Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968)



Plot



Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, often referred to as Captain Scarlet, is a late-1960s British science-fiction television series produced by the Century 21 Productions company of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, John Read and Reg Hill. First broadcast on ATV Midlands between September 1967 and May 1968, it has since been transmitted in more than 40 other countries, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Characters are presented as marionette puppets with scale model sets and special effects in a filming technique that the Andersons termed "Supermarionation". This technology incorporated solenoid motors as a means of synchronising the puppet's mouth movements with pre-recorded dialogue.

Set in 2068, the series follows the hostilities between Earth and a race of Martians known as the Mysterons. After their city on Mars is attacked by human astronauts due to a misunderstanding, the vengeful Mysterons declare war on Earth, initiating a succession of reprisal attacks that are countered by Spectrum, a worldwide security organisation. Spectrum boasts the extraordinary abilities of its foremost agent, Captain Scarlet, who in the events of the "pilot episode" comes to possess the Mysteron healing power of "retro-metabolism" – the ability to return to full health, even after suffering fatal injury, which renders Scarlet essentially "indestructible".
Captain Scarlet, the eighth of ten puppet series that the Andersons produced during the 1950s and 60s, is the follow-up to Thunderbirds and precedes Joe 90 and The Secret Service. In terms of visual aesthetic, the series represents a departure from the style of Thunderbirds on account of its use of non-caricatured puppets of realistic bodily proportions. Re-run a number of times on UK TV and purchased by the BBC in 1993, the 32-episode series has initiated merchandising campaigns since its first appearance, including the releases of items from dolls to tie-in novels  and comic strips in the Century 21 Publishing's children's magazine, TV Century 21.

When compared to its antecedents, Captain Scarlet continues to be recognised as considerably "darker" in tone and less child-friendly due to its increased violence and themes of extraterrestrial malevolence and interplanetary conflict.The transition in the puppets' design has polarised the views of critics and former production staff, although the series has been praised for its depiction of a multinational and multiethniccast of characters against the backdrop of a utopian future Earth,  Having decided to revive the series in the late 1990s, Gerry Anderson supervised the production of a computer-animated reboot, Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet, which was televised in the UK in 2005.



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Puppets

 

Changes made to the original Supermarionation design made puppet motion more stilted than before. To portray a walk, an operator would need to hold the puppet's legs, while the camera maintained a close-up shot to conceal the hand from view. This clip from the episode "Attack on Cloudbase" has an interruption in the shot when the characters of Captains Scarlet and Blue are required to step through a door into the Cloudbase Radar Room to talk to Captain Magenta, since the strings supporting the puppet heads made it impossible to film such entrances in a continuous shot. Through the characters of Scarlet and Colonel White, whose English accents are demonstrated, Marcus Hearn and Simon Archer argue that the impression that Captain Scarlet leaves on viewers differs from that of Thunderbirds.
Supermarionation, a technique in which the movement of the marionette puppet's mouth is electronically synchronised with character dialogue, had been formulated by Gerry Anderson for Four Feather Falls in 1960. Until production for Captain Scarlet, the head of the puppet had been disproportionately large in comparison to its body, as the head contained a solenoid that formed the key component of the lip-synch mechanism. The production team was not able to scale up the body to match the head, as this would have made the puppets hard to operate and have necessitated a proportionate scaling-up in the size of the puppet sets. Since Gerry Anderson had expressed frustration with this caricatured design during the production of earlier Supermarionation series, and wished that the puppets would more accurately reflect human  biology,before production commenced on Captain Scarlet the producer, Reg Hill, and his associate, John Read, designed a new type of puppet in which the solenoid was instead placed inside the chest, to permit a head of realistic proportion. The costume designer for Captain Scarlet was Sylvia Anderson, who was influenced by the work of French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, in particular his 1966 "Cosmonaut" collection, in designing the Spectrum uniforms.
After test-sculpting in Plasticine, the puppet heads were moulded on a silicone rubber base and made using fibreglass. At heights ranging from 20 to 24 inches (approximately one-third life-size) the next-generation puppets were no shorter than their predecessors. For previous series, puppet eyes had been sized out of proportion to the heads, but as part of the realistic look introduced in Captain Scarlet, the eyes of production personnel were photographed and the images scaled down for attachment to the eye sockets. As had been the case for earlier series, a number of alternative heads displaying a range of expressions were created for main character puppets, including "smilers", "frowners" and "blinkers". Since episodes of Captain Scarlet were filmed in pairs, one on each of the puppet stages available at the Century 21 Studios, duplicates were made of the "expressionless" template of each main character. For the pilot episode, an "agony" head was specially sculpted for the Captain Scarlet puppet for a brief reaction shot of Scarlet's Mysteron double being shot by Captain Blue.
The increased realism of the puppets meant that their mobility was significantly reduced, ironically leaving the new design less lifelike than Anderson had hoped, To minimise the amount of movement required, the puppets were made to stand on moving walkways or sit at moving desks: for example, Colonel White's desk on Cloudbase is seen to rotate, while Lieutenant Green is seen to operate the Cloudbase main computer from a sliding chair. Puppeteer Jan King recalls:
The Captain Scarlet puppets were not built to walk. They were too heavy and not weighted properly anyway ... It is virtually impossible to get a string puppet to walk convincingly on film unless it is a very caricatured puppet. In Captain Scarlet, if a puppet had to move off-screen, it was done in a head-and-shoulders shot—the floor puppeteer would hold the legs of the puppet and then move the puppet physically out of shot at the right time, trying to make the body and shoulders move as if the puppet were walking.
The "under control" puppets described by King were stringless and controlled from the waist. One resulting advantage was that a puppet could be moved through a doorway without necessitating a break in the shot. For shots displaying characters such as the Angels seated in aircraft cockpits, variations of the "under control" design, comprising just a head and torso, were manipulated by levers and wires positioned underneath the set. This development of Supermarionation would be named "Supermacromation" when Anderson returned to puppetry in the 1980s with his later production, Terrahawks.



Episode Guide

1 "The Mysterons"
Captain Black destroys an alien city on Mars, unleashing the horror of the Mysterons who first intend to kill the World President. The Mysteron reconstruction of Captain Scarlet somehow returns to life after falling 800 feet to his death.
2 "Winged Assassin"
Scarlet's first assignment with his powers of retro-metabolism is to protect the Director General of the United Asian Republic from assassination at the hands of the Mysterons.
3 "Big Ben Strikes Again"
An atomic device has been hijacked and hidden and Captain Scarlet has until the clock strikes twelve to save London from total destruction.
4 "Manhunt" 
The hunt is on to apprehend Captain Black after he unwittingly becomes a radioactive hot spot.
5 "Avalanche" 
A series of crippling attacks on Frost Line Outer Space Defence bases sees Captain Scarlet and Lieutenant Green race to stop the Mysteron assailant before a belligerent general starts an interplanetary war with Mars.
6 "White as Snow"
When Colonel White is targeted by the Mysterons, rather than risk Cloudbase being attacked, he takes refuge in a submarine.
7 "The Trap" 
A summit of top military commanders is secretly a Mysteron ruse to eliminate the best minds of Earth's armed forces.
8 "Operation Time" 
Crucial Mysteron weaknesses are revealed when a leading brain surgeon is killed and reconstructed by the Mysterons to murder a top army general.
9 "Spectrum Strikes Back"
Two brilliant devices are created to counter the Mysteron threat — but a spy among the delegates at the conference starts off a deadly trap.
10 "Special Assignment"
Captain Scarlet turns double agent to thwart Mysteron plans to destroy the whole of North America.
11 "The Heart of New York"
Professional bank-robbers try to get the Mysterons to work for them after the aliens target New York City.
12 "Lunarville 7" 
Scarlet, Blue and Green investigate strange signals emanating from the far side of the Moon and discover a second Mysteron complex under construction.
13 "Point 783" 
The Supreme Commander of Earth Forces is targeted by a seemingly invincible, renegade superweapon.
14 "Model Spy" 
A French intelligence agent posing as a fashion designer is kidnapped by Mysteron reconstructions of his own models.
15 "Seek and Destroy"
When the Spectrum Angels are threatened by the Mysterons, reconstructed Angel fighters menace Scarlet, Blue, and Destiny.
16 "Renegade Rocket" 
A nuclear rocket vanishes from radar. For Captain Scarlet and Blue it is a matter of inputting the correct self-destruct code before the mystery target is annihilated.
17 "Crater 101"
Scarlet, Blue and Green return to the Moon to destroy the second Mysteron complex. They are able to return the heart of the complex — a crystal pulsator — to Spectrum.
18 "Shadow of Fear" 
A powerful Himalayan observatory receiving precious photographs of Mars comes under attack from a reconstruction of one of the resident astronomers.
19 "Dangerous Rendezvous"
For the first time, Spectrum is able to contact the Mysterons using the strange properties of the crystal pulsator recovered from the Mysteron complex on the Moon. But Cloudbase itself is in danger of obliteration.
20 "Fire at Rig 15" 
The source of all Spectrum's vehicle fuel is threatened when a demolitions expert contracted to put out an oil rig fire is killed and reconstructed by the Mysterons.
21 "Treble Cross" 
A test pilot barely survives a car accident engineered by the Mysterons and helps Spectrum in an attempt to capture Captain Black.
22 "Flight 104" 
Scarlet, Blue, a top astrophysicist and two journalists find themselves trapped on an airliner under Mysteron control.
23 "Place of Angels"
A vial of a lethal new virus is stolen from a maximum-security laboratory. Scarlet must stop the Mysteron agent before the Los Angeles water supply is polluted with the contents.
24 "Noose of Ice" 
An underwater Arctic mine extracting a rare metal to be used in Earth's return to Mars is terrorised when its heating elements are sabotaged and the surrounding water threatens to freeze and crush the tower.
25 "Expo 2068"
Scarlet must neutralise a stolen nuclear reactor before total devastation is brought to the Atlantic Seaboard of North America.
26 "The Launching" 
The President of the United States is seemingly threatened with assassination.
27 "Codename Europa" 
Three of Europe's leading politicians are targeted by a reconstructed electronics professor.
28 "Inferno"
Spectrum must protect a South American irrigation plant from attack by an orbiting spacecraft taken over by the Mysterons.
29 "Traitor"
A series of hovercraft accidents in the Australian outback means that Scarlet and Blue must expose the traitor before it can strike again.
30 "Flight to Atlantica"
Captains Blue and Ochre go on a mindless destructive spree of the world's biggest naval complex after drinking drugged champagne.
31 "Attack on Cloudbase" 
The Mysterons themselves arrive on Earth to destroy Cloudbase.
32 "The Inquisition" 
Captain Blue is drugged and wakes up three months later on Cloudbase facing questioning from a man claiming to be from Spectrum Intelligence.

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