You Don't Want To Go Home Again

This Sunday brings the first new Sucrophile column in 25 years, courtesy of people who really ought to know better. As is our wont here at the Institute, we performed the test tastings while watching kids TV from the golden age of same.

Rather than watch animation, though, we fired up a DVD from "Thunderbirds," the wonderful puppet disaster series produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in the mid-sixties. And while my ten-year-old self was thrilled to be watching those old episodes again, my sixty-something present was more than a little appalled at what I was seeing. These episodes were like an item-by-item list of all the hubristic things that went wrong in the sixties and seventies*.

The pilot, for example, features a nuclear-powered airliner. Even in 1964 I can't believe anybody thought a flying nuclear reactor would be a good idea—to say nothing of a flying nuclear reactor whose shielding lasts only as long as it takes to watch the in-flight movie.

Then there's "Pit of Peril," in which the US Army develops a very mobile walking fire-base, with enormous claws at the front for tearing out trees and otherwise defoliating the place, to deal with those "pesky jungle wars" the country was always getting involved in. Just as Vietnam was beginning to escalate.

In the aftermath of 9/11 and Grenfell Tower, I can't see anybody being comfortable watching "City of Fire," with its flaming and collapsing world's-biggest building. Then there's the fact of the fire being caused by a flamingly (sorry) incompetent woman driver. A "joke" the writer makes a point of repeating at the end...

Still looking forward to seeing "Path of Destruction," in which a gigantic walking (there's that conceit again) super-logger is designed to deforest enormous tracts of land. And "Attack of the Alligators!" in which growth hormones released into a South American river super-size the title reptiles. Honestly, it's as if someone used a time machine to go forward and learn the most stupid things humanity was capable of, and then went back to write kids' scripts about them.

Time for me to dust off the ol' keyboard and write that "Thunderbirds" global-warming-is-good teleplay.