Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, often referred to as Captain Scarlet, is a 1960s British science-fiction television series produced by the Century 21 Productions company of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, John Read and Reg Hill. First broadcast on ATV Midlands from September 1967[5] to May 1968,[6] it has since been transmitted in more than 40 other countries, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.[7] Characters are presented as marionette puppets alongside scale model sets and special effects in a filming technique that the Andersons termed "Supermarionation". This technology incorporated solenoid motors as a means of synchronising the puppet's lip movements with pre-recorded dialogue.
Set in 2068,[e 1] Captain Scarlet presents the hostilities between Earth and a race of Martians known as the Mysterons. After human astronauts attack their city on Mars, the vengeful Mysterons declare war on Earth,[e 1] initiating a series of reprisals that are countered by Spectrum, a worldwide security organisation. Spectrum boasts the extraordinary abilities of its primary agent, Captain Scarlet. During the events of the pilot episode, Scarlet acquires the Mysteron healing factor of "retro-metabolism" and is thereafter considered to be virtually "indestructible", being able to recover fully from injuries that would normally be fatal.[e 2]
Captain Scarlet, the eighth of ten puppet series that the Andersons produced during the 1950s and 1960s, was preceded by Thunderbirds and followed by Joe 90 and The Secret Service. In terms of visual aesthetic, the series represented a departure from Thunderbirds on account of its use of non-caricatured puppets sculpted in realistic proportions.[8] Re-run a number of times in the UK[7][9][10] and purchased by the BBC in 1993,[9] the 32-episode series has entailed tie-in merchandise since its first appearance, from dolls[11] to original novels[12] and comic strips in the Century 21 Publications children's magazine, TV Century 21.[13]
In comparisons to Thunderbirds and other earlier series, Captain Scarlet is generally considered "darker"[14] in tone and less suited to child audiences due to stronger on-screen violence and themes of extraterrestrial aggression and interplanetary war.[15] The transition in the puppets' design has polarised critical opinion and drawn a mixed response from former production staff,[16][17][18]while the concept of an indestructible protagonist has also been called into question.[19][20] However, the series has been praised for its inclusion of a multinational, multiethnic puppet cast and its depiction of a utopian future Earth.[21][22][23] Having decided to revive the series in the late 1990s,[24] Gerry Anderson supervised the production of a computer-animated reboot, Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet, which was broadcast in the UK in 2005.
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[hide]Plot summary[edit]
In the pilot episode, a team of Zero-X[n 1] astronauts investigate the surface of Mars in 2068 after unidentified radio signals emanating from the planet are detected on Earth.[e 1] The source is discovered to be an extraterrestrial base, which is attacked and destroyed when the explorers mistake a harmless sensor device for a weapon.[e 1] The inhabitants of the settlement, the Mysterons, are sentient computers that form a collective consciousness.[25] They are the remnants of the original Mysteron race, extraterrestrial life forms that originated in a galaxy other than the Milky Way and maintained their colony on Mars for 3,500 years before abandoning the planet at the turn of the 20th century.[25] Possessing partial control over matter, the Mysteron computers draw on their power of "reversing matter" to rebuild the complex before vowing revenge for the unwarranted aggression,[e 1] which Captain Black is commonly held to have committed in violation of orders from his own superiors.
Reversing matter, also described as "retro-metabolism",[e 2] allows the Mysterons to re-create the likeness of a person or object in the form of a facsimile that is under their control. This ability is used to conduct a "war of nerves" against Earth, in which the Mysterons issue threats against specific targets (from world leaders and military installations to whole cities and continents) and then destroy and reconstruct whatever instruments are required (whether human or object) to execute their plans. The presence of the Mysterons is indicated by two circles of green light (the "Mysteron rings") that trail across scenes of destruction and reconstruction. Although the Mysterons are able to manipulate events from Mars, their actions on Earth are usually performed by their replicated intermediaries.
The primary agent of the Mysterons, Zero-X mission leader Captain Black, is (apparently) killed and reconstructed during the encounter on Mars.[n 2][25][26] Before the events of the pilot episode, Captain Black held a senior officer rank in Spectrum, an international security organisation inaugurated in 2067[e 3] that mobilises all its personnel, vehicles,[n 3] and other resources in response to the threat posed by the Mysterons. The Spectrum Organisation is directed from Cloudbase, an airborne headquarters stationed at a height of 40,000 feet above the Earth's surface,[e 4] and has a presence in all major cities. The organisation employs operatives of many nationalities, of whom the most senior hold military ranks and colour-based codenames, are posted to Cloudbase, and answer directly to the commander-in-chief of Spectrum, Colonel White.[n 4] Cloudbase is defended by the Angels, a squadron of five female pilots code-named Destiny (squadron leader), Harmony, Melody, Rhapsody, and Symphony, who fly the Angel Interceptor fighter aircraft.[27] In addition, the organisation incorporates a fleet of Spectrum Pursuit Vehicles (SPV) hidden in secret locations around the world as well as Spectrum Patrol Saloon Cars, hovercraft, transport jets and machine-gun equipped helicopters.
Captain Scarlet becomes Spectrum's foremost weapon in its fight against the Mysterons after the events of the pilot episode, in which the Mysterons threaten to assassinate the World President[n 5] as their first act of retaliation.[e 1][28] The original Captain Scarlet is killed in a car accident engineered by the Mysterons[n 6] and replaced with a re-created Mysteron likeness.[e 1][28]However, when the Captain Scarlet duplicate is shot by Spectrum officer Captain Blue and falls to his death from a tall structure, he returns to life with the consciousness and the normal personality of the original Captain Scarlet fully restored let alone his memories of Mysteron control, and thereafter he is free from Mysteron control.[n 7][n 8][e 1] Captain Scarlet's Mysteronised body possesses two remarkable abilities: he is able to sense the presence of other Mysteron duplicates in his vicinity,[n 9] and if he is injured or killed, his retro-metabolism restores him to a state of top health. Now able to deploy suicidally reckless tactics to thwart Mysteron threats, Captain Scarlet repeatedly braves the pain of death in the knowledge that he will recover to face the Mysterons again.[n 10]
While Captain Scarlet and Spectrum defend Earth against the threat from Mars, it is found that Mysteron reconstructions are particularly vulnerable to electricity[e 5] and that they are detectable on X-rays, to which their biology is impervious.[e 5] Consequently, two anti-Mysteron devices, the "Mysteron Gun"[n 11] and the "Mysteron Detector," are developed to aid Spectrum.[e 6] A three-episode story arc charts the uncovering of a second Mysteron complex under construction on the Moon,[e 7] its destruction by Spectrum,[e 8] and efforts to negotiate with the Mysterons on Mars via a crystal power source, salvaged from the complex, which is converted into an interplanetary communication device.[e 4] A failed attempt at satellite surveillance of the Martian surface,[e 9] aborted military conferences[e 10][e 11] and the sabotaged construction of a new space fleet[e 12] hinder Spectrum's plans to return to Mars, and the organisation is unsuccessful on two occasions in apprehending Captain Black.[e 13][e 14] The penultimate episode of the series depicts a Mysteron assault on Cloudbase with the use of armed spacecraft, which is ultimately revealed to be a nightmare dreamt by one of the Angel pilots.[e 15] The finale is a flashback episode that ends inconclusively with regards to the war between Earth and Mars and the fate of Spectrum and the Mysterons.[e 16]
Production[edit]
When talks to find an American broadcaster for Thunderbirds fell through in July 1966, production for the series' second season ended with the completion of just six episodes at the behest of ITC financier Lew Grade.[29] Having overseen Gerry Anderson's work since the creation of Supercar in 1960 – and going on to buy his production company, AP Films, during the making of Fireball XL5 – Grade was enthusiastic for Anderson's programmes to be transmitted abroad, in the lucrative American market, and decided that a new concept would do more to attract potential bidders than a second season of Thunderbirds.[29]
As a result of the cancellation, Anderson was required to come up with an idea for another Supermarionation series. He had once been inspired by the thought of creating a live-action police drama in which the hero would have unexpectedly been murdered halfway through the series and replaced by a new lead character.[30] Now giving fresh consideration to this idea, Anderson resolved that a selling point for his new series could be a character that can be killed at the end of each episode and resurrected by the beginning of the next. This, coupled with contemporary theories about the possibility of life on Mars,[31] led to the idea of an interplanetary war raging between Earth and its neighbour and a worldwide security organisation being called on to defend human civilisation. After further thought, Anderson decided that "Scarlet" would make an unusual codename for this organisation's "indestructible" agent who can come back to life, while "Blue" could be his partner's designation. From this, Anderson reasoned that all the personnel should have colours for names so as to form the whole "Spectrum" of colours, and decided that someone called "White" should be the leader of the Spectrum Organisation, much in the same way that white light is composed of, and can be broken down into, the colours of the spectrum.[31][32]
I thought we should make a show about the Martians, but then there were doubts being expressed by scientists as to whether the so-called "canals" on Mars were really man-made. Since we were well into pre-production, I came up with the idea of making the Martians invisible, so if they did come up with conclusive evidence that there was no life on Mars, I could say, "Ha-ha, yes there is – but you can't see it."
– Gerry Anderson (2002)[33]
Intrigued by the often-heard phrase "life as we know it", Anderson wanted to set the aliens of his new series apart from the conventional extraterrestrials of 1960s television and cinema. He therefore worked from a basis of "life as we don't know it",[31] and made the Mysterons that were to feature in the series a race of sentient computers as opposed to organic lifeforms,[25] although this is not explicitly stated in the television episodes. The initial intention was that the original Mysteron civilisation came from another galaxy.[25] Having established a settlement on Mars in the distant past, they fled the planet centuries later, abandoning their computer complex.[25]
Contemporary recollections of the Second World War proved to be an inspiration for a number of design aspects. For instance, Anderson recalled that RAF pilots had found it difficult to counter German attacks during the Battle of Britain, since taking off from the ground meant that it took considerable time to intercept the enemy.[34] He therefore made Spectrum's headquarters an airborne aircraft carrier called "Cloudbase".[34] The Mysteron rings were inspired by an advertisement for the Oxo line of food products, which included an image of the brand name sliding over a frying pan and the outline of a woman's body.[32][34]
Writing[edit]
With a provisional series title of The Mysterons,[35] Anderson and his wife, Sylvia, wrote a pilot script in August 1966.[36] This differed significantly from the final draft of the pilot episode. Initially, it was decided that the Mysteron duplicate of Captain Scarlet would be artificially resurrected by an advanced Spectrum computer rather than reviving naturally, and that thereafter he would no longer be truly human but a "mechanical man" akin to an android.[35] Another early ambition was for each episode to feature a guest star voiced by a well-known actor of the day. To this end, the role of the World President in the pilot episode was originally intended to be voiced by the American-born actor Patrick McGoohan.[37][38]
With Anderson serving chiefly as executive producer, the majority of the writing input for Captain Scarlet was provided by Tony Barwick, who had previously written for the short-lived second season of Thunderbirds.[39] Originally given the role of script editor, Barwick went on to pen 18 of the 32 episodes himself, and was also often required to make substantial changes to other writers' work.[39] While discussing his approach to writing episodes in a 1986 interview, he drew parallels between the premise and characters of Captain Scarletand those of Thunderbirds, suggesting, for example, that Spectrum was similar to International Rescue and that the character of Captain Black was like the earlier recurring villain from Thunderbirds, The Hood.[39]
Filming[edit]
After a two-month pre-production period lasting from November to December 1966, filming for the pilot episode, "The Mysterons", began on 2 January 1967,[40] with a budget of £1.5 million for the 32-episode series.[34][41] At an average cost of £46,000 per episode, or £2,000 per minute, it was the most expensive Anderson production to date.[42] A month before, Anderson and his team had dropped the name "AP Films," since Arthur Provis was no longer working alongside Anderson on a full-time basis, and renamed their company "Century 21 Productions".[40] Many of the directors for earlier Anderson series, such as Alan Pattillo, David Elliott and David Lane, had either left AP Films or were involved in the production of Thunderbird 6, the second Thunderbirds feature film, at the time that Captain Scarlet was being produced. Although Desmond Saunders and Lane were available to direct the first and second episodes, while veteran AP Films director Brian Burgess also contributed, the Andersons needed to transfer some of the more junior production personnel to replace the outgoing staff. To this effect, Alan Perry and Ken Turner were promoted from the camera operator and art departments.[43] Directors drafted in from outside AP Films were Peter Anderson, Leo Eaton and finally Robert Lynn, who had worked as an assistant director on the 1958 Hammer films Dracula and The Revenge of Frankenstein.[43]
The Slough Trading Estate[l 1] in Buckinghamshire had served as Anderson's production base since the filming of Stingray in 1964.[44] To accelerate production on earlier Supermarionation series, pairs of episodes had been filmed simultaneously on separate sound stages, a practice that continued for Captain Scarlet. Some filming coincided with the production of Thunderbird 6,[39] which was recorded on a separate puppet stage and released in July 1968. Editing rooms, post-production offices and a preview theatre were housed in a separate building on the Slough Trading Estate; the crew collaborated with the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories at Harlow in Essex[l 2] on the technical and electronic side of the production.[45]
A third unit, headed by Derek Meddings and his assistant Mike Trim, handled special effects and miniatures and was tasked with creating all the permanent sets and models to be used from the pilot episode, such as the Cloudbase interiors and scaled-down Spectrum Pursuit Vehicles. A design innovation for this series meant that the noses of the miniature vehicles would "dip" when stopped, to imitate the sudden application of brakes and deceleration on a real-life vehicle.[8] The miniature of the Cloudbase exterior, which ran to six feet (1.8 m) in length, proved to be too heavy to be held up with strings and was instead supported by a metal pole.[46][47] To transfer the Mysteron rings from script to screen, the production team acted on the advice of producer Reg Hill, who suggested that a transparency be made that could be panned across the puppet sets using a slide projector.[32]
By the time the series started broadcasting on ATV in September 1967, principal photography had been completed for the first 20 episodes.[48] In general, turnaround for completing all the puppet shots for each episode was two weeks[41][49] or 11 working days.[42] It was originally predicted that shooting would be wrapped within eight months,[41] but filming overran until late October due to the demands of the Thunderbird 6 shoot.[41] While production on the next Supermarionation series, Joe 90, began in November[50] it was not until early 1968 that the last episodes of Captain Scarlet were edited and completed for broadcast.[48]
Music[edit]
Music for Captain Scarlet was composed by Barry Gray, an innovator in electronic music, who had scored all the Supermarionation series preceding it. The opening title sequence theme, "The Mysterons", was rendered electronically and accompanied by a staccato drum beat to introduce the lead character of Captain Scarlet.[1] This seven-note beat was also used to link scenes within episodes,[1] and to cut to advertisement breaks,[52] for which it was accompanied by a zooming image of the Spectrum logo as designed by Tony Dunsterville of the art department.[52] On the subject of the beat, Anderson recalls, "When I went to the recording session, I heard the drum beat he had come up with and I thought, 'Christ, is this all he could produce?' Looking back on it, however, I can see that what he came up with worked very well."[52]
The closing credits theme, "Captain Scarlet", underwent significant change after the completion of the first 14 episodes. The first version had been mainly instrumental, with the words "Captain Scarlet!" sung in time to the aforementioned staccato drum beat after which a vocoded repetition of the words "Captain Scarlet!" provided by Gray himself[1] would be heard. This was then revised as a song performed by a London-based pop group The Spectrum, assembled by RCA Victor[53] as an imitation of the American band The Monkees,[1] who happened to share their name with the organisation that appears in Captain Scarlet.[1]
In addition to the main theme, Gray scored incidental music for 18 episodes of Captain Scarlet between March and December 1967.[48][54] Musical accompaniment for the remaining 14 episodes was achieved by re-using these completed tracks as well as music from previous Anderson productions such as Thunderbirds.[48] In composing his incidental music, Gray made extensive use of two contrasting, yet similar, themes to illustrate Spectrum and the Mysterons.[55] In their notes to the soundtrack release, Ralph Titterton and Tim Mallett suggest that the music is dominated by a "military feel", with an emphasis placed on percussion, brass and wind instruments, by contrast to the full orchestral sound of the Thunderbirds score.[55] With the exception of the four-note Mysteron motif, Gray generally restricted his use of electronic synthesisers, including an Ondes Martenot, to space sequences, preferring traditional instruments for Earth-bound action.[1] Captain Scarlet's motif, heard in both versions of the end credits theme and the incidental music, is a melodic variation on the Mysteron theme, emphasising Scarlet's history as an ex-Mysteron.[51]
Awarding the soundtrack CD release a rating of four stars out of five,[56] Bruce Eder of the website AllMusic describes the collection of theme and incidental music as "a strange mix of otherworldly 'music of the spheres', late-50s/early-60s 'space-age pop', 'British Invasion' beat, Scottish folk-inspired tunes, kids-style 'Mickey Mouse' scoring, martial music, light jazz, and light classical",[56] and singles out both "Cocktail Music", from "Model Spy", and the piano track, performed by Gray, from "The Inquisition", for particular praise.[56] In his BBC Online review, Peter Marsh opines that the darker tone of the music is reflective of Captain Scarlet as a programme featuring realistic puppets and death,[57] frightening alien villains[57] and "no laughs",[57] stating that "dissonant vibraphone chords shimmer under hovering, tremulous strings contrasted with urgent, militaristic drums and pulsing brass – driving the action ever onto its climax (and, no doubt, a big explosion)."[57]
On 8 October 2015, Fanderson released a 3-disc set exclusively for club members. It contains music either written for, or used in, all but three episodes ("The Heart of New York" and "Treble Cross" contain no original music and the cue recordings for "Traitor" are lost).[58]
