THE big news this month is the tremendous success which we are having with our Supercar series in overseas sales.

The programme started on Station WPIX in New York in January and achieved a rating of 15.6 — much higher than any other show on the air at the same time. The C.B.S. show in opposition had a rating of 9.6; N.B.C was 3.7.

So far, our U.S. sales have grossed 600,000 dollars [about $6.3m in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] and we have just completed another regional sale which will soon bring Supercar’s earnings into the 1,000,000 dollar [$10.5m] bracket.

The series is also being shown in such countries as Canada, Australia, Italy, Portugal and Japan.

This is the first British-made puppet series to crash the world market in this way. The original idea was put to us by a team of four film technicians — Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Reg Hill and John Read.

They showed us — in book form — a lay-out for the show with artists’ drawings of Mike Mercury, Supercar and the rest of the characters. Lew Grade was enthusiastic from the start — and we agreed to put up the money.

The series is produced by Gerry Anderson, 32 — his wife Sylvia is script editor and provides the voice of Jimmy and all the female parts. Actors and actresses speak for the rest of the puppets.

Art director Reg Hill, who designed Supercar itself, is in charge of all the sets and John Read is the chief cameraman.

A WEEK TO FILM

Each Supercar episode takes a week to film, followed by three months editing. A crew of 60 film technicians work on the programme and nine puppeteers under the direction of Christine Glanville and Mary Turner.

Making these half-hour Supercar films is a most involved and complex business — much more elaborate than any previous puppet series.

The Slough studios, where they are filmed, uses overhead gantries; three dimensional sets; revolving stages; back projection and special electronic equipment to enable the puppets to talk.

Two models of Supercar are used — one is seven feet long and the other, for trick flying shots, is 18 inches. Mike Mercury himself is 22 inches high.

Thirty-nine episodes have been filmed so far and we will soon be starting on a new series.

The success of Supercar as a TV series has, in fact, been as swift as one of Supercar’s flights on the screen. Fast going indeed.

The post Supercar’s big success – the inside story… appeared first on THIS IS ATV NETWORK from Transdiffusion.

Although the series was intended to cater for the younger viewer, the age groups of those who follow the adventures of Steve Zodiac, Venus and company range from 5 to 50 — and many more beyond.

Fireball XL 5 is a spaceship, the biggest of its type and over 300 feet in length. It is rocket-propelled. It can be away from its base for months at a time. Completely self-contained, it has living quarters for all its crew, with an ultra-modernistic lounge, observation window, a laboratory for research and an “astrascope”, which enables its crew to see in any conditions. It has a nose cone (“Fireball Junior”) which detaches itself from the main part of the spaceship and can make a landing while the spaceship continues in orbit.

Part of the equipment is a set of “jetmobiles”, the motor-cycles of the future, which can travel across any type of terrain, either on land or air-cushioned a few feet higher. They enable their riders to explore any of the planets being visited.

Fireball XL 5 is part of the World Space Patrol fleet. Each spaceship in the patrol controls a different area in outer space. The patrol’s base is Space City, on an island in the Pacific, a purely scientific establishment with a revolving skyscraper, enormous control-tower, laboratories and equipment for propelling the ships into space. Communication can be maintained between base and the spaceships patrolling outer space.

The new puppet characters which come to the TV screen in “Fireball XL 5″ are, like their popular predecessors in “Supercar”, electronically operated. Their heads are made of fibre glass and contain solenoid cells which automatically control their lip movements as they react to the vocal pitches of the human voices speaking the words. The voices are pre-recorded and played back from the control-room as the action is filmed, each wired to the respective puppet players.

The star of the stories is Steve Zodiac, blond, handsome, and in charge of Fireball XL 5. As he patrols a sector of the universe beyond the solar system, he has with him Professor Matthew Matic, a navigation mathematics genius, who has his own navigation bay in the spaceship. Also on board the spaceship is an attractive blonde, Venus, a doctor of space medicine, with her own laboratory in the craft. She possesses a fascinating Continental accent, and accompanies Steve Zodiac on his explorations and adventures.

Another of the regular characters is Robert the Robot, a transparent mechanical man and automatic pilot in the spaceship. He can walk — controlled by sound-waves. He has one particular eccentricity. If his orders are changed or anything goes wrong, he literally gets steamed up. The steam is set off electronically from his head!

Among the many other characters who come into the stories from episode to episode is a lovable animal called a “lazoon”, which comes from another planet.

Because of the out-of-this-world techniques needed for the series, the Andersons and their talented crew created a Special Effects studio, which was added to the existing studio and manned by a skilled team of experts in this aspect of film-making. This studio-within-a-studio is complete in every detail and proved capable of providing all the unique scenes required for the first-ever puppet series dealing with life in outer space in a hundred years’ time.

Space City was built in this studio, enabling close-ups to be shot of the spaceships being fired from their rocket bases and returning safely to land. The model-makers also created numerous planets, with their unusual surfaces shown in minutest detail.

Every type of special-effects procedure is carried out, and the “backroom” boys do a truly wonderful job of creating realistic explosions and planet atmospheres.

The stories in “Fireball XL 5” are thrill-packed. There have never been such unusual adventures on the TV screen. And each one is different. As the spaceship speeds through outer space on its normal patrol, anything may happen. It may run into unexpected trouble, or an urgent message may be flashed to it from base. Steve Zodiac never knows what may be in store for him. He has to intercept a missile which has been fired from an enemy planet and is powerful enough to blow up the whole earth. He explores mysterious underground caverns on a planet and meets weird Green Men who take him prisoner and also capture Venus. There is excitement when a space fuel tanker is being taken to other planets and space pirates come into action. Steve also has adventure in roughing up spies in space, and there was even an episode in which he met a space circus, complete with gipsies and caravans.

There is nothing horrific in the series. The thrills and adventures are achieved without resorting to bloodshed. When it is necessary, for instance, to overcome the occupiers of a planet, a ray gun is fired at them, but instead of this being a lethal weapon it fires coma rays which reduce the enemy to temporary unconsciousness. It has been the thinking of the planners of the programmes not to present Fireball XL 5 as a war machine, but rather as a vehicle used to patrol outer space and keep the peace.

The post Fireball XL5 appeared first on THIS IS ATV NETWORK from Transdiffusion.