@@andreafox7267 me too! The whole process (ludicrously overcomplicated, now we look back on it!) just built to a superb climax, helped by Barry Gray's utterly brilliant music, and with it the excitement. God, it's giving me such a nostalgia rush. I want to be 12 again.
Exactly so. The entire Thunderbirds series held top the music emphasising the story at various stages. in simple terms.. themes of hope, expectation, issues, danger, catastrophe, resilience, and rescue Watched them when first aired, and even today themes like 'The Crablogger" still echo in memory ... unforgetable
Those were the days. When kids weren't treated like morons and their entertainment was like watching a weekly action packed feature film. The model work here is just great. I love the subtlety of the undercarriage suspenion visibly lowering as it takes the weight of the wings. As for the music? Awesome.
That's what this is to you? I would argue that your nostalgia is blinding you to just how childish this show actually is. It's deliberately aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator for a male 4-12 (?) audience. Secret passages, transforming everything, cool uniforms, rockets, a space station, fast vehicles, team of various archetypal brothers on the young side doing hero work, only minor family bickering, each brother happens to be an expert in his field, repetitive suspense sequences, 1 knock-out female ally to occasionally show up, otherwise very limited female presence in their HQ, minimal parental supervision, and cliched villains with poorly defined motives. Did I miss anything? I think the robot, space station descent pod, and stealth recon jet were only in the reboot. The show had each brother go through a lengthy suit-up and boarding sequence every episode where they deployed. That's designed to pad run time with lazy stock footage. But a child will love it if the music tells them to be excited. And then they get the rocket countdown and launch payoff. The secret doors on a private island to board the various craft are ludicrous and unnecessary. One guy pulls down a couple of wall lights that become a rollercoaster harness just for the wall to turn around. Another guy leans on a painting that flips up to send him head first down a slide. The couch turns out to be 2 secret rail cars. Campy AF if you ask me. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the hell out of the old reruns as a kid, but I just grew out of it. The reboot certainly took full advantage of new tech like color, HD, CG, etc. But I couldn't watch the silly recurring suit up and boarding sequence. Every. Single. Bloody. Episode.
@@imofage3947 Yet another poor person that feels they need to impose their present day perceptions, ECT. on classical items rather than just sit back and enjoy them.
Here Here. This sort of thing needs to be said about a lot of 1960s shows looked back on through rose tinted lenses, especially when the same people then complain about modern telly being patronising and formulaic. There was plenty of very good, objectively intelligent telly made in the 1960s and 70s. Fawlty Towers, The Prisoner, Sandbaggers, Play For Today, Beasts, but that wasn’t the norm just as it isn’t today.
@@imofage3947 The slides and chutes and other Rube Goldberg devices for getting the puppet characters into their vehicles were done for a reason. As anyone who's worked with puppets can tell you, it's next to impossible to make marionettes walk believably. By the time they produced Thunderbirds, the Andersons decided it was best not to show the puppets walking at all -- except for the occasional "cheat shot" of a puppet seen from the hips up, being "walked" on a stick held by a puppeteer just below the frame. And sure, it was a show for kids. But I can still enjoy Thunderbirds today at the age of 70, because I was just the right age when I got hooked on it.
The movie is sometimes criticised for this sequence being overly long - but the critics don;t understand just how enthralling it was to an audience who were simply unused to special effects like it. Kind of like to modern eyes, the sequence of flying to the Moon is 2001 can seem a bit tedious and drawn out. In the 1960's it just wasn't.
これほど無駄にカッコいい発進シーケンスはない．メカ、動き、背景、アングル、すべて完璧．さすがの劇場版．最後の仕上げは音楽．自分にとってバリー・グレイはジョン・ウィリアムズを超える劇伴作曲家．ほんとに全てが素晴らしい． ウルトラホーク1号はゼロエックスよりやや遅れて登場．時期も構成もほとんど同じ．パクリではないと思っている．どちらも大好き． Thanks for Cumbrian's uploading. Your work is excellent. The highest quality for the scene.Barry Gray is my best composer so that I'm very happy.
see, this scene right here is damn good filmmaking, this scene goes on for 7 bloody minutes! yet even as a kid when I had the attention span of a goldfish, this scene always entranced me because the genuinely great music and just the satisfaction of seeing a spacecraft deadass make itself right before our very eyes!
There must be at least a million sound engineering solutions that would’ve required less effort to get this ship off the ground. But, by God! This is AWESOME! I remember seeing this movie as a kid - still totally brilliant! Thank you Gerry! You couldn’t have done it any other way…
Very true. The first sequence, they drop the front wall and then retract the entire building, when a set of doors would achieve the same practical effect. But the whole process it just so ridiculously over-the-top that it becomes amazing.
This is my childhood. An outrageously triumphant time for British entertainment. Thunderbirds had the largest merchandising campaign of any show or film until Star Wars came out. It is a story of a team of brilliant people backed by a TV network who went on to produce some of the greatest" childrens" TV ever. Star Trek TOS and Battlestar Galactica (original)were great shows but they cannot compete with the effects you are seeing here.
Yes it is the hanger that's moving - look at the clouds. This is just so awesome. I play it time and time again and never get tired of it, along with Ivor Novello and Sigmund Romberg. The oldies are the best. And remember the crash of the Enterprise and Data crying after he found his cat? I cried too. I really believe if there was more stuff like this society would be a HAPPIER place. Love to everybody!
This movie was very much part of the 1960s Zeitgeist... That wide eyed youthful optimism of a fantastic decade. Barry Gray was actually retired when Sylvia Anderson happened upon him. Barry then came up with genius music scores that put him right up there with Vaughan-Williams, Holst, Elgar, Bantock, Britten, Coates,Walton....need I go on? Sylvia Anderson said that his proudest moment was at the premiere when, at the movie's final scene, the band of the Royal Marines marched playing the Thunderbirds Theme.
@The Black Helicopter Revue - I totally agree with you that Barry Gray should take his rightful place alongside all of those famous English composers you have listed. You are absolutely right about that.
I was there as a teenager and yes, i shared that optimism of a bright technological future, semiconductors were still new kids on the block but were already making a huge impact in portable entertainment, in the actual soundtrack mention is made of the Zero-x flight computers, the producers were right on the money there with that prediction, great shame today's reality we looked forward to isn't as nice as that optimistic sixties future world.
When a generation thought they could do anything - Gerry and his team brought so much genuine pleasure to millions with his world of positivity and hope !
Rossticus Well, this wonderful film was made 50 years ago in another era -- for a generation of children who didn't need to see a change of scene every two seconds. The pacing was Perfect - and we just enjoyed the show. But today, we can just sit back and marvel at the sheer artistry and excellence of it all. Brilliance.
Exactly what I love and miss about both! Everything these days is too rushed in comparison, you're not given a chance to fall in love with the ship any more.
As usual the music combined with the models and special effects show without any doubt what a genius Gerry ,Sylvia and all the team were. The shows may be 40,50,60 years old but they still stand up to the test of time . What a legacy of unforgettable television.
Wow just discovered this, Saw it at the cinema, funny when the future is fifty years ago!. Barry Gray - fantastic blend of military, orchestral and pop in his music. Hearing this now creates feelings of excitement and wonder that I forgot I once had.
This is absolutely awesome. For anyone wondering though, the sequence is edited. There are other videos on RU-vid of the actual intro from the film, which includes all the wonderful announcements of "This... is Assembly Control!". The music, however, is best heard in this video in its full form. A representation of humanity's heroic side is somehow contained within it! :)
One of my earliest memories - 'going to the pictures', in 1966, aged three and a bit, with my mum and my gran. I do remember not liking the 'Rock Snakes'. I have seen it at the cinema since - and that is the only way to really appreciate everything about it, and how much money, time, and love was poured into it. Even though it's marionettes and models, the suspension of disbelief is total. It's real. Odd to say that, but it is. Set design, sound fx, and real pyro effects, topped off with superb voice acting, writing, and Barry Gray's tremendous score, using, I believe, a 60 piece orchestra, and his own electronic instruments - a primitive synthesizer called an Ondes Martinot, to create eerie tonalités akın to avant garde 'musique concrète'- The end theme of UFO, for example. And this was made for children. And it's perfect.
I see a lot of comments about just how impractical this would be in the real world, and one thing I'd like to remind those who say that is that this *is* the real world. This was all filmed with models, they didn't have CGI back then. Is it still impractical? Absolutely. But that just gives you even more to appreciate about the model work. Despite being a "kids" movie, the visual effects are superior to almost everything we produce in cinema today.
Five-and-a-half minutes of a spacecraft assembling itself to the strains of Barry Gray's stately, quasi-martial music. Doesn't make a lick of sense engineering-wise, but it's magnificent!
Better edit here than in the film for this sequence; wish this sequence wasn't so broken up in the film. By the time 2001 A Space Oddysey had come out, film makers were more secure to have an entire sequence like this with just music behind it. Barry Gray's approach here prefigures Jerry Goldsmith's approach in "The Enterprise" piece for Star Trek TMP, both pieces musically espousing the wonder and grandness of amazing spaceships & mankind's t echnological achievements.
Also Brian Johncock who worked on the visual effects for Thunderbirds changed his name to Brian Johnson and won an Oscar for The Empire Strikes Back. Derek Meddings won an Oscar for Superman (1978) and should have won another for the Bond movie Moonraker.
watched this clip on a 63 inch flat tv, even today it holds up very well and the awesome music by the great barry gray complements the action well, fifty years for the right tv but well worth the wait.
Kids shows now: bluey, cocomelon, all engines go (that awful disgrace of Thomas, that horrible excuse of a paw patrol reboot Kid shows then: Thomas the the tank engine and friends, Bob the builder, fireman Sam l, THIS MASTERPIECE CALLED THUNDERBIRDS
Wouldn't it be fabulous to be a child watching this behind the security fence filming with your mobile, or if you got permission from security to watch from the control tower.
Amazing handwork, everything is model and in real small. Like the cars. The moving technic and no CGI. This old thechnic was also used in star wars , every ship was model build work. That was so awesome with the thunderbirds and the music 😊.
I loved this when I was a youngster but now I watch still in awe of the ideas but think about things a lot more. 0:20 Why move a building that must weigh mega-tons to reveal the body of an airliner that is going to move straight forward? Er?
Really like this, only thing I think would make it better is if the video of the engines firing was sychronised with the beat picking up again (is currently does at 2 in the countdown).
I get the feeling this was supposed to be a four-minute long sequence, Barry Gray wrote the piece, and then had to riff on Thunderbirds stings and leitmotifs for the next three minutes.
I watched these programmes spellbound as a youngster in the 60s, now I'm in my 60s and I still love Thunderbirds. With probably the best theme music ever composed !
If this were a real organization, seeing this video and hearing Barry Gray's epic musical accompaniment would undoubtedly make many people want to enlist.
Una maravilla. Un mundo de futuro, acción y aventura. Gerry y Sylvia Anderson, solo agradecerles por su iniciativa y creatividad igual a su magnífico equipo. 👍👍🇨🇱
As spacecraft reveal and launch scenes go, this is second only to 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and especially impressive considering the smaller budget the British had.
Okay the smaller budget the Andersons had. You’re talking about ‘the British’ as if they’re a fucking third world country with a small film industry. Epic film format was fucking invented there
Makes you realize how important Barry Gray's music was to the overall impact of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation project-saw this film Christmas 1966-knocked me out !
Just perfect, we boomer kids had the best entertainment a generation ever could, looking back at this at an interval of nearly sixty years it's plain that the people who made this put their heart and soul into their work to make it as realistic and credible as possible, much of the technology we take for granted today was brand new then or in development, but they rightly predicted how it would shape tomorrow, and all set to a majestic soundtrack by the great Barry Gray, my total administration for all those talented people who made our childhood fantastic,
Wow, I haven't seen this since it was originally shown, and I had a Zero-X toy as a kid, it was bloody huge... happy memories! Give me this over the re-imagined CGI snooze fest of a show. (Same goes for Captain Scarlet!) 😊👍
I agree with other folks comments, this is a classic piece of cinema, the superb music alongside such brilliant action. I think there must be too many E numbers in food today as kids seem to be too hyperactive to put up with realistic slow action like this. Some guy on the Tube as even edited this part where the ship is assembled and quickened it up, hence ruining it. Criminal.
I really can't understand the reason for this movie being maligned. I mean, those of us that grew up with Gerry Anderson and especially Thunderbirds, appreciate the magnificent model work accompanied by Barry Gray's superb scoring. These movies ( including Thunderbird 6 ) were the pinnacle of Meddings,Trim & co's work and remain an inspiration to this day.
Okay I’m a huge Gerry Anderson fan but this movie does not reflect the greatness of the shows. It has no plot and even the model-work is barely on show with a TWENTY minute dream sequence of a Cliff Richard Jr music video. Thing is the Anderson couple had sole writing credits for the screenplay which really didn’t help this movie because it was dumbed down from the sort of writing you need for a big motion picture and even from the episodes in the show itself which had more of a story and events. They needed a writer like they had for UFO, to give it weight. Again i love the Anderson works but there’s a difference between visuals and writing and you need someone to come in and give this story some prominence and make it interesting enough for a movie rather than just extending a mediocre season 2 episode with padding
And what craft took Captain Black's team to Mars on his fateful Mission, and Captain Scarlet to Mars on his mission to try to make peace with the Mysterons? (and presumably the occupants/supply of the base which was there)? And before even that.. what craft took Stingray to Mars to investigate the under surface ocean? (okay.. that was in TV-21 comic, but still good to recall) ZERO-X !!
The original NASA design for the space shuttle was a two part normal take-off system with the shuttle piggybacked on a huge 'mothership' which would take it up to the upper atmosphere before the shuttle lifted off on its own engines. Penny-pinching political morons cut it back to the vertical lifting rockets. Both shuttles lost were destroyed as a result of that lift off, one by a rubber seal on the solid fuel booster and the second as a result of damage caused to the heat resistant tiles by ice falling off the liquid fuel tanks. The initial design would have saved both those disasters!
The comic series did try to create a single shared universe in which all the shows took place, though it was a bit awkward with all the inconsitencies between them.
I always thought they were parallel universes that happened to evolve the same interplanetary solution (through the principle of convergent engineering). I do know when I bought my son a Zero-X for Christmas (in the mid 2010's!), I was very grateful for the existence of the Captain Scarlet version, as a Thunderbirds-branded variant was either impossible to find on E-bay or so much more expensive as to be ludicrous.
I have this very film on steam video, seeing Zero-X assembled for flight like a 1980,s Transformer Toy, wailing sound of the main ship taxiing out of the hangar amid whirling dust clouds sends the hairs on my back a jangling. Revised sound track is even cooler , a mix of wailing Bristol Olympus Mk 101 turbojets of an Avro Vulcan, and the stirring music banged out by a Royal Marines Band. Bazza got the main ship,s rear undercarriage bogies wrong, each should have twelve tyres on three axles aka Tu 144 Mk1 to handle the extra weight of the combi chemical and atomic drive.
