Captain Scarlet and the Revenge of the Mysterons

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NMM Captain Scarlet 2016
Television series
German title Captain Scarlet and the Revenge of the Mysterons
Original title Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
Country of production Great Britain
original language English
Year (s) 1966-1967
length 30 minutes
Episodes 32 in 1 season
genre Sci Fi
idea Gerry Anderson , Sylvia Anderson
music Barry Gray
First broadcast September 1, 1967 (UK)
German-language
first broadcast		 January 6, 1991
occupation
Original voices

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is an English puppets - science fiction series of the famous producer-married couple Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and successor of the highly successful Thunderbirds . The series tells of the adventures of the high-tech special unit "Spectrum" in the desperate attempt to prevent terrorist attacks by an alien power. Spectrum's best agent, Captain Scarlet, was given an indestructible body by accident and thus became the greatest trump card on earth in the fight against the disembodied Mysterons.

story

In 2068, a terrestrial research expedition discovered an alien city on Mars . Due to a misunderstanding - the surveillance camera of the aliens looks like a threatening weapon - people open fire and destroy the city to the ground, whereupon the strangers of the earth declare a hopeless war of nerves through terrorist attacks. The disembodied aliens call themselves Mysterons and have the ability to recreate destroyed objects - and killed people - on a molecular basis and use them for their dark purposes.

After Spectrum agent Captain Black had already become a tool of the Mysterons, Captain Scarlet also met the same fate - he was killed in a provoked car accident and replaced by a Mysteron double. Under the control of the Mysterons, he takes the world president hostage and flees to a high platform, from which he falls to his death after an exchange of fire. But the dead come back to life surprisingly, as their mysterious body heals itself within a few hours. But he is no longer under the control of the Mysterons and has his old personality back.

Practically endowed with an indestructible body, Captain Scarlet can now survive many dangerous situations. In a desperate race against time, Spectrum usually succeeds in thwarting the announced terrorist attacks from space, but all efforts are often in vain. Spectrum does not get any closer to their actual goal - to negotiate with the Mysterons and to clear up the misunderstanding surrounding the destruction of the Martian city.

background

Captain Scarlet is the fifth television series of the Andersons and should build on the great success of Thunderbirds , but it did not succeed.

Thunderbirds was a program for the whole family, in the approximately one-hour episodes, in addition to the crackling tension, love, family life and above all humor were not neglected. In the half-hour episodes, Captain Scarlet concentrated almost exclusively on the missions, although there are a few humorous interludes, but tellingly, for the character of the hero, Captain Scarlet, no "smiler" - a doll's head with smiling facial features - was built, but at least for his boss, Colonel White.

With all the perfection of the trick technique, Scarlet's missions quickly become boring, the actions of the Mysterons predictable. The series is also very brutal (ice-cold murders, blood-smeared corpses, ...) and hardly belongs in the children's program.

The conflict with the Mysterons is not resolved in the 32 episodes. The next series produced the Andersons Joe 90 , which was again more tailored to the child audience.

Trick technique

Technically, the series meant a huge leap forward compared to its predecessor Thunderbirds . The puppets no longer had oversized heads, but exactly human proportions. This had become possible because the electromagnet for generating the mouth movements could be made smaller and now found its place in the breasts of the dolls. (See also Supermarionation )

The sets in which the dolls acted had become much more detailed and were exactly to scale - if there was no doll in the picture, the sets could easily have been used for real shots.

However, the puppets were more immobile than their predecessors, and the cute walking and running of the puppets, which had already been shown as little as possible in Thunderbirds , looked absolutely impossible with the new puppets with their human proportions. Therefore, the actors are usually only seen standing or sitting, and as in Stingray and Thunderbirds, the heroes usually climb their vehicles using lifts or something similar. Often the film was also filmed from the actor's first person perspective - the camera moves through the model landscape and you can hear the hero's footsteps.

In some episodes it was decided to have a real actor take detail shots such as opening a door, but he could only be seen from the neck down!

Feature films

As part of the "Super Space Theater" series, two compilation films were made, with the content of the individual episodes being slightly changed:

  • 1980: "Captain Scarlet vs. the Mysterons"
  • 1981: "Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars"

reboot

In 2005 there was a CGI reboot of "Captain Scarlet" with the title "Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet" (26 episodes).

literature

  • A. Pirani: The complete Gerry Anderson Episode Guide (Titan Books 1989)
  • Nicolas J. Cull: WAS CAPTAIN BLACK REALLY RED ?: The TV science fiction of Gerry Anderson in its Cold War context , in: Media History , Volume 12, 2006 - Issue 2: Britain, Popular Culture and the Cold War, p. 193 -207.

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