Thunderbirds Are ... Huh??

For whatever obscure reasons, the mid-60's puppet-action TV show Thunderbirds completely passed me by, but when I saw that the full-length movie Thunderbirds Are Go, from 1966, was going to be on Turner Classic Movies, I felt compelled to watch it. Mother of God, I may never be the same. Well, I will be; I exaggerate (so unlike me). But it's still a mighty strange viewing experience. On Facebook, I likened it to watching Teletubbies while high, but actually, watching Teletubbies anytime after dark didn't require any other stimulant to achieve a state of altered consciousness, and it's the same with this movie.

The plot is so not crucial to enjoying the movie, but in a nutshell, a planned flight to Mars is scotched by sabotage, so the Thunderbirds (a bunch of guys, mostly brothers I think, led by their father) who style themselves as an "International Rescue" squad, are hired two years later to make sure the next attempt is successful. The square-jawed puppets are assisted by the drag-queenish Lady Penelope, riding about in her pink Rolls-Royce which doubles as a hydroplane. There's a crazy-ass dream sequence you must see to believe in which the blond sissy-boy brother Alan (pictured; my partner kept singing the "Misfit" song from Rudolph whenever he was on) imagines accompanying Lady Penelope to an outer-space discotheque, where a puppet Cliff Richard sings while cotton candy-colored mist swirls around.

The puppets are totally non-emotive, though their lips quiver sometimes, and we never see a puppet walk--they either locomote off-camera or are scooted around by bizarre banks of moving furniture. Even weirder, once in a while, a puppet will reach down to a desk to grab something and we get a cut to a pair of real human hands doing the grabbing. Long stretches go by where absolutely nothing happens except the characters talk to (or at) each other in fake scientific lingo.

Then suddenly, there are long stretches of rockets getting ready to be launched or things exploding, and this is where the movie is the most fun; the sets are clearly miniatures, but they are very well executed. I always get a frisson of delight at these kinds of sets because they look like something I could have built in my rec room when I was 10 (I was always building miniature sets for sf movies or for elaborate plays in my play area--building is the wrong word, more like assembling out of found objects).

Don and I had fun with some of the dialogue. At one point, a saboteur wearing a mask is approached by a Thunderbird guy who exclaims, "There's something wrong with your FACE!!" as he rips the mask off. They also have a little sign-off exclamation, "F-A-B!" which, according to the Internet tubes, means either "First And Best," "Full Acknowledgment of Broadcast," or "Fully Advised and Briefed." (I like the last one, if "briefed" refers to the state of their undergarments.) Or maybe it's just a way for a bunch of (mostly) straight puppetmen to shriek, "Fabulous! without compromising their masculinity. I could see this becoming a cult favorite of mine, if I ever get tired of John Waters movies or bad Bela Lugosi flicks.