MONTY PYTHON is Queen, the iconic band with the bunch of huge hits that everybody knows and is popular with at least four generations of fans, while FAWLTY TOWERS is Pink Floyd, the band that has everybody heard of by name, was maybe influential amongst the right people, but the average person maybe only knows ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL (or in the FT world: “Don’t mention the war!”)…and is fronted by a huge asshole.

  42. OK, interesting, interesting. So you’re saying FAWLTY TOWERS has a kinda cool, underrated guitar tone, while MONTY PYTHON have a I-guess-it’s-nice-but-David-Gilmour-is-really-not-that-great guitar work.

    Follow-up question: who’s the Marillion of British sitcoms, ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES, ‘ALLO ‘ALLO!, or KEEPING UP APPEARANCES?

  43. That’s definitely ‘ALLO, ‘ALLO. Marillion with Fish, Marillion without Fish or just Fish – it’s just the same joke over and over and over again…

  44. I thought something similar at first, but I’m not 100% sure. Maybe ‘ALLO ‘ALLO should be ELO, they’re more goofy and “Evil Woman” sounds kind of like “You stupid woman!”

  45. “Don’t mention the war” is certainly the most famous FAWLTY TOWERS quote, and “You’ll have to forgive him, he’s from Barcelona” is sometimes referenced, but that’s about all I can think of.

    FLYING CIRCUS gave us the Dead Parrot sketch – it’s almost impossible to ever use the word “fjords” in a sentence (on the rare occasion we Americans have a reason to) without succumbing to the urge to precede it with “pining for the”, and that’s just one line among many famous lines in that skit. The show also gave us “wink wink, nudge nudge” and “upper-class twit” and “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” and “And now for something completely different.” It gave us the Silly Walk, the Lumberjack Song, the Argument Clinic. It gave us the lower-case dictionary definition of the word “spam”! And those are just the most famous ones off the top of my head.

    So Python seems like the winner based on FLYING CIRCUS alone, and the films tip the scale even further. HOLY GRAIL consists almost entirely of famous and quotable lines, and the other films gave us “What have the Romans ever done for us?” and “It’s only wa-fer thin” among others.

  46. CJ, have you ever seen the “Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus” specials made for German television in the 1970s? As a Python fan I know that the first of these two specials was written and performed in German by the Pythons, and they’ve said that they took some care to try to maintain the nuance of the jokes in translation as much as possible. (The second special was performed in English.)

    When I watched the first special with English subtitles, it sounded like the Lumberjack Song’s “a bra” and “my dear mama” (“my dear papa” in their later performances) was rewritten as “a halter” and “my uncle Walter” so that the lyric still rhymed in German while still making sense.

    If you’ve seen these specials, did you notice any other noteworthy adjustments to the material to make it work better in German? I’ve always wondered about this.

  47. Of course I have seen them. They were produced by German TV icon Alfred Biolek, who became a fan of the Pythons on a UK vacation. When he passed away a few years ago, Eric Idle tweeted how he invited the whole group to his house and cooked for them. (Biolek also had in the 90s a popular celebrity cooking show, but sadly none of them ever showed up on it. We got an episode with Udo Kier though! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8zhoTsBfZQ )

    The first episode of the German special was indeed performed phonetically in English, but they were very hard to understand, although John Cleese was apparently quite fluent in it. About the change in the Lumberjack song: The German word for bra is “Büstenhalter” so they had to change a bunch of the lyrics for the sake of the rhyme, but they did a good job with it.

    In the 2nd episode they were dubbed by professional voice actors. I don’t really think they actually changed any jokes for the German audience. At least half of it was new material anyway.

    Fun fact: Although the Python movies were a huge success over here, FLYING CIRCUS was more of an obscure cult classic, that was broadcast undubbed and without subtitles (something that very limited your audience back then) deep at night on the local public broadcasters, until Sat. 1 actually had the episodes dubbed and aired them that way in the late 90s. The dubbing was controversial (not just among purists), but it was a huge success, so they also did the same thing with FAWLTY TOWERS. I remember that John Cleese even showed up at a late night show to promote it. The host (Again: Thomas Gottschalk of DOUBLE TROUBLE, TRABBI GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and SISTER ACT 2 fame) asked him if he would do the silly walk after the commercial break, Cleese replied with a stern “No.” that got a big laugh out of everybody, but after the break neither the word “silly” or “walk” were ever mentioned again.

    Oh, and the German 90s dub of FLYING CIRCUS re-appeared once or twice on Pay TV, but even Netflix only has it English with subtitles and the DVD box only lists it as “bonus feature”.

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