Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Spectrum is Green. 

Captain Scarlet was my favourite Gerry Anderson series… it had an edgy darkness that really drew you in to the drama being created. The modelling, puppetry & action sequences reached a zenith in that series… they were amazing. It always tickled me that the voice actor Francis Matthews party piece was an imitation of Cary Grant’s voice, which Anderson once heard him do on a radio show… and that’s the voice he hired Matthews to give Captain Scarlet!

This is the voice of the Mysterons. We know you can hear us Earth man. You will do more Gerry Anderson reviews. Or you will be destroyed......👽

Definitely my favourite Gerry Anderson puppet show. Something about its poe-faced seriousness and violence just seemed edgy and cool to me as a kid. The theme tune was catchy as hell too.

Just bought the whole series on Bluray, in glorious HD! You can really appreciate and admire all the fine details and effort that went in to making this. The show is a magnificent time capsule of 60s retro-futurism, with an incredibly gritty and ominous atmosphere. It’s also uncanny how accurate certain elements of the show were in projecting the future - technologically, politically, etc. A true work of art.

This is not a terrible kids show. I was seven when this was first shown on British TV. I loved it, along with all the other bloodthirsty kids I knew. The target audience. When it was repeated in the 1990's I could, as an adult, appreciate how dark the themes were. Got the box set .

Growing up in Nigeria, the Gerry Anderson shows I watched (and enjoyed) were Captain Scarlet and Terrahawks. As an adult, watching one of their episodes is like opening a time capsule with intriguing fantasy and technical elements.

"Captain Blue knew enough to let Captain Scarlet volunteer for certain death." Priceless!

We couldn't believe we were able to watch this on kids TV when it came out, it was thrilling. One of the do gooders at the time tried to get it taken off the air, thankfully they failed

I've never been bothered by the uncanniness of the marionettes in Anderson productions because the voice acting was always so good. It lends a sense of humanity to the somewhat robotic physical presentation of the puppets.

The SPV is for Captain Scarlet to get to his certain death even quicker! Brilliant! 😂

It was definitely on TV in Australia for a short time in the early 70's. I watched it as a very young child and had a Dinky Toys SPV

There's a moment in Space: 1999 when Martin Landau rides at a desk that can trundle along on a conveyor, and I remember wondering if the Andersons had forgotten that human actors can walk.

I loved this show as a kid. When I was 7 I had a Captain Scarlet dress up outfit, and I wore it as often as I could!

This was edgy before edgy was a thing, as it still had that puppet charm that made it so compelling.

That was so unfair 😂😂😂😂😂😂 Seriously tho, yeah.. Captain Scarlet was the best for me.. I think it really demonstrated well the idea of the bravery of the military .. self sacrifice.. I like the bits where Blue has to be reminded by Scarlet on occasions that there’s no point in Blue risking his life if he can take the risk instead... a nice touch ..

Captain Scarlet, Joe Ninety and Thunderbirds were the shows worth watching when we were kids! Sad as that sounds they were F.A.B!

Captain Scarlet was my favorite of the supermarionation shows. I watched it every weekday at 330pm on Channel 36 in the SF Bay Area back in the early 1970s after arriving home from school. To this day I can sing the closing theme song. For me as a little boy it was fun to watch with action, explosions, and tons of puppet violence.

Back then, I was too young to appreciate just how Cary Grant-ish Captain Scarlet's voice was. Hilarious "Oh pu-lease, don't tell me how I'm going to die, sur-prise me!" I always think that John Altman based his Nick Cotton character on Captain Black. At least I really hope he did.

Captain Scarlet is my favourite Anderson production. When I was 4 I had a Captain Scarlet wallet with a Spectrum ID card inside. 20+ years later, I diligently video taped every episode when the BBC screened the series in the 90's. Imagine my horror on finally realising that the titular character was in fact a Mysteron replicant from half-way through the opening episode!

I watched it as a kid in the late 60s and thought it was a great -- much better than Thunderbirds. The "don't try this at home" warning was probablty aimed at me!

I watched Captain Scarlet in the 60s in the UK as a kid and actually loved its dark and serious tone. I had an SPV at the time which got lost or given away and bought some mint condition ones as an adult for the nostalgia. 😅 Great review sir 👏

Captain Scarlet: Well hung and enjoys hiding rainbows on his person.

Brilliant critique. Very well played. Thank you.

Being 58 years old ( and Canadian ), Captain Scarlet was my first childhood TV obsession, and it remains so. I have friends who are seriously into what they call " the trilogy " ( Scarlet - 90 - Service ), but apart from the happily bloodthirsty agents of WIN in Joe90 and the occasional cameo from Scarlet puppets in Secret Service, I still stick by Scarlet as my favorite Anderson show. Even UFO and Space 1999 never really worked for me. When I finally got to see the CGI NEW CAPTAIN SCARLET on bootleg DVDs, I was overjoyed, since it kept the violence, expanded the working of Spectrum AND let the characters have realistic hand to hand fights and a real personality each. Hell, it even let Black, Scarlet, and Destiny have a three way romantic situation that was kind of screwed up by having Black killed ( and this time, he actually got an on screen graveyard burial, something the original didn't manage, which made his return even creepier ), but return with an undiluted hard on for Destiny. Poor Destiny had to deal with Scarlet, a reconstruction of a dead man, and Black, a terrorist who happily killed anyone his alien masters told him to...and they both wanted her.

I used to shine our torch on my bedroom wall when I was a kid, and pretend I was a Mysteron. As you do.

I swear a modern, serious reboot of this show that leans into the adult concepts could work.

Brilliant! Loved it! Watched it with My Dad, He loved it to! Happy Times! RIP Dad x

Captain Scarlet was always my favourite show and is still very watchable today. I have a feeling that the theme song/outro were on a 7 inch picture sleeve single from back in the day. I had a bunch of them covering all the Anderson/Century 21 series or at least as far as my Swiss cheese (full of holes) memory serves! 😁

I grew up in the sixties in Australia and was 8 when Thunderbirds came out. I had a subscription of TV-21 comic each week that was dated a hundred years in the future and Captain Scarlet came to after school TV in color and was in TV-21 comics also, with great original stories beautifully done. I was eldest of six kids, and we had all the Dinky toys of Captain Scarlet vehicles, and I built three Airfix angels and a cardboard cloud base. We had a large garden in the backyard with a pond, and spent many many fun hours play acting it all amongst us all with the toys in the garden and pond.

“Oh my god, they’ve killed Captain Scarlet!” 😂

We had a teacher called Cloudbase. We called him that because he was 7 feet tall. He drove a Mini. This is true. 50 years ago now. Gerry Anderson was a true icon for people my age. Thank God our memories of him are intact, unlike those of Jimmy Savile and Rolf.

Thanks for a great video with that brilliant Australian humour. I'm 64 now so I guess having grown up in the 60s makes me somewhat blood thirsty as I liked Captain Scarlet more than Thunderbirds just for it's darkness. Also I thought the Angle Interceptors were fantastic, the only Gerry Anderson series to top Captain Scarlet was UFO.

I think it was a great kids show. Loved it when I was a kid even more than Thunderbirds. Captain Black was as sinister as Hell. Anyone got a favourite creepy Captain Black scene?

14:06 Trivia: The term "uncanny valley" comes from a 1978 translation of the Japanese term "bukimi no tani gensho" which referred specifically to the way a robot that looks very human-like would cross the line into appearing eerie and unsettling. It was coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori, who's perhaps best known for originating and promoting the idea of holding robot-building competitions starting in 1988. Fans of BattleBots and the like might recognize him as the grandfather of the entire sport. So you're right, the term didn't exist in 1967-68 - but it wasn't far off. :)

All these years later and that ginger Angel is STILL a smoke-show!

I much preferred Captain Scarlet to Thunderbirds, mainly because it was more serious than Thunderbirds (and had better puppetry too). I always thought Thunderbirds was too "goofy", both in the way the characters behaved and how the puppets looked. Captain Scarlet, UFO and Space 1999 season 1 were my favourite Gerry Anderson shows, mainly because of their dark overtones and they would "lose" as often as they "won" in the episodes.

2:15 - in my head, that Mysteron voice ALWAYS says "This is the voice of the Mysterons. We KNOW you can hear us, Earthmen. Oh BUGGER - what's the point of it all, Earthmen? I'm SO depressed". GREAT!

I watched this show in the 1960s??? Must have, the short sting version of the theme was a very early earworm! Seeing it here in the USA as a child, "Captain Scarlet (Captain Scarlet) Ba-ba-ba-bum ba-da-da-da-dum" stayed with me all these decades. Huh. Well, on to the mystery of how I'd somehow heard of Clutch Cargo...

A couple of (hopefully) interesting facts: Colonel White was also the voice of the Mysterons. The SPV cars that Spectrum uses were originally designed to be driven by occupants that sat facing backwards as this was thought to be safer in the event of a crash, the driver using cameras to see forwards. This was intended to work as a bit of futuristic forward thinking by the show creator but in practice it seriously screwed up how scenes looked when editing together the shots of the characters in the cars and the external shots of the cars being driven. A shot of the interior of an SPV would show the driver sat facing backwards e.g. facing towards the left of the viewer's TV screen while an exterior shot of the same SPV driving along the road would have it moving from left to right. While this was correct in line with the rear-facing driving seats, it looked very odd to the viewer. This situation was very much worsened when an SPV was in pursuit of another vehicle the occupants of which are facing the usual direction i.e. the same direction that their car is travelling and the shots of those occupants are being intercut shots of the occupants of the SPV. It quickly became very confusing as to who was chasing whom! This led to the screenwriters having to insert lines of dialogue into the show at every suitable opportunity to remind the audience of the rear-facing driving position e.g. an SPV would pull into a petrol station for fuel and an attendant would remark in surprise at the fact that the Spectrum guys are facing backwards.

According to Ed Bishop, the voice of a Captain Blue, although the actors knew Captain Scarlet would come back every episode, none of the other actors were told if their characters were going to live or not, so when new scripts came in, the actors would scan them before reading to see if they'd be back next week.

The threads gave it its charm.

Aah the 60s! What jolly futurism!

When I was 8 or 9, I was visiting my grandparents and brought one of my Captain Scarlet VHS tapes with me. In the middle of a violent part of an episode (Renegade Rocket), my late grandfather, back then in his mid-80s (he passed away in 2003 or 2004) turned to me in a serious tone - "You enjoy this violence do you? Hmm? You like this killing, this warfare? War is awful!" Bare in mind he had fought in WWII and probably saw on-screen conflict rather negatively. Captain Scarlet was my favourite out of the Gerry Anderson productions, followed by Thunderbirds and then Stingray.

Scarlet kept really quiet about the '8 times yearly salary payment on death in service' clause in his terms and conditions.

I always thought Cpt Scarlet looked like a young Elvis Presley;

Wow! Forgot all about this show. Loved it as a kid in the U.S. on channel 17 WPHL, Philadelphia at 4:30 each afternoon.

As a little boy you sometimes feel like you are indestructible but know you aren't. Captain Scarlet really was indestructible! Who didn't want to be Captain Scarlet?

I got hooked on this show,because,of the theme of the show,and,because of the character’s in the show.I missed this as a child in the 1960”s,so,this was a treat for me to watch with the family at Christmas of 2009!And,those special effect’s by Derek Medding’s!As usuale,wonderful!

Captain Scarlett and The Mysterious sounds like a British Invasion Band name...

In the U.S. only ‘Thunderbirds’ were shown and even then not everywhere. In the early ‘90s the Sci Fi Channel (as it was initially spelled) played a lot of old science fiction, horror and fantasy shows and films. They showed only maybe two of the Supermarionation shows that I can recall… ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘Stingray’. It wasn’t until Amazon Prime video launched that one could see all of the shows though. I found them all fascinating in their own special way. Honestly I just liked the esthetics of the shows.

1) Thunderbirds, 2) Stingray, 3) Captain Scarlet.

He was voiced by actor Francis Mathews

I remember this show from the 'Captain Cosmic' afternoon show on SF Station Channel 2. It showed Star Blazers, Ultraman, Infaman, and Captain Scarlett!

I choked on my drink at the apt description of the Mysterons' voice. xD

Oh my! “Like all marionette heroes, he’s well hung … but that’s no help.” 🤣😂🤪

please do Thunderbirds or Stingray too!

Aware that, as we are now wearing well into the 2020s, the era of 'Thunderbirds'/'Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons' (2020s - 2060s) is upon us as I write I've been dabbling in Anderson World on and off over this past year or so, so thanks for this review, contrasting those two series.

“Captain Splat” is hilarious!

Robert Mitchum also starred in this series, 06:24.

I own the Captain Scarlet box set on DVD - picked it up for a song, some ten years ago. I was always more intrigued by the vehicles than the principal character - & as a child born in the early Sixties, noticed Mattews' take on Cary Grant. I kinda liked the notion of an indestructible agent, tho' never liked Capt. Blue - thought he was as the proverbial spare at a wedding, but hey, each to their own. I did prefer this series over Thunderbirds, but both clearly had merit for excitement & adventure. The Anderson's served we kids well in our childhood - the crap that is produced today will not have the same long-lasting reminiscences that we were afforded. Great, unconventional take on a classic run...

Captain scarlets voice is deep in my mind

1:19 Great Scott. It's Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds The Original Series. Thunderbirds Are GO. F.A.B Virgil. Thanks A Lot Mate. X

Captain Scarlet is my favourite show.

I remember one episode where--gasp!--Captain Scarlet REALLY died and Spectrum was being destroyed. Ha but not really, the whole thing turned out to be one of the angel's dreams.

Captain Scarlets voice was modelled on Cary Grant

OMG......kkkkkkk.....so many jokes and puns in so little time. I loved this series, but unfortunatly only a few episodes were shown here in Brasil on the 70's. Thank's God we now have internet and youtube. Greetings from Brasil

Really well done all these animation puppet tv series

5:20 - Well that’s hardly surprising that he ‘suspiciously sounds like Cary Grant’; Scarlet’s voice was brought to life by Francis Mathews apparently doing an impression of Cary Grant

Great video, thanks. I grew up with the Anderson’s productions starting with Fireball XL5 and ending with Space 1999. While the latter was far and away my favourite, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds. I don’t find the good captain has aged as well as Thunderbirds though.

I really love your video reviews. I've been binging them all week. This one is especially funny and well done. If Captain Scarlet is blown to bits, which part comes back to life? Do the pieces need to coalesce?

I really enjoyed going down memory lane with this as a kid my dad was stationed in London 1965 first time I saw the the and and then we came back stateside and I kind of forgot all about until in the late sixties early seventies they started broadcasting the Thunderbirds by this time I was in my teens and like I told my friends and my cousin's about the and then we would like ditch school go home and watch the Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet whichever one was on and to help us alone we will smoke a little pot LOL I had a really good time watching but I've always enjoyed the Thunderbirds Captain Scarlett there was another show that was pretty good but I can't remember the name

Captain Scarlett was pre Kenny of SouthPark, or better yet he was the Redshirt of Star Trek.

This is utterly fascinating! Where the heck was this on Saturday mornings in the 70's? I feel my childhood was diminished by stupid American TV producers that wouldn't pick up the show. Egad.

All I remember was that each episode ended with an image montage of what looked like a much more exciting show.

I always loved all thing Gerry Anderson, with Captain Scarlet my all time favourite, 😎👍👍

I once visited the thunderbird studio at weta. Interesting stuff if a little weird.

I know someone who used to fancy Captain Scarlet.

0:17 Captain Scarlet From Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons The Original Series In 1967 Thinks He's Looks Like James Bond 007 From Ian Fleming's Dr No And The Spy Who Loved Me In 1962 And 1977. Spectrum Is Green. My Name Is Bond. James Bond. Thanks Mate. X

As you state here, in the 70s and 80s THUNDERBIRDS was the only puppet series channel 9 (Australia) were willing to replay - and it drove me around the bend! If 9 were so willing to replay THUNDERBIRDS every year and every month - why not give us some variety and add Scarlet or Stingray into the mix???? Finally, like you, I found them on VHS in the 90s but by then I was aged in my 20s or 30s and a little old for them. Bloody channel 9!

The artwork at the end of the show could have been used in a new version of the board game Cluedo. "I believe it was Captain Blue in the Refuse Compactor with the Spikey Wall Crush-o-tron. (tm). Wrong! it was Rhapsody Angel in the Pilot's Ready Room with the Cyanide Lipstick!

Fantastic series

Mysterons sound like...... Brilliant!

Marionettes Thunderbirds, i loved that one.

"Hanging had been abolished in the UK, but this is Supermarionation. They all hang." 🤣🤣👍

Thanks for posting. Suggest uploading complete series of both original and CGI series please

I liked the reboot. Same vibes as the original complete with horribly gratuitous death scenes for a kids show, but Lt. Green is a lot more likable and the explanation of how Scarlet turned good while keeping his abilities was nice seeing how they didn't even attempt it in the original.

Bloody spell check Misteron

fab!

Spectrum . . . Makes me think of M.A.S.K.’s computer. The round table and team around it makes me think it could be more than chance.

This is exactly how I perceive human beings.

It wasn't the first manned trip to Mars - that was in Thunderbirds are Go

Excellent stuff. Have subscrived. Please please please do Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90 and UFO. Oh and 1860's Batman!!!

The design looked far more futuristic than that in Star Trek, which was made at the same time

Captain Scarlet, a life insurance nightmare lol...

Angel this and Angel that no wonder spice girls were so successful as they were the path was already paved by this show.

Stingray used to air here in the US.

"Like all marionette heroes, he was well-hung." Bravo. Bravo.

There was an actor called 'Ben Browder' who played John Crichton in Farscape & Cameron Mitchell in Star Gate, who would have been perfect to play Captain Scarlet if it were ever made into a movie.

I don't think I've ever seen this, seen plenty of Thunderbird's and read alot of Eagle comics with Dan Dare. How has this come to pass?

you get my Sub for one thing you said . Mysterons. have the power of UNDO. I am in stiches