Filmed In Supermarionation Review

Hello there puppet fans and movie buffs i'm giving you a review of something that to me means alot because it's about TV shows that i grew up with and chances are you grew up with them as well but it's not only about those shows it's about the way the shows and films were filmed this is my review of Filmed In Supermarionation.

Now here i would normally describe what the film is about but since this is documentary i shall instead tell you what supermarionation is to put it simply this technique is a way to make the puppets speak and have there lips move by using thin wires and pre-recorded dialog. To help the voices and the move move was a small audio filter which is still used to this day and it's there that someone would play the dialog over and over until everything was perfect supermarionation did more things like control facial expressions.

What i really liked about this film is the fact that they got a few of the original Thunderbirds voice actors back to voice there characters in reconstructed sets so when you here parker speaking that's actually David Graham doing the voice and the same goes for Thunderbirds co-creator Sylvia Anderson who voices Lady P so as a fan of the original series that just blew me away that they were recording new dialog as those characters on Tracy Island.

I wish i could tell you who appears in the film but there's so many so i'll just shorten it by saying everyone who isn't dead and who worked for Gerry Anderson during the 60's appears in this film at some point and it's great hearing there views on various shows that they worked on and you get a true sense that there were more then just friends there a family and they even use old footage of the great Derek Meddings who did alot of the special effects for there shows and that was just awesome to see the man who i think is a legend.

This film goes into the history of A.P.V Films which would later become Century 21 Productions and because of that i got to see shows that i had no idea about the picture above is from a show called The Adventures Of Twizzle which was a show that the andersons and many of the A.P.V crew worked on i admit i have seen a few clips of the show on youtube and it's not that good to be honest but it's great to see how it was made and the fact that the creator Roberta Leigh would not pay them that much and yet they still turned out a pretty decent show goes on to show you how much talent the crew had.

One of the film downsides is that it does spend two much time on the shows that by now are all but forgotten instead of focusing more on the shows that people remember i can see why they included shows like Twizzle but they also included a 30 second advert that the team did we didn't really need to see that.

One of the films many upsides is that you get to see how the supermarionation technique was perfected by the team throughout the years for example in Twizzle and Torchy The Battery Boy you can see the strings holding up the puppets clear as day but by the time you get to The Secret Service you can barely see them at all and even that was the last show that the team made by that point they were a well oiled machine.

So far i've only mentioned some of there shows but Century 21 also made two films with this technique and they were based on there on there most successful show Thunderbirds the films were called Thunderbirds Are Go (not to be confused with the recent TV remake of the same name) and Thunderbird 6 while the show was a huge hit not only here but all over the world but the show also had movie quality effects the downside was when they leaped to the big screen there was nothing new they can offer and i like that the film highlights this and to me this is were the team started to loose moral.

Overall guys i would say that if you grew up with Thunderbirds , Stingray , Joe 90 or Captain Scarlet then i would say that this is the film just because it will hit you with Nostalgia and you might get to hear some stories that you perhaps didn't know so for me this film is easily a 9.5 out of 10 i know that this review barely scratches the service of what's in the film but that's because of two things 1) there's a lot to take in and 2) i really think you should go out and try and find a copy of the film