Customer Reviews

Fireball XL5 - The Complete Series

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kennedy was in the White House when this aired. No one had heard of the Beatles yet. All televisions were black and white and most ran on cathode tubes. I was 7 years old. This is a great treat to anyone who wants to relive the children's programs of their youth. It is not sophisticated like "Thunderbirds", though. Thunderbirds had effects that still make you wonder how they did them. It also had scripts that approached B movie quality. Fireball is in black and white and is quite primitive by comparison. Still, it will make you want to grab some milk and cookies and watch with delight.

I would have been three or four when this show was on the air. But yet the few episodes I must have seen stuck with me strongly enough that I tried for years to find out what it was. The only thing I remembered was "Fireball." A year or so ago, the Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds set came out on DVD. Based on the cover photos, I thought maybe this was the show I had enjoyed as a small child in South Dakota. When I heard about the Fireball XL5 release it all clicked. End result: I ordered this set and have watched about six episodes. Nostalgia aside, it's really a fun look back at what must have been and exciting space adventure for kids back in 1962. The stories are what grabbed me originally and I must say, they aren't at all bad. You can see a lot of influence on Star Trek in this effort. Is it cheesy? Of course! But in the best way. It's a glimpse into the excitement of the JFK-era space race that must have captured every person's imagination in the early 1960s.

One of my friends said of the cover - "It looks so old!" But the transfers in this box are pretty amazing for a 41-year-old show. The intro to the show ("OK Venus?" "OK, Steve!") are the perfect start to each episode and a chance to boldly go where no puppet (these shows are filmed in "Super Marionation") has gone before. If you're someone who likes clever stories and is willing to put up with Black and White video from 1962, I think you'll have a blast!

It took 41 years, but we finally have them all, and in glorious black & white! I loved these as a 6 year old and appreciate it even more now. Looking back at these, I see their influence on more mainstream shows like Star Trek (Space City's chief engineer was even Scottish...beam me back to '62 Scotty!). The re-mastering is superb, the bonus stuff is great. I wish there had been some sort of guide book in the set with info about the episodes, but all-in-all it's still a great set. A must-have for fans and campy fun for everyone else.

What a delight it was when the mailman dropped off this box set today, I dropped work at once to sit down and watch it. It's hard to believe that it has been 40 years since a young boy sat in front of his parents old Zenith to watch this delightful show, my favorite Anderson production after "Supercar".

The first thing I noticed was how the resolution and sharpness of the DVD format revealed exactly how cheesy an affair this show was. Every wire, scratch, scuffmark and dirt spot on the puppets and props shows up in crystal clarity. Before the DVD I never noticed the string that pulled Fireball down the launch rail, and I did not recall that Venus's eyes were just painted on her face. Of course, that only makes the whole thing more endearing in my book.

After the great Stingray box, the extras in the package seem skimpy. There are only two commentary tracks, director Alan Patillo, who speaks very quickly in a Scottish accent, and voice artist David Graham. There is also a not very interesting 17 min. feature on the guy who drew the Fireball comic art for the old TV21 magazine. There are also some production stills on each of the five disks. Also, note that the individual disc sleeves have some confusing discrepancies as far as what episodes are contained on which disc.

Still, it's great to be reunited with this show on something besides a poorly dubbed VHS bootleg. Thanks, A&E Video. Now, come up with Supercar and I can die a happy man.

Fireball XL5 was my favorite childhood TV show and I was brokenhearted when NBC replaced it with Underdog! The things
you loved as a kid seem to always stay tucked away inside your
inner child. When I found out that the series was coming out on
DVD I felt the same thrill that I felt each saturday morning 40
years ago. As an adult Fireball XL5 seems kind of silly and the
production is far below Gerry Anderson's later kid's programs
but it's still the best series he did. This DVD boxed set features all 39 episodes in digitally remastered quality. If
you remember this show from when you were a kid buy this set. With the world in the state it's in today this program will bring
back your childhood innocence for a few hours and make you feel
young and happy again. To this day I have a model of Fireball XL5
sitting on my TV. Thanks to A & E for finally releasing this great show!

Fireball XL5 was the second fully-developed Supermarionation series, Supercar being the first. But it was the first Gerry Anderson show to air on a major network (NBC) in the United States. The exploits of Colonel Steve Zodiac, space doctor Venus, professor Matt Matic and Robert the Robot made a big bang in their Saturday morning time slot, and ran for three years. The puppet strings are not as visible as in Supercar, but Fireball XL5 was slow in getting off the ground, and in many ways Supercar was a better show. Unlike Supercar's dynamic opening theme, Fireball opened with moody instrumental music and dramatic shots of the rocket. Professor Matic sounded too much like Supercar's Professor Beaker, but voiceovers make or break a puppet show, and Beaker was the better character. Supercar's casting was better also, with Jimmy and Mitch the monkey for comic relief. The obvious exception was the addition of Venus in Fireball XL5. By the fourth show Fireball had hit its stride, introducing an alien mascot character in the role of Mitch, and a few sparks between Steve and Venus, as hinted at in Barry Gray's clever closing song, smoothly sung by Don Spencer: "My heart would be a fireball, and you would be my Venus of the stars." Here are all 39 episodes digitally restored in glorious black and white, along with various extras on each of the five discs, including voice actor commentaries, photo galleries, and "The Noble Art of Fireball XL5," a featurette with comic strip artist Mike Noble.

First of all, A & E/CARLTON VIDEO are to be commended for putting these series out in one full, affordably priced sets! The STINGRAY and CAPTAIN SCARLET sets were perfect....didn't like buying THUNDERBIRDS in the seperate sets BUT I bought them all.
I disagree with the first review left here...When ANDERSON did SUPERCAR, this series and STINGRAY... GERRY ANDERSON was hitting his peak, in my opinion. These are the shows that were much more interesting to watch because they were character driven and had very colorful secondary characters and villians. I also like the more 'CARTOONY' designs used. The later series became more about special effects and vehicles. Not to say THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET are not GREAT shows...they are. I just prefer the earlier work like FIREBALL XL-5.

Also, a clip from this series most recently appeared in the TOM HANK'S film 'THAT THING YOU DO' and everyone knows about his admiration of space series, etc., which this falls into nicely.

This is a GREAT series! AND I am sure it will look much better than the PAL VHS transfers which have been the only things available until now!

Rick Goldschmidt RANKIN/BASS Historian

During the 1960s Gerry Anderson produced a series of "high tech" puppet shows using a series of innovations collectively named Supermarionation. Cinematic special effects such as rear projection and travelling mattes were combined with circuitry enabling a puppet's mouth to respond to sound track cues. The result was an amazing series of programs: Four Feather Falls, Supercar, Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90. Each show was a quantum leap over the previous one in terms of sophistication, due largely to a remarkable gang of geniuses such as Anderson, Derek Meddings, Christine Glanville, Reg Hill and Barry Gray who stayed and evolved together for most of the decade. Although the "heart" of Anderson's ouvre may be the great hour-long Thunderbird episodes, my favorite will always be Fireball XL5.

I nearly jumped out of my seat upon seeing a ten second clip in Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do. At that moment my childhood came rushing back and I was once again in front of the TV on a Saturday morning, munching cereal and following the adventures of Steve, Matt and Venus. On a 19 inch black and white set the strings didn't show, a papier mache ball was a convincing planet and a converted B-58 airplane model was a frightening alien spaceship.

There are wonderfully goofy things here that only a kid would understand. An ultramodern spaceship carrying cargo packed in wooden crates is laughable to adults but perfectly sensible to a ten year old boy whose world includes both watching television and building tree houses. Characters that could exist in deep space with only an oxygen pill for support stretches credibility, but we hadn't had 8th grade science yet and everything was still possible. Even to this day there are a few episodes (Invasion Earth and XL5 to H20 for example)that rivet the attention. In fact, after 40 years Fireball's unpretentious tone still wears better than some modern science fiction, including the often cringe-producing Star Trek or most of the Irwin Allen schlock.

The importance of Fireball in the history of television can be debated ad infinitum, but let's leave that to those who didn't see it as a kid. For those of us 50-somethings who grew up with this (these) shows, it's a part of our childhood, as real as reading the back of cereal boxes. 1962. Kennedy in the White House. A Chevy in the driveway. Good Housekeeping on the coffee table. John Glenn circling the earth. Steve Zodiac exploring the universe. Ah, life is good!

P.S. When will Four Feather Falls be available to U.S. audiences?!

Okay, you have three key officers: a captain, a doctor, and a science officer. Oh, and the chief engineer is a Scotsman! Does any of this sound familiar?

For the 1960s, the original Star Trek series is hailed for breaking feminist ground by allowing 'wimminfolk' to answer phone calls on the bridge and change bedpans down in sickbay. On Fireball XL-5, Dr. Venus is a brilliant space doctor who often makes key contributions to the success of the missions. She participates as a fellow adventurer, and not simply as a 'damsel in distress.' She even flies a supersonic jet and saves a space general's life!

Yes, Dr. Venus gets coffee for Steve Zodiac. But he's busy flying the spaceship and can't leave his station, and her act is not submissiveness but simple kindness and courtesy. Remember when men and women liked to please each other? It seems to me that she is far and away one of the best feminist role models to emerge from 1960s TV sf.

Meanwhile, a few years later on the 'non-sexist' Star Trek, Captain Kirk commands a spaceship where the females all wear miniskirts, the yeoman falls into his lap every time the Romulans attack, and he saves the universe again and again by bedding alien females. Steve Zodiac may have joked, "Just like a woman!" but he always showed Venus genuine respect, while Captain Kirk may have limited his remarks to a smirk but blatantly treated women merely as objects . . . if not playthings.

Yes, Fireball XL-5 is nothing more than a children's show. It is also nothing less than a ground-breaking television series in the science fiction genre. It certainly paved the way for the portrayal of more realistic human interest stories in science fiction, and that contribution shouldn't be overlooked just because you can see the strings.

It is 2062, and the World Space Patrol, set at Space City, watches the skies with its fleet of XL spacecraft. The hero of the half hour, Colonel Steve Zodiac, is the pilot of Fireball XL5, the interplanetary rocketship protecting Sector 25 beyond the Solar System from alien invasion. With Steve Zodiac in command, his crew consisted of Venus, a doctor of space medicine, Professor Matic, the science officer, Venus's pet Zoonie the Lazoon, and Robbie the Robot, the rocket's mechanical co-pilot. I was 6 when Fireball XL5 aired and ever since I've been a SciFi and realSci fan, going on from XL5 to the likes Dr Who, Lost in space, the moon landings and a PhD in astrophysics. However despite the oddities of the witty 60's script, the spaceship Fireball XL5, and its accessories like the hover scooters, are a fantastic iconic design (particularly in the colour stills). The storylines are quite strong for a kids series, and the aliens are quite convincing - although we seem to see many of them again quite soon as the fishpeople in Stingray. In many ways Fireball XL5 is has a younger feel to it than later Anderson projects, so I expect boys nearer 5 to 7 would appreciate it most (or those now around 50 who first saw it at this age). I quickly bought this DVD set when it was going particularly cheaply on Amazon.

My son at 6 really took to the two XL5 videos I had, and like me he really really loved the Steve Zodiac song sung by Don Spencer at the end of each of episode, and we often used to have sing-alongs with it in the car. Although it was nice and thoroughly `modern' to let Venus (voiced by Sylvia Anderson) leave the nappies and washing behind and come along as part of the crew, it's not long before the good Dr of Space medicine is making the coffee or tripping over and screaming for male assistance. Typical Dr Venus quote `Oh I am a Tootie' - which I presume must be some sort of 2060's space bimbo. So Venus provides the backup for the two batchelor men, like doing the ironing, cooking, cleaning up after them, while also juggling a highly succesful career. Typical Professor Matic quote 'Now now, Venus, none of your feminine intuition. Let's stick to the facts' - I expect they had to cut what happened next.

My only regret is that the XL5 series hasn't been colourised in the same manner as the early B&W Bewitched episodes, as the XL5 spacehip would look great in colour. My son (now 9) hasn't taken to the whole XL5 series as he now can't tolerate the black and white TV - however he absolutely loves the B&W AP Films co-production `Torchy the battery boy' from 1958 so perhaps he is actually both too young and too old at 9 for this level of SciFi sophistication. What do I care I bought the series for my 50th birthday - and he's happy with Joe90 and Terrahawks in full `HudsonColour'. And even now "I wish I was a spaceman, the fastest guy alive. We'd Fly around the universe in Fireball Xl5. Way out in space together, conquerors of the sky, My heart would be a fireball, a fireball, and you would be my Venus of the skies."