The Terrahawks: The Complete Series
01/09/2004 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 

pub: Revelation. PAR 61213. 10 volume DVD set. Price: £69.99 (UK).

Buy The Terrahawks in the USA - or Buy The Terrahawks in the UK

check out website: www.revfilms.com and www.supermarionation.net

I have a theory that this review isn't going to go down well with everyone. I mean, even the Gerry Anderson purists don't rate this series compared to the classic Anderson 60s series. From my point of view, I remember Gerry Anderson being interviewed in the early 90s declaring that the puppets used on 'Terrahawks' were going to be vastly superior to the earlier shows.

All right, the early shows were criticised for how the marionettes jerkily walked but at least they had legs. With 'Terrahawks', we had puppets without strings and as the supplementary material describes, the operators had their hands up the puppet's nether regions and rods to move their arms. Watching all 38 episodes here, all I counted were 3 or 4 full length body views, the rest of the time these characters were either sitting down or having something hiding them from the waist down and worse, practically everything in close up which gave a very claustrophobic view of everything in contrast to the rather good modelwork by the other effects team.

Not quite on par with Derek Meddings old team but still a worthy effort for the most part. In some respects, considering this series was going to be called 'Thunderhawks', it was obvious that Anderson was originally planning to do an update on 'Thunderbirds'. Some elements of this remained with the exotic vehicles and the way they were launched, even the implausible Battlehawk take-off and avoiding showing the characters on their backs taking off - there must have been an easier way.

When this series was first on, I tended to think characters 'Tiger' Ninestein and Mary Falconer were based on Michael and Mary Parkinson (both TV interviewers for those abroad) and watching now, I think Kate Kestrel, sans her multi-shaded hair, could have been Moira Stewart (a BBC TV news presenter). Although there was a hint in the extras that the characters were based on real people, its a shame that more detail wasn't given although no doubt some will say there was a Sean Connery influence although I think it must have been Yung-Star's wrinkles that made him look that way.

In many respects, I think 'Terrahawks' was influenced by committee. A children's series was asked for and it played down to that element rather than let it find its own level by taking itself more seriously. Scriptwriter, Tony Barwick under his various 'Stein' aliases, tried to balance things out with a lot of in-jokes that tend to make people groan rather than smile.

Oddly enough, towards the end of the series when it was written more seriously, the show actually succeeded in being rather good. Mind you, it did help to remove Hawkeye and minimise Hiro's involvement and getting rid of Cy-Star's 'wonderful' moments helped immensely as well. Having Kate Kestrel nearly complete singing a song practically every episode was a bit of a bind and using Stu Apples rather too much tends to indicate a limit to how many puppets they had available. As an after-thought, gents, it's all well and good thinking an in-joke will be something everyone will get but carrying it on episode after episode tends to ring one note.

There was even plans to take Kate and Stu off into a spin-off series. I have to say that although I think that Kestrel's musical career was a bit out of place here, there wasn't anything really wrong with Richard Mycroft's compositions (anyone remember his own hit 'It Takes Two To Tango'?) but it became so much padding away from the actual purpose of the show.

OK, for those not in the know, 'Terrahawks' is a secret organisation designed to thwart the plans of the alien android cackling 'Zelda' and her accomplices based on Mars from doing the nasty to the Earth. Most of the time, the Earth people didn't know what was going on although I think the World Song Contest might have had them wondering.

The Terrahawks are bossed around by one of nine clones called 'Tiger' Ninestein who can have another body replacing him and uploaded with a similar personality within a day of arrival. He's also an incurable computer game fanatic. The other characters are a tad wishy-washy in the form of Mary Falconer, Hiro, Hawkeye and Kate Kestrel - who has a lot more to do than the others cos she's a public singing star. Since the marionettes couldn't do much physical moving, most of such action was left to ball-shaped Zeroids.

As noted above, much of this series looks like it tried to emulate Anderson's past glories but lacked the cohesion of them and brought the story down to pantomime levels. In several instances, it was shown that the Terrahawks actually had the capacity to annihilate Zelda's Mars base but didn't. Hardly the action of a pro-active force in defending the Earth. With a little more work, this might have been a much stronger series.

I have to confess that I was more than a little interested in the extras with this boxset and these were of great interest. Top of this list was the interviews with the voice artists and a demonstration of them doing a script on disk # 10. Incidentally, those of you playing the box set, should allow the credits to finish on disk # 6 for a little surprise. Transcripts of all these interviews are interspersed throughout the DVDs, as well as scripts and merchandise. This alone makes this set of historical value if you collect all things Anderson.

Although I'm not convinced by expecting the unexpected, this series is really an acquired taste and you might well end up buying it for what ever reason you personally deem for owning it.

GF Willmetts