Set sail for adventure with Stingray mini albums

We wanted to draw attention to one of our latest sales items that might have slipped under the radar – or should that be sonar? 

Our new 3-disc set of Stingray mini albums features the soundtracks of three classic episodes, with specially recorded narration supplied by intrepid members of the World Aquanaut Security Patrol…

 

Loch Ness Monster

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“Find the Loch Ness Monster? What a crazy mission…”

Following a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster by Admiral Denver, the crew of Stringray are dispatched to Scotland to solve the mystery once and for all.

With linking narration by Phones.

Tune of Danger

tune-of-danger-small

“This is one concert that is really going to go with a bang.”

One of Agent X-2-Zero’s human agents plans to ruin a jazz group’s performance in Aphony’s undersea city…with a bomb hidden in a double bass.

With linking narration by Commander Shore.

 

Trapped in the Depths

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“Untie me professor – you can’t fight Marineville alone.”

Having joined forces with an undersea race, a mad professor at a fish farm holds Atlanta Shore captive in a plot to steal Stingray and destroy Troy Tempest.

With linking narration by Phones.

 

So, what are you waiting for, Terrainean? 

Order your copy of the Stingray mini album and experience these classic adventures from the 1960s in a whole new way.

Please note: As with all of our sales items, this mini album set is available exclusively to Fanderson club members.

If you would like to join Fanderson, you can do it easily online today.

Thunderbirds go pop!

Thunderbirds pop artArt & Hue has created a  collection of stylish Thunderbirds pop art prints to mark 50 years since the end of the original episodes in 1966.

22 art prints are available in a choice of 18 colours and 3 sizes, printed on museum-quality archival card of 310gsm, made from 100% cotton, using pigment inks which will last lifetimes. The collection showcases some of the series’s modernist Mid-Century architecture, American ‘ubergeek’ Brains and the British style of Lady Penelope and Parker.

Original Thunderbirds photographs have been given a stylish pop art treatment featuring Art & Hue’s signature halftone style. Halftone is an age-old technique that uses dots to make up the printed image, similar to newspapers or comic books.

View the full collection on Art & Hue’s website.

Raise a glass! Fanderson is 35 years old today

fanderson badges horizontal2Thirty-five years ago, on this very day, eight fans of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s work gathered at Pinewood Studios with Gerry himself and Keith Shackleton to discuss the formation of the provisionally-entitled ‘Anderclan’. At ITC Entertainment’s request, these representatives of the various Anderson appreciation clubs and societies were asked to form a single group that both ITC and Gerry would support.

Minutes of that meeting show other club names considered before a final choice of ‘Fanderson’ was made, and that the proposed £5 membership fee would include a pen, badge, membership card, a photo of Gerry Anderson, a photo montage and four issues of SiG magazine. Although the Fanderson 81 convention had been and gone, there was no talk of a further event, nor any detail of merchandise possibilities. Instead, at a time before the internet was widespread, there was much talk of answering letters and stamped-addressed envelopes!

Fast forward 35 years and we’ve since published 83 issues of our own magazine, independent of SiG, with an 84th on its way very soon. We’ve staged an amazing 38 conventions, bringing fans closer to the technicians and artists who worked on our favourite shows. We’ve raised thousands of Pounds for charities including Guide Dogs, Baby Lifeline, Macmillan Cancer Care, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Terrence Higgins Trust, Alzheimer’s Society, Diabetes UK, Children In Need and International Rescue Corps. We continue to work with the owners and licensees of products based on Gerry and Sylvia’s programmes. And our own merchandise puts much commercial product in the shade – especially our much-lauded series of soundtrack CDs.

But in 35 years what hasn’t changed is that this is still a club run by fans, for fans. So, raise a glass to Fanderson – you’re part of something very special.

Replacement Space:1999 Year 2 CD booklets on the way

Space:1999 Year 2 bookletMembers who were among the first to receive our Space:1999 Year Two CD will soon be receiving a replacement booklet in the post, direct from our manufacturers.

Although we’ve received nothing but compliments on the soundtrack album, the paper quality in the original booklets was not up to our usual specification so they’ve been replaced in all new stock, with replacement booklets now mailed to members who bought CDs before we got the corrected stock.

There’s no change to the content or design of the booklets, so feel free to keep the original booklet for regular ‘thumbing’ whilst keeping your new booklet pristine!

Yet to order your copy? You can buy yours online today from Fanderson Sales

IMPORTANT: FANDERSON SALES ITEMS ARE AVAILABLE TO FANDERSON MEMBERS ONLY. 

Ennio Morricone’s Space:1999 score to be released

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Penta Music has announced that it will be releasing a Space:1999 soundtrack CD – scored by Ennio Morricone!

Penta has confirmed that the CD will be released on the truly fitting date of 13th September.*

The CD features the music created for the Italian theatrical release that premiered on 14th January 1975, and consists of three episodes edited together into a feature length format: Breakaway, Ring Around The Moon, and Another Time, Another Place.

The theatrical release of Space:1999 (or Spazio 1999) pre-dated the series’s debut on Italian television by a year, with the first six episodes being broadcast from 31st January 1976. A further six episodes followed in July 1976, and the remaining twelve episodes during the autumn of the same year.

The series’s original iconic score was removed from the Italian theatrical version and replaced with a fascinating score by Morricone, who composed original material featuring frantic jazz themes and futuristic electronic sequences, reminiscent of Barry Gray’s work on UFO.

The release also includes avant-garde library material by Morricone selected from the RCA promotional series of vinyl LPs, Dimensioni Sonore, performed by symphonic orchestra, all in full stereo. Also included is the final large orchestral theme heard over the end credits, featuring vocals from Edda Dell’Orso and I Cantori Moderni di Alessandroni. This was re-used for the 1979 mini-series Orient Express, again scored by Ennio Morricone.

The 70-minute CD comes with a  full-colour 20-page booklet containing:

  • archive stills
  • a foreword from Fanderson chairman Nick Williams
  • plot information and credits for the three episodes.

This will be the perfect companion to Fanderson’s own Space:1999 CDs, and explores another side of this hugely popular Anderson series.

Read more about the release on Facebook

Order your copy from www.beatrecords.it today

* The date on which Moonbase Alpha is blasted out of Earth’s orbit in the series.

 

Call for help: A plaque for Gerry Anderson

Gerry AndersonA fundraising initiative to raise money for a plaque commemorating Gerry Anderson is calling on support from fans.

Gerry’s parents Joseph and Deborah Abrahams lived at 50 West End Lane in Kilburn from 1929 to 1935. This was a large detached house on the corner of Woodchurch Road and is now occupied by Sidney Boyd Court. Gerry also attended Kingsgate Primary School in Kingsgate Road, Kilburn, walking each day down Messina or Cotleigh Road.

The Historic Kilburn Plaque Scheme has proposed that a plaque should go on both Kingsgate School and Sidney Boyd Court in memory of Gerry.

Make a donation

If you would like to make a donation, please send a cheque payable to the “Historic Kilburn Plaque Scheme” to:

Ed Fordham, Scheme administrator, 7 Douglas Court, Quex Road, London, NW6 4PT

If you want to find out how else you can help with unveiling the plaque, or supporting other projects in Kilburn, you can email Ed at ed.fordham@gmail.com or phone him on 07974 950 512

Kingsgate School

Sidney Boyd Court

Review: The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson

The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson

Sam Denham reviews Ian Fryer’s new book on the story behind the Andersons’ extraordinary creative partnership.

It was good timing when I recently received a copy of Ian Fryer’s ‘The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’, the latest non-fiction book inspired by the couple’s innovative and enduring productions, as I’d just been re-reading the first, Tim Heald’s ‘The Making of Space:1999’. Since Heald’s eyewitness report was written – exactly forty years ago – an increasing number of books have been produced about the Andersons and their pioneering films and television programmes, from the ‘primer’ Boxtree publications of the early 90s, to detailed episode guides, biographies and behind the scenes accounts. I think I’ve read all of them, and even had the chance to write one myself – 1993’s 21st Century Visions – for special effects supremo Derek Meddings. But as some have asked, is there really any need for another? I’d say undoubtedly ‘Yes’, Ian’s book shows that there are still novel ways to explore the Andersons’ creatively rich partnership.

Taking an overview of the productions the couple were involved with together from ‘The Adventures of Twizzle’ to ‘Space:1999’, Ian places them in the context of the world in which they were produced, and unlike other books which have largely focused on the technical aspects of how they were made or the recollections of those who made them, he gives an insight into the creative development of the production team’s work, focusing on elements such as story conception, music, and production design. In the section covering Stingray he highlights the increasingly sophisticated approach to scripting, which results in a series that achieves an entertaining balance between adventure, romance and humour, while in the section on UFO he discusses the eye-catchingly memorable – if impractical – aspects of the costume designs and Barry Gray’s equally memorable – and possibly more future-proof – score. Such observations help shed light on the continuing appeal of the Andersons’ shows to viewers, many decades after they were originally produced, and in this respect the book is unquestionably successful.

The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson

The book isn’t without certain flaws though, both in accuracy and presentation. Having carried out my own research into the history of AP Films and Century 21, an early interview with Arthur Provis revealed that John Read and Reg Hill were never directors of Pentagon Films, that AP Films only became established as an active production company after the commission to produce ‘The Adventures of Twizzle’ had been received, and that stories of Les Bowie having been based at Ipswich Road prior to AP Films’s arrival have somehow confused the order of events. This information is also corroborated in other publications and documentaries not referenced in Ian’s bibliography.

A number of other errors have crept in that possibly should have been picked up at an early stage. Such slips include Alan Fennell being described as the script editor of Thunderbirds instead of Alan Pattillo, and Gerry’s return to Pinewood, after originally working there as a dubbing editor, being said to be in 1973 with the production of ‘Space:1999’, when he’d clearly already returned some years earlier to make ‘Doppelganger’ and the last nine episodes of ‘UFO’ (these are also later referred to as having been filmed at Elstree Studios).

It’s also stated twice that ‘Space:1999’ was the only occupier of Pinewood’s stages during the course of its production, although I can readily think of two others – ‘The New Avengers’ in 1976, and ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’ in 1974 – that were both shot during the same period. Christopher Lee would have filmed his guest role in ‘Earthbound’ just prior to the Bond film’s main foreign location shoot and its subsequent return to Pinewood in the summer for the filming of its studio interiors.

The oddest claim made in the book is in the section covering the conception of the ‘Thunderbirds’ craft, where it’s stated that Derek Meddings based his designs of the vehicles on the shapes of the numbers assigned to them. Having interviewed Derek extensively about his work on ‘Thunderbirds’, he never mentioned that this affected his creative thinking, and during a recent conversation with Mike Trim, Mike supported the opinion that the craft were designed purely with a ‘form follows function’ philosophy – the only exception being Thunderbird 5, which was solely inspired by the shape of the Tracy Island roundhouse.

In terms of presentation the book takes a slightly idiosyncratic approach, being divided into sections, most of which are devoted to one particular production. In the case of each TV show, Ian has also chosen an episode to examine in more detail, and this helps to give a flavour of the particular series without giving away too many spoilers to readers who may not have seen them. In addition he provides potted biographies of cast and crew along the way, although these do tend to break up the flow of the text and might have been more effectively included in a separate section at the end of the book, as would the extensive opening list of acronyms.

Probably the weakest aspect of the book’s presentation though is the visual content. Given that it includes a beautifully glossy section full of colour images, it’s a shame that most of these are either book covers or lobby stills (including one from ‘The Man From Uncle’!), indicating that official picture rights may have been difficult to obtain. Even given this limitation, the selection of images strikes me as not having made the best use of the opportunity – perhaps greater use of studio or location images, or photographs of cast, crew and props from events and conventions might have added more variety.

Such criticisms aside, I enjoyed reading ‘The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’. Apart from the occasional factual inaccuracy, the book appears to be generally well-researched, and offers an objective and very readable account of the Andersons’ almost 20-year partnership. Ian clearly has a genuine love and enthusiasm for the subject and has provided a thoughtful and thought-provoking addition to the Anderson literary canon. Although perhaps ideally suited to those who are relatively new to the Andersons’ worlds, and at £25 in hardback not such good value as the recent ‘Thunderbirds Vault’ book, it still deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone who loves the Andersons’ productions, or wants to learn about their creation. Forty years on, the snowball that Tim Heald started rolling with ‘The Making of Space:1999’ is still growing.

The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson: The Story Behind International Rescue is available in hard back and Kindle editions from Amazon.

Space:1999 fans – vote for Lego Eagles!

Lego Eagle transporter

Have you ever wanted to build your own Eagle transporter out of Lego? Well, with your support it may soon be possible…

Anderson and Space:1999 fans can vote on the Lego Ideas website for this classic space vehicle to be considered for production!

The proposal is for a modular Eagle with interchangeable passenger, cargo and pallet carrier pods, as well as display stands. The set will also come with minifigures of Commander John Koenig, Doctor Helena Russell, Paul Morrow and Alan Carter.

To cast your vote, simply create a Lego ID,  log in and click the ‘support’ button on the project page. From today, you have just 16 days left to vote!

About Lego Ideas

Lego Ideas is a website that enables builders to post details of models they would like to see made into official Lego sets. People then click a button to support the projects they like and those that get 10,000 supporters are submitted to Lego for review. During the review process Lego will look at the viability of making the model for a reasonable retail price, and investigate issues such as licensing availability.

 

Lego Eagle transporter

Lego Eagle transporter

Lego Eagle transporter

Arthur Provis has died

We are saddened to hear that the co-founder of A.P. Films, Arthur Provis, has died.

Born in 1925 in Reading, Berkshire, Arthur made a career as a photographer in the Navy before founding A.P. Films with Gerry Anderson in 1957. Together they went on to produce Twizzle and Torchy the Battery Boy before pioneering the Supermarionation process with Four Feather Falls. Arthur left the company in 1959 to team up with Roberta Leigh, with whom he made Sarah and Hoppity in 1961 and Space Patrol in 1962. 

Arthur’s role in the history of Supermarionation received fresh recognition when he appeared in Filmed in Supermarionation, a documentary directed by Stephen La Rivière and released in 2014.

 

Fanderson releases Space:1999 Year Two Soundtrack

Space: 1999 Year 2 soundtrack CD

Space:1999 fans rejoice!

Fanderson has confirmed the release date of its Space:1999 40th Anniversary Year Two Soundtrack CD. This lavish product will be available from 1st June 2016.

However, Fanderson members can pre-order their copy right now.

Fully updated and remastered from Fanderson’s double-CD release in 2000, this 4-CD album runs for approximately four and a half hours and contains music from Space:1999 Year Two episodes, as well as the compilation films Destination Moonbase Alpha and Cosmic Princess.

The release features new library tracks and archive material courtesy of composer Derek Wadsworth. The set is complemented by a sumptuous full-colour 40-page booklet  and a special 40th Anniversary slipcase.

Not a member of Fanderson?

Our sales items are available exclusively to Fanderson members.

If you want to get your hands on this and other exclusive releases such as our Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet sountrack CDs, you can join the club online. 

Join Fanderson