Fireball XL5


Fireball XL5 is a British children's science-fiction television series following the missions of spaceship Fireball XL5, commanded by Colonel Steve Zodiac of the World Space Patrol. The show aired for a single 1962–63 series, produced by husband and wife team Gerry and Sylvia Anderson through their company APF, in association with ATV for ITC Entertainment, and first transmitted on ATV on Sunday 28 October 1962. While developing his new show, Anderson thought a brand of motor oil – Castrol XL – had an interesting sound. A phonetic change created the name "Fireball XL", with the "5" added since the title seemed rather flat without the numeral.
The show featured the Andersons' Supermarionation, a form of puppetry first introduced in Four Feather Falls and Supercar and used again in their subsequent productions such as Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and The Secret Service. Thirty-nine black-and-white half-hour episodes of Fireball XL5 were made on 35mm film: all subsequent Anderson series were produced in colour.
Several Anderson series have been shown in syndication in the US, but Fireball XL5 is the only Anderson series to have run on a US network. NBC ran the series in its Saturday morning children's block from 1963 through September 1965.
Fireball XL5 is often confused with Space Patrol, a puppet series with a similar premise that was produced by Gerry Anderson's former collaborators Roberta Leigh and Arthur Provis.
The complete series is available on DVD in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US.

Premise

Set in the year 2062, the series follows the missions of Earth spaceship Fireball XL5, commanded by Colonel Steve Zodiac of the World Space Patrol. Zodiac's crew comprises the glamorous Venus, a doctor of space medicine; middle-aged navigator and engineer Professor Matthew Matic; and co-pilot Robert: a transparent, anthropomorphic robot who often proclaims "ON-OUR-WAY-'OME".
XL5 patrols Sector 25 of charted interstellar space and is one of at least 30 "Fireball XL" ships operated by the World Space Patrol. The ship has a "gravity activator" to produce internal artificial gravity and is made up of two detachable sections. A winged nose cone dubbed Fireball Junior houses the cockpit and serves as a self-contained short take-off and vertical landing craft for use on other planets. The rest of the ship contains a navigation bay, laboratory, workshops, lounge and crew quarters, together with the rocket motors that enable interstellar travel. On arrival at an alien world, the main ship usually remains in orbit while Fireball Junior explores the surface.
The World Space Patrol is based at Space City, located on an unnamed island in the South Pacific Ocean. The organisation is headed by Commander Zero, who is assisted by Lieutenant Ninety. For unspecified reasons, Space City's 25-storey, T-shaped control tower rotates. XL5s patrols are missions of three months' duration, with the ship on call at Space City between missions. The ship blasts off from a mile-long launch rail that ends in a 40-degree incline, or sky ramp. On its return to Space City, the whole ship lands vertically in a horizontal attitude using underside-mounted retro-rockets.
Until the episode "Faster Than Light", XL5 is depicted travelling around the galaxy at sub-light speeds. Its rocket motors, powered by a "nutomic" reactor, provide a maximum safe speed of "Space Velocity 7", allowing the ship to reach the outlying star systems of charted space within a few months. Outside the craft, the crew do not wear spacesuits: they take "oxygen pills" to survive the vacuum while using thruster packs to manoeuvre. The ship's "neutroni" radio allows virtually instantanenous communication with other craft over vast distances.

Episodes

Characters

Regular

Many episodes of Fireball XL5 are set on exotic planets:
Robert the Robot is the only regular character in a Gerry Anderson series to be voiced by Anderson himself, albeit with the aid of an artificial larynx. As related by Anderson in a deleted scene from the documentary Filmed in Supermarionation:
Anderson said that Fireball XL5 launching from a rail was inspired by an old Soviet design. A similar concept is used in the film When Worlds Collide.
Regular characters were voiced by Paul Maxwell, Sylvia Anderson, David Graham and John Bluthal. In common with many of the Anderson puppet shows, most of the important characters have American accents, with some exceptions: Venus is French, Jock the engineer is Scottish and some of the aliens have British accents. Language barriers are rarely encountered as most of the aliens in the series speak English.
Fireball XL5 has an instrumental opening theme and a sung closing theme. The latter – "Fireball", written by Barry Gray and performed by Don Spencer – entered the UK charts. The Flee-Rekkers later recorded an instrumental version in the style of Telstar.

Tie-ins and home video

In addition to the theme song, the series spawned tie-ins including toys, an MPC playset with rocket ship and figures, model kits, puppets, ray guns, water pistols, comic strips and annuals. A black-and-white Fireball XL5 comic strip ran in TV Comic from 1962 to 1964. In January 1965, the strip moved to the newly-launched TV Century 21 comic, where it remained for the next five years. The comic adventures, drawn by Mike Noble, were printed in colour until 1969, when they reverted to black and white. Four annuals, featuring comic strips and text stories, were published by Collins between 1963 and 1966. In the US, Gold Key Comics published a single-issue comic book in 1963; the following year, Little Golden Books published a colour illustrated story book .
Like most of the Supermarionation series, Fireball XL5 was given a "complete series" DVD release in Region 1 by A&E Home Video. A Region 2 version with new bonus material was released in 2009, superseding a 2004 release that had no extras. Also in 2009, a colourised version of the episode "A Day in the Life of a Space General" was released on Blu-ray.

Translations