Mistress of puppets

Most Cult TV fans probably only know Roberta Leigh as a footnote to the career of Gerry Anderson. It was Leigh, an author of children’s books, who came to Anderson’s fledgling production company with her character Twizzle, a meeting that resulted in Anderson producing his first puppet series, The Adventures of Twizzle, in 1957. Thus launches the narrative of Anderson as the creator of Supermarionation and powerhouse of 1960’s British sci-fi television. But if one doesn’t take that detour, and instead follows Leigh along her own path, there is a lot to be found that is surprising, noteworthy and pretty delightful.

First off, one would find that Roberta Leigh was just one of several pseudonyms adopted by a woman born Janey Scott, who later, by marriage, became Janey Scott Lewin. This multiplicity of identities is just one telltale indication of Leigh’s restless, albeit resolutely commercial, creative spirit, the other being her work. Because Leigh was not only a children’s book author, but also a prolific author of romance novels, all written under a variety of names (Rachel Lindsay, Rozella Lake, even Janey Scott) and published by such industry mainstays as Harlequin. Alongside this and her work in television, she also found time to become an accomplished painter.

Leigh and Gerry Anderson collaborated on one more series, Torchy, the Battery Boy, before parting ways. Also parting ways around the same time were Anderson and his production partner, cinematographer Arthur Provis. Provis teamed up with Leigh and, under the banner Wonderama Productions, the two began making puppet series of their own. The first of these, Sarah & Hoppity, was moppet-friendly material in the same vein as Twizzle and Torchy and, like those shows, was based on a series of books written by Leigh. At the same time, with shows like Supercar and Fireball XL5, Gerry Anderson had made the leap to juvenile sci-fi with his puppet productions. Leigh soon followed suit with Space Patrol, a series that lasted 39 episodes, from 1963 to 1964, and was broadcast in multiple countries.

Given their proximity, it’s difficult to argue that Space Patrol was not influenced by Fireball XL5, though the dependence of both on so many classic 1960s space opera tropes makes tracing specific instances of that influence almost impossible. Still, it’s no stretch to say that Leigh’s series was by far the more innovative of the two. For starters, there is the titular Space Patrol’s flagship craft; bored with the unvaryingly vertical and (my word) phallic rocket ships of traditional sci-fi (Fireball XL5’s titular craft being a perfect example), Leigh created the Galasphere, a gyroscope-like vehicle that flits through space with hummingbird like movements. The skipper of the Galasphere represents a further departure; in contrast to Fireball’s square jawed Steve Zodiac, Captain Larry Dart sports a van dyke and shoulder length hair that makes him appear at once bohemian and like a puppet throwback to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.

Then there is Space Patrol’s electronic soundtrack, which was composed by Leigh herself using an assortment of machines purchased at the local electronics shop. While every bit as pioneering as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s also electronically produced theme to Doctor Who, Leigh’s work eschews melody entirely in favor of something more purely industrial, and is at times even reminiscent of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. The effect is indescribably eerie, and all the more so when paired with the naïve aspects of the series, which, after all, is essentially a children’s puppet show about spacemen.

It should also be noted that Space Patrol is refreshingly light on the wanton ray gun blasting and looming cold war xenophobia of other juvenile space operas of the period, and instead whiffs of Kennedy era optimism toward cooperation across borders. In the intro, it is stressed that the Space Patrol are “guardians of peace” and it is not unusual to see its interplanetary members (the Patrol is made up of Martians, Venusians and Earthlings) reach out to the aliens they encounter in a spirit of curiosity and friendship. In one episode, when the patrol thwarts the latest invasion plot by their recurring nemesis, the Neptunians, they follow it up with an invitation for an exchange of knowledge and entry into the planetary alliance, which the Neptunians happily accept. The pilot episode features the Galasphere crew -- Dart, androgynous Venusian Slim, and Martian/dispenser of all food jokes Husky – protecting the wildlife of Jupiter from poachers.

Unfortunately, another one of the things that sets Space Patrol apart is the pitiful amount of capital that ITV allotted for its funding. The result is a production considerably less slick than those of Gerry Anderson, a sort of not-so-Supermarionation. The puppets are cruder looking, many of them sporting painted on eyes rather than the rolling and blinking models seen on Steve Zodiac and crew. This contributes both to the puppets naïve charm and also to that creepy haunted doll quality that, when combined with Leigh’s alien score and the murky black and white in which most of the surviving episodes are found, makes watching Space Patrol a dreamily surreal experience. Likewise, Space Patrol’s miniature sets are a cacophony of visible seams, brush strokes and the occasional oversized finger print, yet the art department still managed to build a diminutively massive futuristic city model that recalls a tabletop version of Metropolis.

Adding to the rickety nature of things is the fact that Leigh, unlike Anderson, was not afraid to show her puppets walking. I feel she should be commended for this, although the spastic capering that resulted goes some way toward proving Anderson’s point. It’s such that, a few episodes in, you can’t help but root for these odd, shaky limbed little people as they negotiate the baroque perils of walking up stairs, getting up from a chair, or entering a doorway from one room into the other.

In all seriousness, though, as a Supermarionation fan who long viewed Space Patrol as an off-brand, and inferior, version of Fireball XL5, I must confess to developing a real fondness for it. While one would expect from a knockoff a certain generic quality, Space Patrol has all over it the fingerprints of a quirky creative sensibility; one which I can only imagine belongs to Roberta Leigh. It also, like the best B movies, has all the enthusiasm and energy that comes when a group of people, upon surveying their woefully inadequate resources, decides to just go for it and give it their scrappy best.

Leigh’s planned follow up to Space Patrol, 1964’s Paul Starr, lacks much of the former’s high mindedness. Space agent Paul Starr’s sidekick, Lightning, is an egregious Asian stereotype and, at the end of the pilot episode, the duo gleefully nukes the bad guy’s compound, not sparing us a shot of the doomed villain puppet at its control panel, toppling pathetically under a hail of smoke and debris. That unsold pilot episode is as far as the series went, but it’s a doozy. Filmed in flush full color -- presumably to compete with its contemporary, Stingray, which was Gerry Anderson’s first color production -- the series gives us much of the spirited cheap-jackery of its predecessor, but this time in dazzling primary hues. Gone are many of Leigh’s innovative touches (Starr’s amphibious space ship allows her to further cop some of Stingray’s mojo), but compensating is an almost manic energy level. Of special note are the voice of Paul Starr, which is provided by a pre-UFO Ed Bishop, and the jaunty theme song, which was again composed by Leigh herself.

Following the failure of Paul Starr, Leigh and Provis’s puppet series returned to toddler territory with 1966’s odd Wonder Boy and Tiger, a thirteen part series of fifteen minute episodes co-produced by the Esso oil company, and the same year’s Send For Dithers. Following the adventures of a boy and his clairvoyant cat who travel around on a flying carpet helping people, Wonder Boy and Tiger employed the same core team -- cinematographer Provis, director Frank Goulding, and Leigh as producer -- who worked on all of Leigh’s puppet productions, and to whom she referred as her filmmaking “family”. The characters of Wonder Boy and Tiger also appeared in a comic strip in Wonder comics, which was edited by Leigh and distributed exclusively in Esso stations. Send For Dithers, which concerned a bumbling handyman whose best friend is a penguin, was similarly bathed in whimsy.

In 1967, Roberta Leigh -- who, by all available accounts, had an amicable split with Gerry Anderson -- finally got the jump on him by being the first to move into production on a live action science fiction series. Unfortunately, few people know this, because the result, a half hour pilot for The Solarnauts, remains unsold to this day. Of all of Leigh’s unsold pilots that are today available for our enjoyment, The Solarnauts is the gem. It’s pure 1960s pulp space opera, a time capsule that takes us back to those rarified days before audience expectations were raised by Kubrick, in terms of thinkyness, and Lucas, in terms of spectacle. Ray guns blast away, bald headed alien fiends cackle menacingly, and Martine Beswick shows up as a sexy space lady in a form fitting silver bodysuit. It’s like an issue of Planet comics come to life, with a hint of Margheriti’s Gamma One quadrilogy thrown in for an added dash of Euro-style. Added enjoyment can be found in spotting the household elements hidden within the thrifty set design; overturned ice cube trays make for viable control panel components, as does acoustical foam serve as the upholstery of the future. Dammit, why wasn’t this series made?!
 

With the recent anniversary of Doctor Who, attention has deservedly been focused on original Who producer Verity Lambert, and on her pioneering role as, not just a female producer in a male dominated medium, but a female producer of science fiction, a suspect genre, in a male dominated medium. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to Lambert to point out that Roberta Leigh, albeit on a smaller scale, was inhabiting the same role at virtually the same time. Leigh’s story, of course, played out to a much smaller array of eyes, and thus today is less likely to be celebrated. That, however, doesn’t mean that those of us who do know of her can’t have a small scale, YouTube abetted celebration of our own.

Watch Space Patrol on YouTube.

Watch the Paul Starr pilot on YouTube.

Watch Wonder Boy and Tiger on YouTube

Watch the Solarnauts pilot on YouTube

Gerry Anderson 1929 - 2012

The enclosed universe that Gerry Anderson created with his run of Supermarionation TV series was so seamless and meticulous in its detail that one would have to assume it was the product of a singular, obsessive vision. This makes it all the more surprising that Anderson's role as master of marionettes wasn't so much a calling as something that was thrust upon him -- specifically when, in 1957, he was commissioned to bring the doll-like hero of children's author Roberta Leigh's The Adventures of Twizzle to British television screens. The truth is that Anderson started out wanting to make films with actual people in them, just like a real boy, but soon found himself overseeing an operation scaled exclusively for stringed stars of less than three feet tall.

Still, whatever brought him to them, there's no question that, when viewed against the generally shoddy background of commercial children's programming then and now, Anderson's puppet series stand out for their high level of craft, imagination and commitment to technical excellence. They also stand out for being strange. My first exposure to them came via Saturday morning viewings of Fireball XL5, at a time when I was just old enough to recognize that what I was seeing was not a cartoon, but nowhere near worldly enough to guess at what was giving apparent life to the odd figures within. These wobbly beings would pleasantly haunt me from that point on, drawing me toward their every new iteration. And while their origins remained mysterious to me, I nonetheless recognized them as gifts. Anderson's generosity reached a peak of sorts with Thunderbirds, an hour long show that -- with it's hyper-real color, globe spanning action, large cast of characters, wide array of futuristic vehicles, and reliable doling out of massive explosions at regular intervals -- seemed like an epic scale, no-expense-spared attempt to stimulate every last pleasure center within the brain of the average ten year old boy.

In both his autobiography and the interviews with him that I've read, Anderson struck me as being something of a melancholy sort, and that darkness eventually started to express itself through his work. UFO, his first live action series, expanded upon the paranoid alien invasion scenarios and creeping police state fantasies of his puppet series Captain Scarlet with characteristically addictive results. A flawed masterpiece, the show countered its shiny futuristic trappings with stories focused on intractable moral dilemmas, Pyrrhic victories, and heroes who were not only not always likeable, but whom often seemed to not even like each other all that much. Like the Altamont to Star Trek's Woodstock, UFO was TV space opera adapted to the darkening expectations of the late 60s and early 70s, and with it Anderson resoundingly made good on his potential to create futuristic television fantasy within a distinctly adult context.

Gerry Anderson's passing at the age of 83 strikes a personal chord with me, because his work  contributed to my adult life its most abiding nerd totems. This at one point extended to my driving up an enormous credit card debt in the accumulation of a large collection of vintage Thunderbirds merchandise. Most of that's gone now, except for the one token of Anderson devotion that I allowed myself to keep: a die-cast toy of Lady Penelope's bubble-topped pink Rolls Royce that I can see on the shelf as I'm writing this. Obviously, those afternoons spent watching Thunderbirds on the living room floor left an impression on me. It's not that I had more to escape from than any other kid my age at the time, but that, when I needed it, the escape Gerry Anderson offered me was so total. Like magical gatekeepers, his puppet heroes asked for a leap in the suspension of disbelief that, once made, kept you in happy orbit, momentarily free from the cares of an unstrung world.

Toys rule

I don't miss selling old toys. Once it got to the point where I had to be competitive, it became more about hassle and less about fun, which just seems kind of wrong. But, man, sometimes I sure do miss some of the cool crap I used to have:

Yes, the ugly truth is revealed. All those many Ultra series with their myriad variations on Ultraman and their armadas of futuristic vehicles were just about pimping toys to impressionable Japanese children. Ultraman was the He-Man of the 70s!

A Thunderbirds playset made in Spain during the mid 60s. I love the complete randomness of color selection in regards to the paintwork on the figures and vehicles, plus the fact that the box is made of wood with lithographed paper glued to it.

Now Mazinga can join you in the bathtub!

Crappy picture. Sorry. But, in case you can't make it out, that's a vinyl figure of one of the characters from that noted bit of MST3K fodder, Time of the Apes. Yes, that's right. Back in the day, someone actually made toys for Time of the effing Apes!

If I had a kid, I would totally make them wear these Kimba galoshes. Even if it wasn't raining.

Oh. My. God.

A piece of my soul died when I watched Black Devil Doll From Hell, but at least it's good to know that I still have a threshold. By way of review, I'll just say that, as far as misogynist 1980s shot-on-video blaxploitation ventriloquist dummy horror porn movies go, it's probably one of the better ones.

Aerial City 008 (Japan, 1969)

The marionette adventures of British television producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson were probably nowhere more popular than they were in Japan, where the Anderson's Thunderbirds still enjoys a Star Trek level cult following to this very day. The Japanese themselves were also known to take a crack at this peculiar genre themselves, with the most widely known example being Go Nagai's early eighties puppet effort X Bomber, which was aired in the UK under the title Star Fleet. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that such series were simply an attempt on Japanese producers' parts to bite the Anderson's distinctive Supermarionation style. Japan, after all, had a long tradition of marionette theater, and also had a history of puppet-driven sci-fi themed TV series that paralleled that of their British counterparts.

The chief creative force behind such series was Kinosuke Takeda, a master of traditional Japanese puppetry who, along with his Takeda Puppet Troupe, created Japanese television's first marionette space adventure, Spaceship Silica, in 1960. He would next go on to collaborate with Astro Boy and Kimba creator Osamu Tezuka on Galaxy Boy Troop (Japanese title: Ginga Shonen Tai), which combined marionettes based on Tezuka's character designs with cell animated exteriors and action sequences. But Takeda's most elaborate effort in this arena -- and the one most clearly influenced by the Anderson's series, in particular Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet -- was 1969's Aerial City 008, a full-color series chronicling the adventures of a family living in a futuristic early 21st century megalopolis.

From the little I've seen of it, Aerial City 008 seems to neatly present the flipsides of human endeavor in much the same manner as Thunderbirds, with the technological wonders of the future being employed to clean up the messes left behind by some of the race's more ill-advised stabs at progress. In Thunderbirds, for example, you might recall that the titular rescue organization had to deal with the consequences of such crack-brained schemes as trying to move the Empire State Building on rails and launching a manned space probe to the sun. In that spirit, Operation Spring, the one episode of Aerial City that I've been able to get my hands on, chronicles the outcome of an international project that has the unfathomable goal of turning Winter into Spring. Predictably, that outcome is complete global catastrophe, with earthquakes rocking cities, hot magma vomiting up from the bowels of the Earth in all kinds of inconvenient places, and uniformed functionaries losing their shit as, all around them, sparks and steam shoot out of blinking control panels.

More close to home, the environmental meltdown has lead to an atomic cruise ship bearing the two youngest members of the series' central family, the Oharas, being trapped between two gargantuan ice bergs. It is now up to the botched project's participating nations -- each represented by a broadly stereotyped puppet representative (the Irish delegate dresses like a leprechaun and rides a bright green scooter, to give just one example) -- to combine their technological know-how to effect a rescue. Thus is a vast armada of futuristic hardware, including everything from super submarines to fanciful airships with propellers coming out of everywhere, set into action, racing against time to save the hapless passengers before the ship's damaged heating system leads to them dying of frostbite.

I have the sinking feeling that Operation Spring may be all that survives of Aerial City 008, which is a real shame, because, from what I've seen, it's an overwhelmingly charming exercise in retro futurism. Despite the dark aspects of its storyline, the show's whimsical 21st century cityscapes, neat gadgets and gizmos, and bright, candy- coated color schemes pop with all the optimism of a 1960s world's fair "kitchen of tomorrow" display. Perfectly capturing this spirit is the show's swinging, club-poppy theme tune -- composed by none other than Isao Tomita -- which would be right at home on a Pizzicato Five album.

Watch AERIAL CITY 008 (1970) | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Puppet Africanus

Interster (1981)

Okay, so 4DK's parade of communist cowboys, Filipino wonder women and Bollywood kaiju movies has left you cold, and I'm left feeling like a man trying to stop a baby crying who's run out of funny faces to make. How about this, babies: A South African children's television series made during the final years of the Apartheid regime that's modeled very closely on the puppet series of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It indeed seems like no country's young sprouts were immune to the hypnotic appeal of freaky-looking marionettes framed within a fiery landscape of exploding miniatures. And thank God for that. After all, it's things like this that, despite our differences, bring us all a little closer, isn't it?

I could find very little written in English about the Afrikaans language series Insterster other than a modest-sized Wikipedia entry and what's written about it on the blog of one Mike Cane. Those sources tell me that Interster came into being as a result of the South African Broadcasting Corporation's inability to acquire broadcast rights to the Anderson's Thunderbirds, prompting them to try their hand at producing a puppet sci-fi series of their own. The result is a very close approximation, coming more than a decade after the Andersons stopped producing their patented Supermarionation series (moving instead into live-action fare like Space: 1999 and UFO) and a couple of years before Gerry Anderson tried to jump back into the game with the underwhelming Terrahawks. The puppets in this case, rather than being stringed marionettes like those used by the Andersons, appear to be internally wired puppets that are operated from underneath, and I was happy to see that they emulate the big-headed, caricatured look of the puppets from Thunderbirds and Stingray, rather than the dead-eyed, ambulatory mannequins seen in later Anderson series like Captain Scarlet.

I would love to say that I saw all kinds of subtextual echoes of South Africa's then-current political situation in Interster, but having thus far only seen two of its half-hour episodes, I'd have to say that that would require a pretty fanciful reading. There is, however, a captive alien prince, who is being held hostage indefinitely by the ostensible good guys -- themselves one side in a simmering interplanetary conflict -- in order to maintain an uneasy, coercive peace. Once freed by his people, this prince leads them in a stealthy, undercover war against his former captors. Could this perhaps be a reflection of the Afrikaners' anxieties about Nelson Mandela and the ANC? Perhaps not, but that aside, it's certainly difficult to ignore the physical resemblance of one of the show's villain puppets to then-prime minister P. W. Botha.

While the above is all conjectural, I can tell you with absolute certitude that Interster contains most of the elements that could be found in the Anderson's most successful shows, such as a square-jawed (and, come to think of it, square-headed) puppet hero with a trusty side-kick; a futuristic defense force -- in this case headquartered in a megalopolis-like 21st century Cape Town; all kinds of nifty vehicles and gadgets; lots of neato miniature work, and, of course, plenty of explosions. The only thing sorely missing is the grandiosity that one of Barry Gray's thundering orchestral scores might have bestowed upon the proceedings, as what we're left with is some pretty cheesy synth disco and wan electronic noodlings that give an air of ponderousness to much of the action.

The plots of Interster's brief episodes are, as might be expected, pretty basic, but not without their interesting elements. The war between Earth's Space Force and their alien enemies, the Krokons, is a cold one, waged under the cover of an interplanetary peace treaty, a situation that forces the show protagonists, lead by the aforementioned square-jawed hero Bruks De La Rey, to act with more consideration for the appearance of diplomacy than we see in the battles that play out in typical space operas. I also thought it was a neat twist that the Krokons' secret human collaborator on Earth is one Gorman (the aforementioned Botha ringer), a corrupt weapons magnate who makes money coming and going by supplying armaments and machinery to the Space Force while demanding hefty prices from the Krokons for his services as a spy.

But these hints of complexity aside, what I really enjoyed about Interster are the same things that I've always enjoyed about Thunderbirds and the Andersons' other puppet shows: the unfading and mesmerizing strangeness of the human-like puppets, the cool miniature work, the very apparent dedication to craft on the part of all involved, and the unique, completely closed reality that these all combine to create. That said, the show does feel a bit colder than Thunderbirds, and as a result lacks that series' inherent charm, instead hewing more closely to the somber, militaristic tone of the later Captain Scarlet. Of course, this perception on my part might be colored by my perception of the malignant system that was in place at the time of the show's production. I mean, escapism is one thing, but no mere television show should be entertaining enough to make you forget that. Still, I'm fascinated enough by Insterster to seek out more episodes... at least until that fascination fades in the face of some new, fleeting obsession.