Hello everyone! 🙂
Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!
As I’ve been revisiting ‘Thunderbirds’ recently with its TV show, its movies and its latest audio adaptation of a novel by Big Finish/Anderson Entertainment, my parents and I checked out another ‘Supermarionation’ series by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson called ‘Stingray’. It was great to check out! 🙂
I hope to check out the audio adaptation of the ‘Stingray’ novel ‘Operation Icecap’ soon, which I currently own as a download from Big Finish. ‘Stingray’ is another one of my childhood shows, though I didn’t see it as much as a kid compared to ‘Thunderbirds’. ‘Thunderbirds’ was more exciting!
I did have the ‘Stingray’ toys I used to play with when I was a kid. 😀 ‘Stingray’ lasted for one season from 1964 to 1965, comprising of 39 episodes in total. My parents and I saw ‘Stingray’ on Britbox. I enjoyed watching each episode as we went through them and it was good to see the series properly.
Mind you, I’m not sure the transmission order of the episodes matches to the production order. The same can be said for ‘Thunderbirds’, as certain pivotal characters are dealt with later on in the series as opposed to earlier, such as Troy Tempest and ‘Phones’ taking Marina to visit her underwater home.
The series takes place in the mid 2060s where the nuclear-powered combat submarine called Stingray is the flagship of the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (WASP), responsible for policing the Earth’s oceans. Not that we see other vessels apart from Stingray in this series, but there you are. 😀
The WASP is based in the self-contained city of Marineville, located several miles inland somewhere on the West Coast of North America. Captain Troy Tempest pilots Stingray along with his navigator whom he calls ‘Phones’. They both answer to the hoverchair-bound Commander Shore of Marineville.
Shore has a daughter called Atlantia who works as a lieutenant in Marineville. Troy and ‘Phones’ are also joined by Marina, a mute young woman from the undersea city of Pacifica. Our Stingray heroes encounter many dangers in the series, including combating against King Titan and his Aquaphibians.
The voice cast of this series have been in many other Gerry Anderson productions including ‘Thunderbirds’. Don Mason voices Troy Tempest in the series whilst Robert Easton voices Phones, X20 and some of the Aquaphibians. There’s also Ray Barrett and David Graham voicing in this series.
Ray Barrett voices Commander Shore in the series as well as Lieutenant Fisher and King Titan. David Graham voices Admiral Denver, Oink the Seal and some more Aquaphibians. Lois Maxwell (who has featured in the James Bond films with Roger Moore) voices Atlanta, Commander Shore’s daughter. 🙂
Not surprisingly, Marina isn’t voiced by anyone in the series. Mind you, Sylvia Anderson does voice Marina briefly in Troy’s mind when he’s dreaming in the episode called ‘Raptures of the Deep’. Marina has her song featured in the end credits for each episode as opposed to the opening credits.
The opening credits of each ‘Stingray’ episode are quite action-packed as opposed to the gentler Marina song sung during the end credits of each episode. It’s contrast to ‘Thunderbirds’, though it was considered that the song ‘Flying High!’ would be sung at the end of each ‘Thunderbirds’ episode.
The last episode of ‘Stingray’ is basically a clip show, presenting three previous ‘Stingray’ adventures in a similar fashion to how ‘Thunderbirds’ did ‘Security Hazard’. The final episode ‘Aquanaut of the Year’ features flashbacks to ‘Emergency Marineville’, ‘Raptures of the Deep’ and ‘Subterranean Sea’.
Incidentally, Dennis Spooner, who was script editor of ‘Doctor Who’ during its second season, wrote quite a number of episodes in ‘Stingray’. You can tell it’s Dennis Spooner’s writing in some of the episodes as the comedy stands out a lot in certain characters and that includes the guest characters.
‘Stingray’ has been a fun show to check out on Britbox recently. I’m glad I’ve seen the series all the way through as opposed to seeing occasional episodes either on TV or VHS. I hope I’ll get a chance to revisit ‘Stingray’ again and review each of the 39 episodes in full detail as well as ‘Operation Ice Cap’.
I would like to check out ‘Space: 1999’ next and hopefully ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’ on Britbox!
Thanks for reading!
Bye for now!
Tim. 🙂
Bradley's Basement 