It is an inevitable fact of the universe that every kid who watches Thunderbirds is seized by an overwhelming desire to possess replicas of the five Thunderbirds and pod vehicles.
Thunderbirds is about an organisation called International Rescue and their efforts to save people from disasters with a fleet of ingenious machines. The story is set in the near future from a 1960s perspective, where everything has a charming retrofuturistic aesthetic. There are five flagship machines—the Thunderbirds—plus a fleet of smaller machines that Thunderbird 2 carries in its cargo pods.
Thunderbirds famously uses puppets and miniatures instead of CGI, drawn animation, or real people. Puppets are doubtlessly limited in what they can do, yet their masterful design and operation make them remarkably expressive. The limitations of the puppets also may have prevented Thunderbirds from falling to the temptation of mindless violent action scenes that other sci fi shows inevitably do. Instead, the show focuses heavily on the vehicles and dialogue.
The dialogue is efficient and exposition-heavy in the style of an Isaac Asimov novel. There are frequent cuts to the survivors and their increasingly desperate struggles, but also some comedy to lighten the mood and endear us to the characters. The International Rescue team are relentlessly heroic—never doubting for a second their will to rescue people. The unfolding of disasters and the logistics of the rescue operations are depicted in enthralling detail.
Like the puppets, the vehicles and sets are somewhat limited in what they can do. The magic of Thunderbirds’ vehicles and sets comes not from their technical capabilities but from how fricking cool and believable they are.
Using clever cinematic trickery, Thunderbirds brings these miniature vehicles to life. They blast off with torrents of smoke, whine and hum with powerful engines, growl through rubble and snow drifts, and they are always able to get the job done—even if they get burnt, banged up, or exploded in the process. These are not the sleek, spotless vehicles of so many modern sci-fi shows; these are grimy, heavily used workhorses scarred by many daring rescue operations.
The miniature reality of Thunderbirds’ set pieces allows us to see explosions, collapsing structures, floods, fires, landslides, crashes, and more in up-close detail. The Thunderbirds’ iconic effects are often produced by shooting the scenes at high framerates and slowing the footage down to reveal in intricate detail the blossoming of explosions, the billowing of smoke, and the shimmer of ocean water.
The result is mesmerising. After you’ve watched an episode of Thunderbirds, life-sized effects are just not the same. They lack a certain beauty that only Thunderbirds’ effects in miniature can achieve.
Time may have dated some of the social aspects of the show—the casual sexism and racial stereotyping are eyeroll-inducing—but this is a minor point in a show that otherwise holds up well in terms of storytelling, direction, and special effects.
It is hard to imagine a modern marionette and miniatures production outperforming this 50-something-year-old show. Only Team America outdoes Thunderbirds in terms of production quality and technical sophistication—but that movie treats the concept of puppets and miniatures as inherently comical.
Would a modern production dare make a serious, unironic show with puppets and miniatures as Thunderbirds did? I doubt it. Thunderbirds and AP Films’ other shows are special in a historical sense. We’re likely never going to see anything like them ever again.