Many Anderson productions originally included scenes that, for various reasons, were trimmed, reshot, or removed altogether. Although the film material for these deleted scenes is generally believed to be lost, surviving scripts, production stills and even audio recordings can still provide interesting insights into these lost moments from our favourite Anderson productions. The opening episode of UFO, Identified, went through …

Partworks are a curious beast of the publishing world. We’ve all seen the commercials; “build your own model of the Isle of Wight ferry, complete in 150 issues – issue 1 just £1.99! (Regular price £7.99).” Either that or you’re being encouraged to buy a television series episode by episode for ultimately five times the price you’d pay for the …

TV Century 21 (later just TV21) was first published in 1965 and quickly became one of the most successful British comics of all time, achieving record sales that remain unbroken to this day. One of the reasons for this success was in no small part down to an ingenious idea that reportedly came from Gerry Anderson himself; that of presenting …

Across thirty-nine episodes, the crew of Fireball XL5 faced a variety of dangerous adversaries as they patrolled Sector 25. In addition to the show’s regular pair of villains, the Subterrains of Planet 46 and Boris and Griselda Space Spy, there was also an assortment of guest villains who each only ever made one appearance in the series. Some were renegade …

Through no fault of their own, most of the Gerry Anderson shows were remarkably light on episode-to-episode continuity. Very occasionally the second episode of a show would follow on from the events of its first, but even then it wasn’t always guaranteed to be shown second (as was the case with Stingray’s Plant of Doom, which first aired in the …

Continued from part 2… Since 1983’s Terrahawks flipped the standard Anderson family setup completely by removing all the fathers and presenting a pair of single mothers in Zelda and Cy-star, plus Stew’s widowed mother Mrs. Dapples, it would be almost twenty years following Into Infinity before we next saw fathers in a family unit on an Anderson show, with 1994’s …

Continued from part 1… With the leap to live action television productions following The Secret Service and the greater realism that came with working with human actors also came a pessimistic streak in storytelling that would run throughout the next three Anderson shows – and which extended to their presentation of families and fathers. Gone for good was the single …

The Anderson shows presented a number of idealised father figure characters for their viewers to look up to over the decades – so many in fact that almost all of his shows included some kind of patriarchal figure at the core of the story, whether the rest of that show’s cast of characters were a family or not. That wasn’t …

“A beautiful island in the Pacific, secret base of International Rescue – so far, undetected. Outwardly, the luxury home of millionaire ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy.” Most visitors to Tracy Island have no idea that it is anything other than the idyllic tropical paradise it appears to be, but the select few who know the island’s true purpose (including viewers of the …

October 2068 saw a historic day; first contact between the human race and an extraterrestrial species. It could have been the beginning of a golden age of interplanetary friendship and cooperation – but instead, it led to the outbreak of war between the Earth and Mars. Neither side came looking for conflict. A Zero-X Martian Exploration Vehicle under the command …