Review for Terrahawks: Volume 3

Introduction

As I prepared to bask in nostalgia once more, I almost got drenched by a cold bucket of reality when I realised that I am going to watch on Blu-ray, a 31 year old children’s television programme. This could be an incipient mid-life crisis, although less embarrassing than a paunch, comb-over and fast car. But when I think back to what I was also watching on television back in 1986, as well as the Terrahawks, you can bet that I’d be tuning in to re-runs of The Phil Silvers Show on BBC2, originally a big hit back in 1955. Nostalgia is big business in television, and if you surf any of the minor channels, you’ll find repeats of comedies and dramas stretching back nearly sixty years. Yet one genre of programming that practically never gets repeated now is children’s television, certainly none the shows that you or I grew up with. That’s down to OFCOM rules of course, as what they deem fit for children today would see shows of my childhood fall foul of their regulations. Heidi’s grandfather smokes a pipe? Can’t show that! So practically the only way that we eighties kids can revisit our childhoods is through the medium of the boxset. That’s my justification and I’m sticking to it.


Martians are invading! Martian androids to be precise, led by the evil Zelda. All that stands between her and the conquest of Earth are the Terrahawks, an elite group using advanced technology and their wits to defend the planet. Tiger Ninestein is their leader, second in command is Captain Mary Falconer, along with fighter pilots Kate Kestrel and Lt Hawkeye, while in orbit is Lt Hiro. Of course they also have their trusty Zeroid robots to fight alongside them, led by Sergeant Major Zero.


All thirteen episodes of season 3 are presented across two Blu-rays thus. And when we last left the Terrahawks, someone was in the family way...

Disc 1
1. Two For the Price of One
2. Child’s Play
3. Jolly Roger One
4. Runaway
5. First Strike
6. Terratomb
7. Doppelganger
8. Cry UFO
9. Space Cyclops
10. Timewarp

Disc 2
11. Space Giant
12. Cold Finger
13. Operation Zero

Picture

Terrahawks gets a 4:3 pillarboxed transfer at 1080i resolution, and 50Hz reflecting the original PAL transmission in the UK. It is quite obviously an upscale, most probably from videotape elements, as the image is soft and completely absent the clarity and crispness of a native HD transfer. It is however stable, with consistent colours, and absolutely no signs of compression to my eyes. In that last aspect, it will no doubt be superior to the DVD version of the same. Terrahawks comes from the Gerry Anderson stable of shows, and in terms of its mechanical effects, the wondrous collection of vehicles and machinery, it’s a spiritual successor of Thunderbirds, while the Zeroids and Cuboids make for visually appealing mascot characters, most typified by the end credit sequences. The show marked a move away from the marionettes in favour of hand puppetry, which has the immediate effect of doing away with the strings. It also allows for comparatively more expressive characters.


Update: I didn't have the packaging and the sleeve notes to refer to, so I had to make some assumptions about the transfer. I have since been informed in a tweet by Stephen La Rivière, Producer/Director/Writer of the Thunderbirds revival that

Quote:
"There are restoration notes on the inside cover that explain that 35 of the 39 episodes are from film, not from video tape... And whilst it suffers from being 16mm prints, the difference between the film and video eps is noticeable."

Sound

The sole audio track is a PCM 2.0 English track, which given the vintage of the show I would assume is mono. Certainly there’s no significant separation or discreet placement to the audio effects and music, although the typical home cinema Prologic treatment does open it up a bit. There is the rare moment of tape hiss though. The dialogue is clear throughout, and subtitles are provided should you require them. It’s all down to the casting and the performances, which aren’t bad, certainly more fun when it comes to the villains, although Ninestein’s faux American accent is obvious to me now in a way that it wasn’t at age ten. He sounds more like Kryten from Red Dwarf. The show’s real coup was in getting Windsor Davies to voice Sergeant Major Zero, the ‘head’ Zeroid. He creates a toned down (and slightly more politically correct) version of his It Ain’t Half Hot Mum character, and is easily the star of the show.

Extras

I did like the fiddly menus of series 1, the noughts and crosses grid where the Zeroids and the Cuboids played a game while you were led through the menus. But apparently free will is more important. The Zeroids and Cuboids are gone on these menus, all that is left is the 3 by 3 grid, and you can navigate at leisure through them. The downside is that it’s hard to tell what the episode order is at a glance.

This third and final collection of Terrahawks comes with the strongest selection of extra features so far, all of them in some form of HD, whether upscaled or native.

The Terrahawks Story lasts 38:59, and the cast and crew are interviewed about the making of the show, with a few vintage behind the scenes sneak peeks. There is also a comparatively recent interview with the late Gerry Anderson about the show.


Supermacro-Machinations lasts 10:15, again with some vintage looks at the puppeteers at work, but with a recent interview with Judy Preece about her job on the Terrahawks set.

Why We Love Terrahawks lasts 13:15, and gathers some fans to talk about what made the show so special to them, among them one Jamie Anderson, son of Gerry.

Making the Unexpected lasts 48:46 and is a special treat, a contemporaneous making of featurette from the eighties.


You also get the S.O.S. music video (3:11), some FX Trims (4:47), and an Image Gallery slideshow.

And of course there is the Big Finish Terrahawks audio episode, My Enemy’s Enemy, running to 59:30.

Incidentally, if you have a BD-ROM drive, you’ll find pdf scripts for some season 3 episodes on disc 2.

Conclusion

The final season of Terrahawks certainly goes out on a high, although that’s mostly by going back to the original ethos of the show, as well as raising the absurd and comedic stakes as far as they can go. The first season truly established the premise, and played with the idea of this scheming android on Mars trying to take over the Earth along with her equally grotesque minions, thwarted on a weekly basis by the valiant Terrahawks. The second season on the other hand became a lot more experimental. For one thing it seemed contractually bound to promote the vocal talents of Kate Kestrel, and the stories seemed to go to contrived lengths to incorporate her singing, culminating with the Terrahawks’ own version of Eurovision in one episode.


This final collection of episodes goes back to the show’s mission statement, of Zelda trying to take over the world, and it’s in that format that the show’s strength lies. Kate Kestrel still manages to get a song in every week, but there’s no need to go to elaborate lengths about it; she’s either in the recording studio, or sat at a piano each time she’s introduced in an episode, and that’s enough to get the song in. The stories are no longer written around her. There is a continued disappointment though, the increased diminution of the Terrahawks characters. Hawkeye may as well not be in it, and once again Hiro’s presence is minimised, his comic interactions with 101 even fewer this time. But this time I was also disappointed by the relative lack of Zeroids in this season, cut down mostly to Sgt Major Zero’s interactions with the cast, or with Dix-Huit, saving the one major Zeroid episode for last, itself a disappointing dream episode, albeit one with a comic sting in the tail.


But the decreased screen-time for the Terrahawks means more screen-time for Zelda and her minions, which as well as having the usual fun with Yung-Star and his predilection for Granite Crunchies, also introduced a new character who was so far off the weird scale that it makes you nonplussed at how it got past the censors. It turns out that the first episode did suffer a pair of scissors when following season 2’s cliff-hanger, Zelda used a crowbar to help Cy-Star give birth. She gives birth to It-Star, a schizophrenic, bi-gender baby, by turns a cute little girl, and an evil scientist with a German accent, straight out of a WWII movie. It’s been thirty years, thirty years in which I’ve grown up, and seen whole lot of bizarre programming and movies. I’ve seen some weird s***, but I want some of what the Terrahawks creators were smoking when they came up with It-Star.


You do get the feeling that ideas were beginning to run low, especially when you can see movie influences on some of the episodes. The Coldfinger episode is merely a pun on the Bond movie, with little else in common, but with Space Giant riffing strongly on King Kong (with a soupcon of Escape from the Planet of the Apes), and Cry UFO’s visual homage to Close Encounters, let down only by it being a Stew Dapples vehicle, you get the sense that Terrahawks was running on empty close to the end of its run. Space Cyclops, one of Zelda schemes of the week, lacks the bite of the first two thirds of the season. But really, when it comes to the first seven episodes, where the sheer lunacy of the It-Star character is centre stage, this is the best Terrahawks of the lot.


I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this trip down memory lane, partaking once more of the show I devoured as a child. Limitations of the source material aside, you’re not going to see Terrahawks looking as fine as on these Blu-rays, and they come very much recommended.