by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday night’s Mars movie screenings (http://marsmovieguide.com/) were supposed
to be a 1981 Gerry and Sylvia Anderson puppet film from England called Captain
Scarlet: Revenge of the Mysterons and some
of the TV shows it was edited from giving the back story of the Mysterons in
the first place and why they would want revenge against Earth people in general
and Captain Scarlet (Wayne Forester) and Captain Blue (Robbie Stevens) in the
first place. Alas, the screening proprietor couldn’t get his old VHS tape of Revenge
of the Mysterons to track properly, so
instead he ran three shows from a later incarnation of the series — Instrument
of Destruction, parts 1 and 2, and Mercury
Falling — and followed it up with Red
Faction, a 2011 production of Universal
Cable Television for the science-fiction channel that used to be called the
Sci-Fi Channel but now bears the preposterous name “syfy” — they wanted a name
they could copyright — which is supposedly pronounced the same as “sci-fi” but
which I insist on calling “see-fee” as a comment on its ridiculousness. Gerry
Anderson and his wife Sylvia started making science-fiction TV shows with
puppets for British commercial television in the 1960’s, and they had a kind of
dorky charm; more recently Gerry Anderson continued, until his death in 2012
(along the way he and Sylvia broke up and she died in 2016), to rework this material
to take advantage of improvements in special-effects technology, first to
remake his old black-and-white TV shows in color and then to redo the puppet
effects with CGI, in honor of which change he renamed the process they were
supposedly filmed in from “Supermarionation” to “Hypermarionation.”
Last night
we got the “Hypermarionation” versions of the two parts of “Instrument of
Destruction” and the lamer “Supermarionation” version of “Mercury Falling,” and
together they told a story of the Mysterons, the indigenous race on the planet
Mars, who get understandably angry at the entire population of Earth when two
astronauts landing on Mars accidentally destroy an entire Martian city. The
city reappears, however, with a bunch of pissed-off Mysterons who decide to
avenge themselves against the Earthlings by capturing two of them, Captain
Scarlet and Captain Black (Nigel Plaskitt), and remodeling them into
Mysteron-controlled killing machines, then sending them back to their
headquarters at SPECTRUM, the international consortium that by this time has
taken over all Earth explorations of space. (I couldn’t resist the idea of a
story in which the good guys of SPECTRUM would take on the bad guys of SPECTRE, James Bond’s nemeses.) When
Captain Scarlet and Captain Black are supposedly killed in an auto accident,
Scarlet recovers and regains his original moral sense but gets to keep the
near-indestructibility the Mysterons conferred on him, giving him a biological
process called “retro-metabolism” in which, if he’s shot, the bullet will wound
him and he’ll feel pain but his body will retro-metabolize and he will overcome
the effects of the bullet and heal back to normal. So the ever-resourceful
Mysterons — whom we never see, at least in their normal form, though we hear a
deep, sepulchral and electronically altered voice that supposedly represents
their collective consciousness, and we get to see two green circles to indicate
when they are in action — revive Captain Black from the dead, enabling him to
break out of his grave from inside à la Plan Nine from Outer Space, and turning him into a permanent Mysteron agent
moving about the Earthlings and trying to screw things up.
The Mysterons also
have a shape-shifting feature which they use to kidnap a super-industrialist,
Hank McGill (also Nigel Plaskitt — remember that the characters are puppets or
CGI creations and so the actors credited are only voice performers), which they
do by kidnapping his chauffeur, taking over his car, driving him to a junkyard
and crushing the car, with him in it, à la Goldfinger. Then a Mysteron impersonates him and has him order
his staff to aim their missiles at targets which are natural ones for the
Russians, thereby launching a first strike and an all-out nuclear war between
the superpowers (or something). In “Mercury Falling” the intrigue centers
around a satellite Earth has just launched around Mars, and the Mysterons’
successful shoot-down of it because they don’t want anyone from the Enemy
Planet photographing them and thereby revealing what they look like au
naturel. This is O.K. kids’ entertainment
but nothing more, and one wonders of the persistence of Gerry Anderson in
remaking his old scripts over and over and over again just to take advantage of technological
improvements — not that they mattered much, since the characters even in CGI still look tacky and blocky, they have virtually no facial
expressions, and though Anderson and his crews eventually got the people’s
mouths to move when they were supposedly talking, they didn’t get them to move
very much.
