THUNDERBIRDS UNSEEN: Lost Scenes From the 1960s! (The Making of Pit of Peril)
Вставка
- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- Thunderbirds Are Go again! Unseen for 6 decades join International Rescue in newly discovered scenes from Gerry & Sylvia Anderson’s hit television series. In this episode, we go behind the scenes of Pit of Peril and tell the untold story of how the episode developed from 25 minutes to 50, including a look at a previously lost version of the episode.
Filmed in Supermarionation, Thunderbirds has endured since its first broadcast in 1965. In this "making of" documentary series, meet the crew of scriptwriters, directors, editors, puppeteers and special effects artists (who also made shows such as Fireball XL5, Stingray, and Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons) as they reveal the space age secrets that blasted UK television into the 21st century and inspired films such as Star Wars and James Bond. In addition to crew interviews, we’ll be aided by original documentation, and original studio film material presented for the first time - and in 4k!
Experience Thunderbirds like never before with lost deleted scenes and alternative edits!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Find us online!
• Century 21 Films Facebook - / century21films
• Century 21 Films Twitter - / century21films
• Thunderbirds Facebook - / thunderbirds65
• Thunderbirds Twitter - / thunderbirds65
• Instagram - / century21films
• Website - www.century21f...
• Shop - century21films...
--------------------------------------------------------------------
About Us:
About Me:
Century 21 Films Ltd is a multi-faceted production company whose work spans drama to documentary, miniature effects to puppet shows. It was founded by a group of filmmakers who first collaborated on Filmed in Supermarionation, the story of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's hit puppet shows including Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet.
Since then, we have worked for a multitude of high-profile clients including ITV, BBC, Mammoth Productions, British Film Institute and the Halifax working on projects such Thunderbirds, Endeavour, Doctor Who and The Twilight Zone.
In addition to our regular filmmaking services, we specialise in ‘Supermarionation’ - the puppetry filming technique used to make shows like Thunderbirds and have collaborated with ITV repeatedly to provide specialised services. Our work has been featured on The One Show, This Morning, Good Morning Britain, BBC News, ITV News and Mastermind.
#filmedinsupermarionation #thunderbirds #century21films
I was born in 1961 in Southern England. My brother and I WORSHIPED Thunderbirds when we were children and we still love it now. 😀
I was born in 1985 in Northern England, and my Brother and I also worshiped Thunderbirds when we were children. The fact it transcends generations is a remarkable testament to its quality and gripping storytelling! (TB2 was always my favourite, and I'd doodle the Mole on any sheet of scrap paper I could find).
Me? 1959, also Southern England. The perfect age to enjoy the original broadcasts. I have them all on DVD... and VHS!
1961, Midlands. F.A.B!
1961. The Netherlands. Turned me into an engineer AND half a Brit. 😁
Cannot wait for these unseen scenes. grateful thanks for continuing to post for 'us' children of the 60's. 🤟
We got Gerry Anderson, my kids got Hannah Montana.
And 90s.
@@marcdraco2189we definitely got the better programmes!
And the 90's kids too, the obsession is the same 😁
Pit of Peril is my favourite episode. The Sidewinder is the best thing ever devised.
ABSOLUTELY!! A fabulous episode.😀😀
I used to wander round the school playground - arms flailing in front of me and mouthing the accompanying music - happy days 😄
The 50 minute does drag with all the padding.
I was born 1965 late while this fantastic puppet shows were all over 1960s TVs. Some of those vehicles ahead of the times. Well done to all involved in these excellent shows. Love Derek Meddings designs. Good show Jerry and Sylvia Anderson.👍🇭🇲🦘🐨✌️
Pit of Peril is one of my personal favourite Thunderbirds episodes!
Sidewinder is I think the first vehicle of the series I saw as a kid. The lumbering behemoth must be one of my favorites ever, my introduction to the walker type, which always hold a special place for me in any scifi story.
@@crashmatrix I loved the sidewinder. I didn't know staff found it 'silly'. But when you're a kid it's all great and now I'm an oldie, it still is.
@crashmatrix Interestingly it first appeared in a Stingray comic, before making it to tv.
His is great stuff..I'm sure the sidewinder sort of reminds me of a giant metal scorpion 😮its all still thrilling to watch..always love the sfx..Derek meddings and team pure geniuses...gaz big fanderson😊
Same here. Holds a special place for me. Logically the sidewinder is a ridiculous vehicle design, but that just makes it all the better 😊
I would like to add thanks to the superb, often tongue-in-cheek and often hilarious, voice over & scripts for this exploratory series of each episode. So informative for us TB nerds while also being so charming. Well done indeed. I'm hoping for a new Blu-ray box set with all the extra features gathered from these reels, contractual obligations withdrawing !! A+
Looking forward to this instalment very much and viewing the unseen footage! Thank you so much for sharing with fans, it's absolutely fascinating.
I'm 65, and I still watch Thunderbirds, I love it.😊👍
This is the best episode of the series, and The Sidewinder is a masterfully designed machine demonstrating overbearing power. Outside of the Thunderbirds themselves, The Sidewinder is the best vehicle in the franchise.
I find these videos fascinating and often go back and look again to figure out just what they did. As a 71 year old who was 12 when TB was first transmitted, I just love it all!
This is brilliant! We definitely need the director's cut of the episodes of Thunderbirds!
I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you are making this series.
As a bit of a UA-cam film maker myself l'm really enjoying the spotlight/magnifying glass being cast over the continuity element of Thunderbirds, especially in the lengthening of the episodes from 25 minutes to an hour... it must have been a nightmare, so well done on producing this excellent series of videos 👍👏
It's like reverse editing in a certain way! Editing usually requires the trimming down of a story to fit the time allowed, yet here is the reverse issue, where padding needs to be inserted into the story at various points without making it bleedingly obvious that screen time is being added.
Mark from Melbourne Australia 🇦🇺
Hi Mark, thank you for your reply, it's much appreciated. You've made some very valid points in regards to editing, on occasion I've added extra material during the making of our videos and it's not always easy to make it not look "bleedingly obvious" 😄 But without doubt the biggest nightmare of all that I've found whilst making our most recent time travel/period video is trying to portray 1940's Britain at war filming in modern day locations.
I find the only way is being very patient and selective in what and where you film - the reason why this took over 6 months to complete.... but worth it in the end, see what you think?
Regards, Gary
This is brilliant work that you are doing - a cross between an archaeological excavation and a detective story. Thanks to all involved for letting us see 'new' material 60 years after it was first made.
Many many thanks for this brilliant video. Thunderbirds was the bedrock of kids telly for me. It was my era, born in 1960 fifty miles West of Slough, nothing came even close to Thunderbirds (OK Stingray and Fireball XL5 were pretty close). Great memories❤
Hopefully we get to see these in full once they’ve been fully scanned and preserved. Bravo to all involved in saving these rare gems.
It'd never even occurred to me that we'd have the existence of radically different final cuts of episodes - being puppets I assumed that everything had to be planned out very carefully in advance, but now I see that shooting new material/redubbing was more straightforward than I thought! Fascinating look at one of the weakest Thunderbirds episodes
LMAO - *_"where the helijet leaves twice"_* - I could (and will) watch these 'till the cows come home. Thank-you SO much for all your hard work here! 🥰
I actually think that the transmitted hour long version is a great episode in its own right. Just because an episode is in a remote setting doesn't mean that it's not a recipe for a boring episode. After all, it not only shows that International Rescue were aware of what was happening sooner, but it shows the increasingly desperate situation the Sidewinder crew were in and the courage shown by those trying to not only assess the situation, but to actively try to get the Sidewinder upright in order to get out. The tense music when the first soldier is lowered into the pit is a sign for the viewer of how dangerous this was going to be. Then, when they get burnt after staying down there too long, the music is reprived showing the obvious pain and discomfort they were in and the genuine concern General Peters and the others have for those who come out badly injured. In addition, as per the intention of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the actual rescue by International Rescue was far from easy, with it being a struggle to get the Sidewinder up and out of the pit before the crew are overcome by the heat and smoke. It's definitely up there as one of my favourite episodes
Another marvellous piece of detective work. Well done all. Despite its ridiculous side I’ve always loved the Sidewinder, its entrance entranced me as a child.
I was 10 years old when Thunderbirds hit the UK TV screens. We were already hooked and glued to the TV with Fireball XL5 and Supercar but when Thunderbirds arrived we did not see mixed up edits, visible puppet strings and continuity hick-ups... we were absolutely stunned! With no repeats or online "watch-it-again" we were ready at 5pm and didn't dare blink for 1 hour in fear of missing the action! Thanks for sharing the behind the scenes stuff that you have discovered, instant memories 👍
Those Thunderbirds were on TV in Finland back in 1990's, when my boys were just small lads. They enjoyed those films wery much. They still do so. Me too😊
I'm Dutch and I was today years old when I found out Thunderbirds was originally dubbed! 0.0 It's incredible to think that the first people to ever see Thunderbirds saw a cheesy, forgotten Dutch dub!
I adore Pit of Peril-I used to watch this with my son when he was little.
That was history in the making! Well done, Century 21 Films, FAB!
This is fascinating. Thank you for all the effort!
Also, hearing Thunderbirds dubbed in Dutch isn't something I expected to get as a Dutch person. That threw me off haha.
This is absolutely awesome.
Never thought I'd see deleted footage from my favorite TB episode! 😃
Hopefully it'll be on DVD and Blu-Ray Disc too as well as the newly restored show and 50th Anniversary episodes included.
One of my favourite episodes even after seeing this
RIP David Graham, what a wonderful voice actor you were
I loved this episode. Saw it first in the 80's re-runs.
Something I can say with some certainty is that all shots featuring the helijet in this episode would have been shot before End of the Road. The Gray & Houseman livery it wore in End of the Road, with a red fuselage, was quite obviously retouched from this livery seen in Pit of Peril. Several areas on the fuselage that would be hard to reach with a paintbrush were left in yellow, such as in between the vertical engines. End of the Road, to my knowledge, would have not yet entered the shooting stage by the time the decision was made to extend the episodes, so this leads me to believe that Pit of Peril must have been one of the earliest episodes to receive additional material. The extensions were shot bit by bit through the remainder of the series' production.
The helijet, having been repainted and recycled several times throughout the series, tells its own story. The model appears in five guises, and I have done my best to place them in the order they would have been made in. This may be debunked by future installments of these mini-documentaries, but based on the research I've done, this is what I believe.
1. Thompson Tower Green (first version). I believe this was the episode the model was originally constructed and shot for. The first version of the green Thompson Tower helijet seen at the beginning of City of Fire is specifically the one in the shot of it descending past the building. The telltale sign is that it lacks the metal tubes inserted above the cockpit for the winch line used to lower Mead and Reynolds in Pit of Peril. These were added for that episode, and stay on all later guises.
2. U.S. Army Yellow (Pit of Peril).
3. Gray & Houseman Construction Co., for the reasons given above.
4. Ambulance (Desperate Intruder). This livery again shares similarities to the previous two, such as the black markings on the vertical engines. Additionally, what appears to be the wheels from a toy car were bizarrely added to the underside of the fuselage.
5. Thompson Tower Green (second version). Yes, there were two. The very first shot of City of Fire, in which the helijet races towards the newly opened Thompson Tower, clearly features a different paint job compared to the one seen in later shots. Not only are several decals missing on this one compared to what we see descending the tower, but the metal tubes mentioned earlier are clearly present. The obvious evolution and shared details in paint job between 2, 3, and 4 leads me to believe this total makeover was the final committed. Why this initial shot was done so much later is beyond me. Perhaps the reason for this will be revealed by the City of Fire reels. I sincerely hope so, it might put my mind at ease!
I am looking forward to seeing more of these documentaries. They are excellently edited. I have (only somewhat obsessively) been chronicling each model from Thunderbirds, as well as the kit, toy, and off-the-shelf parts used to create them for some time now, so these long-lost materials help me answer my most burning questions and make new discoveries.
That's very impressive! I think you should be contributing material to this channel.
Another excellent video. Fascinating how this episode was altered.
Can’t wait for Terror in New York City - my first experience of Thunderbirds (via the Countdown to Disaster VHS). Some great work going on here. Thank you C21!
RIP David Graham, aged 99 - first, the voice of the Daleks, but then of Aloysius Parker, Gordon & Brains in Thunderbirds (as well as Grandpa Pig in Peppa Pig!). Fondly remembered by many of us.
I’m loving this series so much, and as a huge Thunderbirds fan I’m so grateful to you Stephen and your team for bringing these amazing pieces of gold dust to life six decades after their original production. Thank you! Looking forward to the next episode.
One of the best of TV for this 10 year old at the time. Great stuff. Got the Series on DVD now.
Wonderful. Thank you. Barry Gray was a remarkable composer.
It's absolutely wonderful that these reels have been discovered. 60 years later and brand new footage and audio (or should that be old discarded footage and audio) and facts and educated assumptions are being discovered and revealed. It also makes you wonder what final stage changes were made to episodes of the other Supermarionation shows.
i REALLY want to INSIST on that : Monsieur Lariviere narration is SUPERB!!!! and LOVE the humor of it BRILLIANT!!!!!
I remember watching this as a kid, loved Thunderbirds!
Brilliant, love all these unseen clips and stories behind the filming of each episode. Thunderbirds had a big impression on me in the 60's which gave me a life long interest in space and aviation.👍
So good in the day and now.i remember them like yesterday.
what a wonderful gifts!! a BIG thank you!!!
I'm loving all this history regarding one of my favourite TV shows as a kid. Keep up the great work!
I loved the suspense during the rescues on the original Thunderbirds back when I was a child, & as an adult of nearly 64 now I still prefer that to the new non puppet version
As a kid, thought the sidewinder looked ridiculous. Wished it looked more like the walkers in War of the Worlds.
The 1 hour episodes used to be shown on commercial television (Channel 9), in Australia, at 6am on a Saturday morning. For some reason, the episodes were commercial free.
very informative documentary in term of 35mm - 4K look forward to more.
Might've been where ILM got the idea for the AT-ATs or Imperial Walkers. The scene where the IR retrieval vehicles dragged Sidewinder out of the pit was brilliant.
Loving this stuff! I was 7 when this was first transmitted in the UK and have seen them all many times - and in the early 2000s my two sons became fans as well. This kind of quality doesn't get old. Looking forward to the next episode, keep up the great work!
I loved the sidewinder, and the pit of peril.
We're from Wiltshire UK. We used to LOVE THIS
Another fantastic video. The scene with Brains talking saving 'the Sidewinder' is fascinating. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You for all of your research and analysis. I can't wait to see more.
I love this episode.
Thanks for the great content. So happy to still see Thunderbirds talked about. Would also be great to see some UFO content as well, that was also a brilliant show .
Wow. I remember that opener with the plane without wheels
Now that was the most exciting footage that I have ever seen! 😁😉👍
Love these dives into Thunderbirds' history, thank you for sharing.
i remmember this...i remmeber where i was when i watched this so many years ago
We had the Thunderbirds wallpaper which was FAB
Me too!
Keep bringing us these great videos!
Love your videos, very much attention to detail, please keep up the stirling work.
I was born in 1964 and never ever have heard the Thunderbirds Dutch dubbed version until now! Thank you (or not, not sure yet if I like this at all)
Another excellent historical document. Thanks for the hard work and dedication to seeking clarity (even with the occasional diversion down the rabbit hole!). Nicely done.
well done guys hopefully this will get released on dvd/blu ray or at least on itvx streaming 11k views in 11 hours say the fans are still out there .
I still remember the episode about the people who had the job of tree felling and they get sick from a dodgy restaurant LOL, fall unconscious at the wheel etc
This was the best episode
I've always had good memories of this episode since it was one of the few thunderbird tapes I had growing up. Though it was always an outlier as the majority of the ones I had were UK tapes except pit which was a US release and had a US voice cast rather than the original. That and it might have been a shorter cut though that might be me miss remembering it.
2:47 An Another Awesome Behind The Scenes Look Episode About Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds The Original Series. Thanks Century 21 Films Buddy Amigo Dude Mate. Xxxx ❤🇦🇺🇬🇧🇺🇸
I loved Pit of Peril back in the 60’s but watching it yet again earlier this year, those spindley legs on Sidewinder did bug me just a tad!
All this is great brings back great times for me, as kid and I love seeing it today thanks for all the work you put in another great video
I personally think Pit Of Peril is a very solid episode (except that ground covering the pit, that is). The only letdowns are the literally stilted movements of the Sidewinder and the wobblyness of the helicopters. No wonder they avoided both problems later, as the use of helijets proves. But that was no loss because it introduced another futuristic aspect.
An amazing series. Thank you for this insight.
I actually had the cast iron toys ! The flying one with the door that opened in the belly with the rover inside.
Wonderful work here - thank you so much.
Fascinating bit of history, thank you.
It's childhood of the 60s once again! We watch the show then act it out afterwards.
FANTASTIC. And on the subject of old 35mm prints of Thunderbirds, I have a question that maybe someone at Century 21 may be able to shed light on. The question centres around Yorkshire TV re-runs of Thunderbirds in 1977. I recorded many of the screenings on Philips N1700 machine so I got to know the episodes very well, being such a fan of the show. What was unique about the prints run by Yorkshire TV was the fact that to the very best of the research i have done, this was the LAST TIME Thunderbirds was screened with the original film ad-caps/break-bumpers still in place at the end of each reel. All subsequent screenings of the show on all ITV regions then only used static slides to mark the advert break. In my area, where I received 3 different ITV regions, the next full screening of the series was by Tyne Tees TV in 1981.
The prints were in appalling condition on the 1977 screenings, very dirty, scratched, with a lot of corresponding hiss and crackle on the soundtrack. They were clearly some of the original 1965 prints, but what also was interesting was the strange way the opening titles had been cut. The episodes (Yorkshire showed most of the series but not all) began as normal 5-4-3-2-1-Thunderbirds are go, with the title zoom to a green screen. Normally the 'episode preview sequence would then run, punctuated by 2 more zooming Thunderbirds titles, but on these prints, as soon as green screen was reached, the film was spliced straight to the actual episode title, missing out ALL the usual start up titles, filmed in videcolor, etc. In the case of episodes where the actual title was not at the opening fade in, it would seriously omit some key parts of the storyline. ie DANGER AT OCEAN DEEP, which has the episode titles over the wreckage of the Ocean pioneer 1, so the YTV showing jumped from the green screen direct to the episode title, and so anyone not knowing the story already would be wondering what exactly had just blown up and was floating in the water. THE MAN FROM M.I.5 was also cut the same, missing out all the important opening storyline of the episode. All the episodes had many splices, and had clearly been very well run and never cleaned.
Does anyone know why this was done? Could these have been prints sent overseas and cut for a different market, and returned to the UK later? I have never seen Thunderbirds spliced up like this, whereby the generation who saw it for the first time in 1977 would never have seen the usual series opening titles and music. On some episodes bits of the preview part were still in situ, but only in part, and jump-cut very badly. I am wondering if these prints would have been different to the usual episodes in other ways, but as I no longer have the video recordings I made in 77, I can't be sure.
When Yorkshire TV showed Thunderbirds again, in 1982, it was a very different set of prints, all of which were quite pristine, and all intact, except for the original break-bumpers.
Old serials (as Thunderbirds was in 77) when repeated in off-peak (cheap), were often from very disposable 16mm prints, which the replay in both sound and vision was far more cruder than today. For example, if the optical sound head was not sealed tightly from outside light, that stray light could produce hiss, or hum from a fluorescent light. These were also known as 'bicycled prints' as they had been sent around everywhere, and any TV station would have done what they liked with them - cut them to a time slot they had, cut in advert breaks where they wanted, marked them with cue dots for their own machines etc, and yes depending on where they had been in the world they could come back in a right state. In 1977 Thunderbirds was probably just regarded as a 'has been' show but by 1982 it was starting to be appreciated as a perennial gem.
What a great series with wonderful insights. Thank you so much to all involved!
This is fantastic Guys! Keep up the fantastic work!
The helijet had to land to pick up Lt. Mead from copter watchdog before leaving, so it's not a continuity error :)
'pretty good...', indeed.
this just reunleashed the latent nerd in me!
so chuffed to know that there are nerds exploring this hadean labyrinth to uncover more buried treasure
and that, even vicariously, i signed up, like jim the cabin boy,
to be part of this crowdyfunded expedition all them years back.
who'd've thunk that, when i watched its original first transmission,
we would be relishing all these fresh revelations right now!?
if i carry on, i risk digging myself even deeper into a, um, pit
and getting lost down a quatermass, white rabbit hole of jules vernean proportions
(with a rick wakeman soundtrack)
as poe's perilous pendulum swings, like london in the supermarionated 60's
('roger, miller, over and out...')...
cheers
Lovely stuff.
The Sidewinder …. it seems a little more obvious to me now. But did the effects team like creating headaches for themselves. Gwent springs to mind.
While I see it from Sylvia's POV. Personally I think Lew Grade was wrong with extending, the already shot 25min versions. And just asked Gerry to extend the currently unfilmed episodes.
I think Jeff's decision not to attend until called was correct. Because the military would have been pissed to know that all of their possibly top secret transmissions were being monitored. If it was a civilian accident then it would have been correct to offer help.
Secondly, even as a kid I figured a walking machine was dumb but I, a kid, was the target audience and I still accepted it and loved the episode to become my favorite. I also never really paid attention to the fact that the Sidewinder was on its back yet the crew cabin was still right up. The only episode I couldn't stand was the giant crocodile episode, if that was the one that was on tv that week, I'd switch off and go do something else.
As an aside, I'd still love to know how the special effects team were able to have helicopters with their spinning blades.
I seem to remember Gerry Anderson being asked how it was done and he simply replied, "It's a secret."
Probably means he didn’t know!
The interview had with the two puppeteers... where is that from?
Additionally, I always thought the episode The Imposters was one that was heavily modified!
If I remember correctly the Sidewinder is on its side, yet all the interior shots are the correct way up???
Minor details 😂
Still a great show for its time 👍👍👍
5... 4... 3... 2... 1... "We're gonna need a montage! (Montage!) Always fade out in a montage (Montage!)" - Barry Grey is Genius
Happy birthday thunderbird September 12th 1965
Great work!
I loved TB as a kid. I have a photo of me as a kid in an IR uniform with a TB water pistol 😅
UA-cam forgot to alert me even though I asked them to.
Probably Mysteron sabotage.
@@minicle426 Well said!
Absolutely excellent!
Love the video 😊
The General is particularly good at sending his men on near suicide missions !!
I bet ITV will edit out Jeff Tracey smoking that cigar !! 🚭
Just discovered this, and it's terrifc: takes me back to my 10 year old self eagerly tuning in for the first episode.
But memory is faulty, and I'm not clear: were the original eps 25 or 50 min? Or were both versions shown at some point?
Grateful for any insight 🧐
To quote Mr Spock : Fascinating !
I remember this