I Watch TV: Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons

 

Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons

An expedition to Mars goes wrong when Captain Black mistakes a signal for an attack and destroys the city of the Mysterons. Fortunately they are able to recreate it, but they vow revenge and begin a war of nerves. They have the ability to recreate people and things, allowing them to infiltrate places. In their first attack they recreate Captain Scarlet, an agent of SPECTRUM, and have him kidnap the World President. In the climax of the first episode he falls off a giant tower in London, but survives and is both indestructible and no longer under Mysteron control.

Anyone could be a Mysteron! The cold war well under way at the time the latent paranoia of some of the earlier Gerry and Sylvia Anderson puppet adventure shows comes to the fore. More than that, most episodes have Captain Scarlet being put into a life-threatening situation – and not getting out in time. “They crash him and his body may burn/ they smash him but they know he’ll return – to live again,” as the theme song goes. It’s for kids!

This is probably the highlight of the puppetry of the era, miniaturisation of technology means they have proportionally sized heads unlike the larger ones of previous series. The strings are well-disguised. Having realised that they can’t get walking to look right they simply don’t, filming them from above the waist, cutting between shots when they cross a space, or putting them on a travelator. The Mysterons – shown as a deep voice, two O-shaped lights and machinery going wrong – still manage to have some menace. And their agent, the corpse-like Captain Black projects some enigmatic villainy. Often thwarted, SPECTRUM sometimes lose, adding another bit of tension to the question of how Captain Scarlet will be mangled this time.

Am I tempted to poke holes in this? One episode quite late on in the order I watched has them celebrating the first year of SPECTRUM. So SPECTRUM was set up after the Mars mission? And has a world-wide network of people keeping SPECTRUM Pursuit Vehicles in secret disguised garages? It’s fun when a building falls apart and they drive out so I can forgive that. It does perhaps explain some of the weaknesses in their supply chains. One episode has the Mysterons destroying the Angels airplanes, apparently a unique design (built in less than a year? Presumably to fit with Cloudbase, their flying base? How long has that been in progress). In another there’s only one refinery that makes SPECTRUM’s special fuel.

Still, enough of that. Perhaps a flaw is that Captain Scarlet has very little character. At one point we see him gambling, but he’s undercover. He goes out to dinner with Captain Blue (they’re friends but we rarely see that as they’re always working) and a couple of the Angels. The half hour episodes don’t allow for much development. And despite the advances in the puppet faces, they don’t allow much emotion. He mostly does determined, and the others too.

Watch This: Gritty puppet spy-fi thriller with some genuine scares
Don’t Watch This: Very silly, also probably too dark for younger kids