A Major Disappointment

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I have read the previous comments and am delighted at how intelligent, sexy and wise all we XL-5 fans grew up to become! I too suffered from years of dirty looks from Old Boomers whenever I mentioned this show. They swore it never existed, I boldly proclaimed it did, it did! I saw it as a six-year-old so of course it imprints upon Primal Joy circuits: The now-extinct Saturday Morning Cartoon block, when you watched anything animated. But only a handful of shows like XL-5 exhibited imagination, most were machine-made Hanna-Barbara slop like Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat. Yes, back in them days, we had to wait for our TV set to 'warm up'-- thanks to a little something we used to call 'vacuum tubes' (they looked a lot like Robert the Robot!) And TVs had a smell to them too (ozone and the paper bits (!!) inside heating up)-- and we liked it!!! Reviving this show is why God created the DVD and the Internet! My only complaint is the DVDs do not have enough extras on them; they could benefit from more comments. Like from Sylvia and Gerry Anderson maybe? Anyway, if you have never seen the show-- well, decide for yourself. Okay, they're 45 year old children shows, but hey-- it's PUPPETS!! Oops, I mean, it's SUPERMARIONETTES!! If you can't like that, your strings need readjusting, baby.

Every Saturday morning I would tune in to see this show, it was my earliest favorite that I can remember. I think I was 5 or 6 years old. It was pretty well done for that time, although in B&W, it featured good characters, cool rockets and special effects, and best of all, it stirred the imagination. I always remember the jetmobiles, and for my birthday, I got an Fireball XL-5 playset, which costs my mother a whopping $5. It was the best. When I got a little older, I figured out that I could do something close with an 8mm camera, using GI Joes as my cast, and plastic models (blown up with fire crackers and set on fire, of course) for special effects. And then along came the "Thunderbirds"...

Early Gerry Anderson puppet series.Being a 1960s B&W space show gives it a first season Lost In Space-feel.I had a mixed reaction to the series, sometimes I would flick on a tape and enjoy it, some of the spaced out sets were cool, while other times I found it too unlike the more traditional Stingray/Thunderbirds material. The spacecraft the series is named after and the robot did nothing for me, but the series should be viewed as just simply a warm up for the much better Stingray series that followed.

A pox on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for coming up with this one! Not that it was bad, but I found it terrifying! Surely I was not the only small child that it scared. Those cursed marionettes were so lifelike that I got the impression--childlike though it was--that they were people who had somehow been turned into marionettes. The thought that this could actually happen was frightening to me. To this day, I remain traumatized by my memories of this show. Hearing some of the .wav files from the show remind me of just why I found the whole thing so traumatic.