NO PUPPETS, NO POINT:

No Strings Attached: The Thunderbirds are back: they’re younger, with cooler spaceships, bigger effects and no puppets … just don’t tell Gerry Anderson (Graeme Virtue, 7/18/04, Sunday Herald)

[T]hunderbirds director Jonathan Frakes is no stranger to updated 1960s TV shows. Although he’s sat in the big chair for a number of films, he’s still probably best-known as an actor, creating the role of Commander William Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the 1990s respray of Gene Roddenberry’s original space soap that went on to become an enormous success.

When Frakes first became attached to the project, he had no knowledge of the source material. “To me, a Thunderbird was just a car, the coolest Ford,” remembers the 51-year-old, “so I was a complete novice until I got a look at all the DVDs of the original show. I thought the tone of it was great fun, it was just a great place to tell a story from. Even though the characters were wooden, you got them, you got that they were a family, you got the relationship between Lady Penelope and Parker. And the visuals, the ships, were fantastic.”

It would be inaccurate to describe this new Thunderbirds as an American production; it was made by Working Title, the British-based company behind Four Weddings And A Funeral and Love, Actually, and filmed at Pinewood studios near London. “There was a British crew, an Irish photography director, Scottish assistant director, an English producer,” explains Frakes. “I was practically the only American there, apart from Paxton and the three kids.”

But a deal was struck with Hollywood studio Universal to help with financing – the film is rumoured to have a budget of around $80m – and it’s clearly been made with an eye on the lucrative US market. The plot sees the grown-up members of International Rescue conveniently stranded on space outpost Thunderbird 5, leaving a surprisingly young Alan Tracy alone to battle The Hood.

“This is more of a prequel,” says Frakes. “Alan Tracy is only 14 and we’ve aged down Tin-Tin, and we’ve also created a new character, Brains’s son. So it’s three young heroes, not unlike Spy Kids or Harry Potter.” [...]

Lady Penelope’s FAB1 – a futuristic 27-foot-long pink runaround – has been a real controversy magnet. In the original series, it was a stately Rolls-Royce with twin machine guns concealed behinds its grille. Unfortunately, the company wouldn’t give permission for a Rolls-Royce to be used in the film, so Parker now drives her ladyship round in a rocket-shaped Ford.

Fans are crying foul, and it was this contentious motor which led to original series creator Gerry Anderson walking away from his painstakingly-negotiated advisory role on the film. Anderson has gone on record to say, “I knew damn well that if I stood in front of that car saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’, there’d be people asking, ‘How much did they pay you, Gerry?’” He’s also refused to promote the film (despite being offered a reported £400,000), has no plans to see it and even demanded that his name be taken off the credits. Pointedly, his current project (a computer-generated TV remake of one of his most famous creations) has the official title Gerry Anderson’s New Captain Scarlet, so “nobody can take it away from me”.