Supermarionation: the phrase alone is enough to send audiences into paroxysms of... uh, well, confusion.
A stop-motion animation technique involving intricately controlled but endearingly inexpressive puppets, Supermarionation was made famous by British producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for their prize television show Thunderbirds. It was just about the coolest animation process going in the ’60s, but today the Andersons’ gadget-filled adventures look as kitschy as an old Rankin-Bass cartoon. (Anyone who’s seen Team America: World Police will find it impossible to watch vintage Supermarionation without smirking.)
Thunderbirds Are GO! (the program’s catchphrase) is a full-length spinoff of the TV show, which ran from 1966 to 1968. Like the series, it focuses on the International Rescue team, and their collection of really neat air and spacecrafts, Thunderbirds 1–4. The movie spends a disproportionate amount of time watching those futuristic planes and rockets taking off and landing, buzzing around in the air, and simply being assembled. What makes the film—what saves it, if your taste swings that way—is the unapologetically surreal plotting, which lurches forward as though huge chunks of the film had been excised at random once it reached the 90-minute mark.
It unspools like a particularly weird Gumby cartoon—things happen, but they don’t link together in a way that makes any logical sense. The International Rescue team—Jeff Tracy and his sons Scott, Virgil, Alan, Jermaine, and Tito... er, sorry, Gordon—are summoned to watch over the launch of the first manned space mission to Mars, a momentous occasion that has been sabotaged once already. With the assistance of English agent Penelope (and her faithful manservant Parker), they lay a trap to discover who is infiltrating the Mars crew.
Done and done. Do we then get a bit more info on the culprits involved in these spaceship-scuttling schemes? Nope. Once the astronauts make it to the Red Planet, it again looks as though a plot point may be developing with the discovery of Martian natives who are (and please imagine this next phrase delivered in stentorian tones) “life as we do not know it.” But alas, it is not to be—just some scary, fireball-breathing rock snakes going about their business. Nothing to see here, folks—keep moving.
Normally I try to avoid revealing plot twists, but in this case plot is beside the point. What really matters are the little filler segments that either drone on endlessly (the aforementioned rocket launches and landings, cars that turn into boats à la James Bond’s Aston-Martin) or the bewildering cinematic cul de sacs—like the 15-minute or so dream sequence involving Alan, Penelope, and the Swinging Star nightclub that turns into a marionette music video for Cliff Richard and The Shadows.
Incompetence and weirdness are normally not the ingredients of good entertainment—well, unless you’re Ed Wood—but in Thunderbirds Are GO! they may actually be the film’s saving grace.
Metro Cinema will be showing Thunderbirds Are GO! with Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film (hhhjk), a 14-minute animated mashup of old Hollywood films that uses a photocopier, of all things, as the primary artistic anvil on which its images are forged. It apparently took years to film, and comes across as the visual equivalent of a DJ Spooky track—a breakneck overview of classic films filtered through a hallucinatory train chase and rescue.
