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Supermarionation (a portmanteau of the words " super", "marionette" and "animation")La Rivière 2009, p. 67. is a style of television and film production employed by British company AP Films (later Century 21 Productions) in its puppet TV series and feature films of the 1960s. These productions were created by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson and filmed at APF's studios on the Slough Trading Estate. The characters were played by electronic marionettes with a moveable lower lip, which opened and closed in time with pre-recorded dialogue by means of a solenoid in the puppet's head or chest. The productions were mostly science fiction with the puppetry supervised by Christine Glanville, art direction by either Bob Bell or Keith Wilson, and music composed by Barry Gray. They also made extensive use of scale model special effects, directed by Derek Meddings.
The term "Supermarionation" was first used during the production of Supercar, whose final 13 episodes were the first to be credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation". Some sources consider its precursor, Four Feather Falls, to be the first Supermarionation series because it saw the introduction of the electronic lip-syncing mechanism that featured in all of APF's later puppet productions.
The term was coined by Gerry Anderson, who regarded it as APF's trademark. In later life, he said that he invented the term to increase the "respectability" of puppetry, a medium he had not originally intended to work with. According to Sylvia, the productions were described as "Supermarionation" to distinguish them from traditional puppet theatre. Noting that a major disadvantage of APF's marionettes was their inability to walk convincingly, commentators have argued that the term expressed Gerry's preference for artistic realism and his wish to make the company's puppet techniques more lifelike.Garland, p. 65.
A 1960s supplement of the British trade newspaper Television Mail described Supermarionation as a "technical process" whose main features, besides electronic puppet control, were use of 35 mm colour photography, -scale filming stages, back projection, live-action inserts and live action-style special effects, and video assist to guide the crew. According to Chris Bentley, the term encompasses "all of the sophisticated puppetry techniques" used by APF – the foremost being the automatic mouth movement – "combined with the full range of film production facilities normally employed in live-action filming" (such as front and back projection, location shooting and visual effects).Bentley, p. 48. Other commentators have cited the complexity and detail of the puppets, models and sets as aspects of Supermarionation. Marcus Hearn states that the term reflected Gerry Anderson's desire to "promote his company's collective ingenuity as a proprietary process" and "ally his productions with Hollywood photographic techniques such as CinemaScope and VistaVision." He adds that it "encompassed the full panoply of APF's expertise – production values in model-making, photography, special effects, editing and orchestral music that had never been so consistently applied to any type of children's programme, let alone those featuring puppets."Hearn, pp. 20; 33.
The puppets of Twizzle had papier-mâché heads with painted eyes and mouths and were each controlled using a single carpet thread. Speech was indicated by nodding the heads.Rogers et al., p. 11. Somewhat embarrassed to be making a children's puppet series, Anderson and Provis decided to produce Twizzle in the style of a feature film, incorporating dynamic shooting and lighting in the hope that the results would bring them bigger-budget commissions with live actors.La Rivière 2014, p. 17. To add to this more sophisticated look, the series often used three-dimensional sets instead of traditional flat backgrounds, while puppeteers Christine Glanville and her team operated the marionettes not from the studio floor, but from a bridge above it.Bentley, p. 16.La Rivière 2009, pp. 15–16.
Following the completion of Twizzle, APF was unsuccessful in securing new clients, so accepted another puppet commission from Leigh: Torchy the Battery Boy.La Rivière 2014, p. 25. This series used puppets with wooden bodies and heads of "plastic wood" (a mixture of cork dust, glue and methylated spirit).Bentley, p. 22.La Rivière 2009, p. 19. The heads incorporated moveable eyeballs and a hinged jaw that was opened and closed with a string.Rogers et al., p. 12. In practice, jaw movement was difficult to control due to the bobbing of the puppets' heads.Hirsch, p. 61. By now all puppet sets were three-dimensional. They had also become more detailed, being made mostly of cardboard with fibreglass props.Rogers et al., p. 13.
After Torchy, APF severed ties with Leigh and produced its first independent series, Four Feather Falls, using funding from Granada plc.La Rivière 2014, p. 51. The puppets now had hollow fibreglass shells for heads and tungsten steel wires instead of strings. Meanwhile, the hinged jaw gave way to an electronic lip-sync mechanism. Designed by Hill and Read, this was powered by a solenoid, mounted in the head and fed electric current by two of the wires.Bentley, p. 31.Meddings, p. 10. Lip-syncing was a key step in the development of Supermarionation, and Four Feather Falls is regarded by some sources as the first Supermarionation production.Bentley, pp. 29; 31. The mechanism made it easier for the puppeteers to operate the marionettes in time with their dialogue as it was no longer necessary to learn the characters' lines. According to Anderson, as exaggerated movements were no longer needed, the puppets were finally able to speak "without their heads lolling about a like a broken toy." By now the puppeteers' movements were guided using a basic form of video assist: a TV camera mounted directly behind the film camera, which relayed footage to the various monitors around the studio.La Rivière 2014, pp. 55–57.Hearn, pp. 24–25.
The term "Supermarionation" was coined during the production of Supercar, APF's first series to be made for Lew Grade's distribution company ITC Entertainment. Its final 13 episodes were the first to be credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation".
The puppets' distinguishing features were their hollow fibreglass heads and the solenoids that powered the automatic mouth movements. Character dialogue was recorded on two tapes.Holliss, p. 45.Peel, p. 17. One of these would be played during filming, both to guide the puppeteers and provide a basis for the soundtrack; the other would be converted into a series of electrical signals. When activated by the signals, the solenoid in the head caused the puppet's lower lip to open and close with each syllable.La Rivière 2009, p. 29.
The heads of regular characters were entirely fibreglass; proto-heads were sculpted in clay or Plasticine and then encased in rubber (or silicone rubber) to create moulds, to which fibreglass resin was applied to create the finished shells. Guest characters were played by puppets called "revamps", whose faces were Plasticine sculpted on featureless fibreglass heads.La Rivière 2009, pp. 32–33. This allowed the revamps to be re-modelled from one episode to the next and play a wider range of characters.Rogers et al., p. 78. Many regulars were modelled on contemporary Hollywood actors.La Rivière 2014, p. 241. The puppets' eyes were moved by radio control.Peel, p. 18.
The placement of the solenoid dictated the puppets' body proportions.La Rivière 2009, p. 150. Head-mounted solenoids made the heads oversized compared to the rest of the body; the latter could not be scaled up to match as this would have made the puppets too bulky to operate effectively, and would have required all the set elements to be enlarged. According to commentator David Garland, the disproportion was influenced partly by "aesthetic considerations ... the theory being that the head carried the puppet's personality".Garland, p. 64. It resulted in many puppets developing appearances, though Anderson stated that this was not intentional.Sellers, p. 105.
In a 2002 interview, Anderson said that during the production of Captain Scarlet he was hoping to move into live-action television and that he endorsed the new puppets as a compromise for his inability to use live actors. In 2006, he recalled that Century 21 had been "typecast" for its puppetry: "So, knowing it was the only thing I could get finance for, I desperately wanted to make the thing look as close to live action as possible. And I think it was that that drove me on to bring in all the improvements and techniques." Thom believes that the re-design reflected Anderson's desire for greater "realism and spectacle".
Not all of Anderson's colleagues welcomed the change. Puppet sculptor and operator John Blundall pejoratively referred to the new puppets as "little humans" that lacked the personality of their precursors, also stating that the increased emphasis on realism hampered the puppeteers' creativeness. Fellow sculptor Terry Curtis believed that the re-design took away the puppets' "charm". According to director Desmond Saunders, APF was trying "anything to get the to look like ordinary human beings. But they are not ordinary human beings! ... I often wonder it if would have been better to make them more like puppets, not less like puppets." A drawback of the smaller heads was that they upset the weight distribution; this made the puppets harder to control, to a point where they would often have to be fixed to to be kept steady.La Rivière 2014, pp. 264–265. In addition, problems achieving realistic depth of field made it considerably harder to film close-up shots.
In a 1977 interview, Gerry Anderson said that the steps taken to make the puppets more lifelike were an attempt to "make the puppet medium respectable". On the preparations for Supercar, APF's first science-fiction production, he remembered "thinking that if we set the story in the future, there would be and the puppets would be riding around in the car for much of the time, so it would be much easier to make them convincing." According to interviewer Kevin O'Neill, this use of future settings for greater realism "almost accidentally" ensured that all of APF's subsequent series would be science fiction. In 2006, Anderson stated that the transition to this genre "wasn't a conscious move at all", but rather a natural progression given the basic deficiencies of the puppets. Sylvia said that the reasons were budgetary, due to the fact that APF could not yet afford to work with live actors: "... we were picking subjects that we could easily do in miniature scale."
David Garland calls character movement Anderson's "" and states that the puppets' limited mobility resulted in "vehicle-heavy science fiction" becoming his "preferred genre". He considers the use of marionettes – the kind of puppet "perhaps most unsuited" to an action format – to be "one of the most striking paradoxes" of the Anderson productions.Garland, pp. 70–71. Carolyn Percy of the Wales Arts Review comments that the inclusion of "futuristic vehicles" like Supercar allowed APF to devise "more exciting and imaginative scenarios" and "work around the limitations of the puppets ... to give their 'acting' the integrity to match the material."
The final Supermarionation series, The Secret Service, used footage of live actors to such an extent that the result according to Stephen La Rivière was "half-way between live action and Supermarionation". Its protagonist, Stanley Unwin, was modelled on the comedian of the same name, who both voiced the puppet character and served as its human body double in and other scenes where the puppet was impractical to use. According to Anderson, this was another way of avoiding the problem of lack of mobility: "I came up with the idea of getting Stanley Unwin to do all the walking shots, and driving shots in this Model Ford T the had. If, for example, you had a sequence where Stanley Unwin would arrive at a building in his Model T, he would ... get out, walk down the path, and as soon as he opened the door, you'd cut to the reverse angle and that would be the puppet of Stanley Unwin ... I used Stanley Unwin, married to his own puppet, to enable him to do all the things that the puppet couldn't do."La Rivière 2009, pp. 190–191.
Underwater sequences were filmed not in water, but on dry sets with a thin aquarium between the set and the camera to distort the lighting. Bubble jets and small fish were added to the aquarium to create forced perspective.Meddings, pp. 16–17. Beginning with Stingray, shots of aircraft in flight were filmed using a technique called the "rolling sky", which was devised by effects director Derek Meddings to allow filming of dynamic shots in confined space. It involved painting the sky background on a canvas, which was then wrapped around a pair of electrically driven rollers, and creating an impression of movement by running the canvas around the rollers in a continuous loop as opposed to moving the miniature aircraft itself.Meddings, pp. 36–37. Thunderbirds saw the introduction of the "rolling road", an adaptation of the technique whereby foreground, middleground and background elements of road sequences were created as separate rolls of looped canvas and spun at varying speeds.Meddings, p. 72.
In the pursuit of realism, newly built models and sets were deliberately "dirtied down" with paint, oil, pencil lead and other substances to give them a used or weathered look.Meddings, pp. 17–18. Jetex propellant pellets were fitted to the undersides of miniature ground vehicles to emit jets of gas resembling dust trails.Meddings, p. 54. Over time, the effects used for puppet gunfights became more elaborate: whereas gunshot effects in Four Feather Falls were created by simply painting marks on the film negative (which showed up as white flashes on the finished print), for later series the puppets' miniature prop guns were fitted with small charges that were fired using a car battery.Meddings, pp. 98–99.
| Four Feather Falls | 1960 | TV series | APF's first TV series to use marionettes with fibreglass heads and electronic lip-sync mechanisms. Regarded as the first Supermarionation series by some sources, although the term was not used until the production of Supercar.Sangster and Condon, pp. 318; 726-727. (2025). 9780749005290, Allison & Busby. ISBN 9780749005290 |
| Supercar | TV series | First production to feature rocket effects, back projection effects and underwater scenes filmed "dry" through water tanks.La Rivière 2009, pp. 56; 61.Hirsch, p. 62. The 13episode second series was the first to be credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation" and the first for which puppets were copied to allow episodes to be filmed in pairs by separate crews.Hearn, p. 33.La Rivière 2009, pp. 65; 67. It also marked the introduction of a dedicated special effects unit, led by Derek Meddings. | |
| Fireball XL5 | 19621963 | TV series | First production to feature front projection effects and puppet heads with blinkable eyes.Bentley, p. 62.La Rivière 2009, p. 103. |
| Stingray | 19641965 | TV series | APF's first colour series. First production on which puppets' facial expressions could be varied: main characters could now be fitted with "smiler" and "frowner" heads. For greater realism, poseable hands and glass eyes (bearing miniature prints of real human eyes) were also introduced.La Rivière 2009, pp. 97–98.Hirsch, p. 63. |
| Thunderbirds | 19651966 | TV series | |
| 1966 | Nearly all puppet heads were by now made of fibreglass (previously, guest character faces were sculpted in Plasticine).La Rivière 2009, p. 132. "Undercontrolled" puppets, lacking wires and operated from the studio floor, were introduced for scenes showing characters sitting – for example, fighter pilots in aircraft cockpits.La Rivière 2009, p. 152. | ||
| 19671968 | TV series | The lip-sync mechanism was moved to the chest, allowing the puppets to be redesigned in natural proportions. Guest characters were now played by a "repertory company" of permanent fibreglass puppets that could be superficially altered for each role (e.g. by adding or removing facial hair).La Rivière 2009, pp. 154–155.Bentley, p. 119. Eyes were now plastic. | |
| Thunderbird 6 | 1968 | Feature film | The puppets mostly kept their pre- Captain Scarlet body proportions, although heads and hands were made slightly smaller.Bentley, p. 304. First production to feature extensive location shooting.La Rivière 2009, p. 169. |
| Joe 90 | 19681969 | TV series | |
| The Secret Service | 1969 | TV series | Featured extensive footage of live actors. Last series to be "filmed in Supermarionation".Bentley, p. 152. |
| Captain Scarlet S.I.G. | 2001 | Documentary | DVD documentary on the making of Captain Scarlet. Linking sequences feature the puppet characters of Captains Scarlet and Blue. Produced by Gerry Anderson and credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation".Bentley, p. 322. |
The Andersons' puppet work also included The Investigator (1973), a pilot for an unmade Supermarionation series. This featured both marionettes and live actors but did not include the term "Supermarionation" in the credits.Bentley, p. 314.La Rivière 2009, p. 201.
Garland describes the underlying theme of Anderson's work as a "self-reflexive obsession with an aesthetic of realism (or more accurately a surface realism often associated with naturalism) borne of an unfulfilled desire to make live-action films for adults", further commenting that Anderson's typecasting as a puppet TV creator "led him on a lifelong quest to perfect a simulation of reality". He notes that Anderson's involvement with puppets began at a time when Western puppet theatre "had become increasingly marginalised to a niche, to an association with children's entertainment", and that APF's productions used an "aesthetic of incremental realism" to appeal to children and adults alike (a target audience that the Andersons referred to as "kidult").Garland, pp. 62–64. Garland suggests that this drive towards increased realism echoed "19th-century marionette theatre's own attempts to distinguish itself from other forms of puppetry (especially ), which also involved a tethering to the newly-emergent realist aesthetic across the arts".Garland, p. 66.
In 2004, Anderson created a Captain Scarlet remake titled New Captain Scarlet, which was produced using computer-generated imagery (CGI) and motion-capture techniques. Motion capture was used heavily for action sequences as it provided more convincing character movement. As a nod to Supermarionation, the series was credited as being "created in Hypermarionation".Garland, pp. 71–72.Bentley, p. 285. According to Anderson, Hypermarionation was not simply animation, but a "photo-real" production method combining CGI, high-definition picture and surround sound. Garland suggests that through Hypermarionation, Anderson sought to achieve a "hyperreal simulation of his live-action film utopia".
In 2014, a Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund a remake of the anime series Firestorm, to be produced using a technique called "Ultramarionation".
| Filmed in Supermarionation | 2014 | Documentary | Includes newly filmed Supermarionation puppet sequences featuring characters from Thunderbirds.La Rivière 2014, p. 337. |
| 2015 | Mini-series | Screen adaptations of three Thunderbirds originally released in the 1960s. Made in celebration of the series' 50th anniversary and filmed using 1960s Supermarionation production methods. | |
| Nebula-75 | 2020 | Web series | Puppet web series made during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. Filmed in the spirit of APF's early-1960s productions and credited as being "filmed in Supermarionation and Superisolation". |
Century 21 Films also worked on "Apollo", a 2019 episode of Endeavour that is set partly in a TV studio which is making a puppet series called Moon Rangers. The episode features story-within-a-story marionette sequences that were written and filmed as a tribute to Supermarionation.
Supermarionation characters also appear briefly in the BBC Children in Need Puppet Aid music video, albeit with no speaking or singing role.
The Japanese series Aerial City 008 (1969) and X-Bomber (1980) also featured Supermarionation-style puppets, (2025). 9781880656815, Stone Bridge Press. ISBN 9781880656815 with the latter of the two referring to its filming style as 'Supermariorama' in reference to Supermarionation. In South Africa, similar techniques were used to make Interster (1982–86). The American puppet series Super Adventure Team (1998) was created in imitation of Supermarionation but with more adult themes and suggestive situations.
, a 2004 puppet film by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, was inspired by Thunderbirds and has been described as an imitation or spoof of Supermarionation productions. Stone and Parker dubbed their filming process "Supercrappymation" (or "Supercrappynation") as the wires were deliberately left visible. (2025). 9781405385381 ISBN 9781405385381
A Stargate SG-1 episode, "200" (2006), features a self-parody in which the characters are played by Supermarionation-style puppets. (2025). 9781442256194, Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781442256194
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