TV Review - Thunderbirds 2086

Thunderbirds 2086 was one of my favourite childhood cartoons mainly because being a little bit like Thunderbirds meant Dad tended to watch it with me (though he's more of a Supercar man). I've long been intending to do something on the site about the show but faced with some resources consisting of the 1983 Grandreams annual and about half of the episodes I've never felt particularly confident doing much.


I'm not even sure why the show is set in 2086 when it was broadcast in 1982 (Japan) and 1983 (USA), though it didn't hit the UK until 1986. For one thing I'm not sure of the origins of the series. Oh, I know that it's a dubbed version of Scientific Rescue Team TechnoVoyager (the last often Romanised as TechnoBoyager). But I've heard two completely different origins of the dub. One is that Jin Productions basically ripped off Thunderbirds, which was shown in Japan; indeed, the initial import of diecast Dinky toys to support the thing inspired the Japanese toy industry to eschew tin and vinyl in favour of diecast and ABS, thus leading to basically the entire content of this site in a chaos theory way. The original show itself was probably a considerable influence on the likes of X-Bomber (brought to the UK as Star Fleet). That the vehicles carried 'TB' was a pure coincidence due to the Romanisation thing. Incidentally, diecast wizards Popy did plan to release combining toys of the TB vehicles but unforgivably only got as far as a prototype - a drool-inducing picture of this beautiful unicorn can be seen to the right. 24 episodes were made, though the show was cancelled after only 18 were screened. ITC then found out and presumably by hook or by crook acquired Western rights, did an English dub, slapped the Thunderbirds trademark all over it and broadcast it in the West in 1983 - I'm guessing it was shown elsewhere but it only seems to be in Blighty that it made any sort of impact.

The other option is that it was made completely with the co-operation of ITC (but not Gerry Anderson) as a co-production with being an update of Thunderbirds being planned from the start. To me that would have the advantage of passing Occam's Razor if it wasn't for wondering why Jin didn't use the Thunderbirds brand in Japan. Maybe someone else had already licenced the name and they had to broadcast it, or maybe they wanted to distance themselves from an old show. Could be anything, I'm no scientician.

Anyway, the series itself - beyond the chest-pounding title sequence which used early computer animation and employed the single greatest voice over in the history of anything - isn't actually great shakes. The starring players are pretty off the shelf types, including the head of International Rescue Organisation's nephew Skipper fulfilling the child association role (read as: you'll really hate him) and the usual touchstones for this sort of thing (impossibly good looking hero, crazy black guy, grumpy but fair team commander, spunky girl, space cowboy). Mainly they face the same sort of ecological and man-made disasters as the Tracy family did back in the sixties while there are also some genuine bad guys in Star Crusher and his Shadow Axis. Their arc was cut short with the show's cancellation, however, and in the dub at least there's very little sign of a real over-arching storyline.
 

The show has never been released on DVD, possibly for copyright reasons or just as likely due to a lack of interest. Various episodes were issued on VHS in the UK during the late 1980s through to about the mid-1990s, though never systematically and often jumbled on budget compilations with pukka Anderson stuff. Thus the episodes below are VHS (or maybe even TV) rips uploaded to YouTube.
 
As mentioned Grandreams did put out an annual for the Christmas market in 1983. It's pretty cobbled together. The strips were actually made in-house while most of the colour images are clearly grabbed from colour spreads in the same books and often blown up far too much - the incredibly grainy, fuzzy character models being the prime victim. It's main plus point is that it can be found cheaply if you shop around.

So that's about the extent of my knowledge on the show. Here are all the episodes I have. If anyone has a complete set please let me know, though I suspect that's only likely if the whole lot (it seems ITC did dub and broadcast all 24) did get a video release.

Thunderbirds 2086 playlist on YouTube