In the meantime, to whet your appetite A Christmas To Remember is available to stream, free of charge, until 18:00 on Sunday 26th December. Remastered and reconstructed Super Space Theater films The Incredible Voyage Of Stingray and Invaders From The Deep (to be shipped separately in summer 2022) Edwardsville Slideshow - a collection of archival production and promotional stills featuring key locations from Edwardsville, Illinois, where Stingray was shot. With music. (10 min). s "making of" featurette, The Thing About Stingray is included here, running 20:21, with thoughts from some of the original crew on how the series was brought about, and its legacy (this was included in A&E's series set). There's also a Gerry Anderson interview, running 12:10, from...I don't know, because there's no date given, no context for the interview, and it obviously just begins and ends in the middle of a taped conversation with Anderson. Interesting...but not particularly helpful.

And the 75-second home movie footage of behind-the-scenes work is great, despite the sound of the projector drowning things out. Not that there’s any dialogue, but we didn’t need a deafening projector sound either. Okay, some of the extras are questionable, such as the truly hideous NTSC alternate opening which is perhaps best lost at the bottom of the sea. Commentary - in this exclusive new audio commentary, director Richard Taylor goes down memory lane and explains how Stingray was conceived and shot in Edwardsville, Illinois; how different actors behaved and improvised during the filming process; where and how key sequences were shot; how his original concept for the film evolved; etc. There are some interesting comments about the reconstruction of the Director's Cut of the film as well. Truth be told, all the characters sport relatively vacant stares, an obstacle that was leavened by cycling through an expressive variety of puppet heads from shot to shot. The greatest hurdle remained the profusion of strings enveloping the marionettes—that those wires are rarely intrusive is a tribute to the diligent folks at the other end of those strings and the craftspeople behind the scenes. The show’s head shop aesthetic was fully-formed right from the start thanks to future Bond special effects artist Derek Meddings, the art direction of Bob Bell, and model-maker Reg Parks, whose stylish creations include the Stingray sub itself, a sleek piece of machinery that borrows its futuristic curves from a toy space gun. Music Video - Richard Taylor made this brand new video for Jerry Riopelle's tune "Hi Gear", which is heard multiple times throughout Stingray. (3 min).

Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. I've recently read some criticisms of Stingray online, ranging from the puerile (in the vein of, "you'll enjoy it better if you're high") to the patronizingly dismissive, due to more "enlightened" times and one assumes, at least one enlightened reviewer (for some apparently, Stingray is a racist, misogynist relic of the past). I can't speak to the sounds-promising substance abuse angle, but God knows I've gone down the path of over-analyzing a movie or TV show on political/sociological lines. I suppose you can find serious issues in Stingray if you strain hard enough to connect the dots, and maybe they're valid (I try, though, to keep in mind what a psych professor once told me: the human mind will always "draw" connecting lines on any collection of five dots or more on a piece of paper...no matter how randomly placed). Yes, it could seem suspicious to those forever on the lookout for colonial/imperial tendencies in old pop culture, that those underwater aliens in Sea of Oil are so nice about giving up their oil for friendship with WASP. However, I'm inclined to think the overall conscious scheme of things in Stingray is an entirely more prosaic "heroes and villains" dynamic, hung on a well-worn melodramatic comic book framework (and gussied-up with sci-fi, Bondian trappings). After all, the show's primal intentions are pretty well stated by James Garner's head Captain Troy Tempest in the series opener: "At least we know what we're up against. Whole races of people living under the sea. Some bad and I guess some good. Some to help...and some to fight." So much for deep geo-political messages, possibly based on race. And if the all-white WASP team offends you today, try and remember that in 1964, producer Anderson was giving boss Sir Lew Grade exactly what was asked for: a kids show specifically aimed at primary audiences in England and America, with America over 87 percent white in 1964...and England well over 90 percent. Was Stingray diverse and forward-thinking like the similarly-structured Star Trek on American television two years later? Certainly not...but it was hardly "evil" by omission, either. Presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and granted a 1080p transfer, Stingray arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Dark Force Entertainment. Anderson and his colleagues were always far better as technical wizards rather than tellers of compelling tales. And when the eponymous sub unleashed hell via its torpedo tubes, the result is explosive in more ways than one.

Key player is Troy Tempest, who looks like a constipated James Garner. (An excellent making of documentary on the latest Blu-ray set reveals that Garner was used as a shorthand guide for the model makers).Description: Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's much-loved Supermarionation series - their first in color - has been remastered in High Definition from original 35mm film elements for this Blu-ray edition! On the Set of Set Sail for Adventure: From the estate of Stingray contributor Alan Fennell, we present some previously unseen home movie footage taken by Alan whilst filming Set Sail For Adventure When you have an iconic show like Stingray, rejigging the episodes to form something allegedly more epic is understandable.

English television titan Lew Grade (he produced everything from The Prisoner to The Muppet Show) was so impressed by the Anderson’s success he bought out their company, and it was Grade who made the call to produce their next series, Stingray, in color—but just for U.S. markets, the color version didn’t appear in the U.K. till 1969. They dubbed the chromatic upgrade “Videcolor” and the Anderson’s trademark style—string-operated manikins bobbing and weaving through intricately detailed sets—was given a fancy moniker too: Supermarionation (perhaps a sneaky tribute to Dynamation, Ray Harryhausen’s space age brand for his own animation technique.) Stingray is also noteworthy for the refinements made to the Supermarionation process between shows, with the puppet sculpts having more detail, and being more proportionate in comparison to those featured in earlier productions, making the characters seem more defined and realistic. Model work also feels more polished, the design of Stingray itself being a genuine stroke of pop culture iconography. The ‘underwater’ sequences stand up remarkably well, even now. The fullscreen, 1.37:1 color transfers for Stingray: The Complete Series -- 50th Anniversary Edition look pretty good, with solid-enough color (maybe some fading here and there), a sharpish image, and some occasional screen imperfections, like dirt and scratches.Watching Stingray now, I can more fully appreciate the extensive effort that went into synching up all the details of the impressive production--not just the marionettes' mouth movements, but all of the effects, including moving the dolls around, the impressive, consistently imaginative production design, and the almost big-screen-worthy direction and editing of these little half-hour sci-fi adventures. With that said, I'm not sure what else I can add to a discussion or evaluation of the show...without sounding like some creepy old weirdo who's taking this all too seriously. Thunderbirds is my childhood touchstone with Gerry Anderson's world, and I have found memories of occasionally catching it when I was quite young. I've seen it a few times since then, and it never fails to entertain me. Briefly. Stingray, which came out the year before Thunderbirds, is less ambitious technically (not only in its half-hour run time, but in the scope of its special effects), but it still satisfies that nostalgia-driven rush of childlike pleasure when an adult viewer sees some cool models and funny-looking puppets moving around in herky-jerky fashion on the TV screen. However, there are remnants of your pop culture history that were perfectly acceptable to watch as a child (my two littlest kids watched Stingray for a couple of episodes--my little girl in particular took to the Barbie doll-like aspects of mute Marina), or cool and cute to watch in your twenties (girlfriends and wives love that "little boy" enthusiasm at that age when you're revisiting something in your past)...but which now feel a tad, um... juvenile when you're pushing 50--no matter how much you loved it when you were a kid (everyone knows that even Gerry Anderson, who always hoped for a big-screen live-action career, was slightly embarrassed having to do what amounted to kiddie shows with dolls). There’s an out-of-nowhere dream sequence in that episode that is in fact a harbinger of things to come: Sylvia often used the character’s dream lives to explore both their fears and desires (in the Loch Ness episode, Sheridan dreams he’s a top-notch bagpiper). The Cool Caveman ponders Tempest’s dreams about undersea cavemen, and Raptures of the Deep plays up Tempest’s autocratic yearnings with his late night reveries of ruling the world. For the head man of WASP, Tempest seems to have a multitude of issues—in Tom Thumb Tempest, he’s the victim of a mysterious plot to shrink him. Tempest is so terrified he wakes up in a sweat… yes, the Anderson’s puppets actually sweat. Into Action With Troy Tempest/A Trip to Marineville/Marina Speaks: Three 21-minute Mini-Albums, released in 1965, and featuring the original voice artists In their initial forays into the world of puppets, Gerry handled the production, writing, direction, and occasional voice work—wife Sylvia handled most of those chores along with designing costumes for the characters (the marionettes were formidable in their own right; between two and three feet high, and rigged with complex mechanisms, they were great for detail but hell on production costs—bigger manikins meant bigger studios). As work began on Stingray, Gerry stepped away from directing and Sylvia took a break from voice work so they both could concentrate on the nuts and bolts of the production and the rigorous art of storytelling—and the effort shows.