Thunderbirds 2086

Anime from the early '80s this short lived series (many Japanese animated series are short lived) based heavily on the '60s British children's show "Thunderbirds" about an international rescue organization. The original program used puppets (awful) and models of the equipment and spacecraft (awesome). The plots were silly and the puppets annoying. The producers for this later went on to make a couple of S/F series (U.F.O. and Space 1999) and for some reason they all seemed to involve a character with white-blond hair. Go figure.

Some things CAN be made better. In my humble opinion "Thunderbirds 2086" is much superior to the original series in plot, characters, and technical areas. The Animation is some of the best for the early 1980s, the plots good enough for even adults to enjoy, and the characters and situations they are in believable (As hard as this may seem for Anime). The series has a nice on-going plot but each episode can be enjoyed on it's own without having seen all the previous episodes. Even the dubbing was good at a time when most dubbed Anime was somewhere between poor and unbearable. And NO dumb songs!

To my knowledge it was shown in syndication about 1986 because that's when I was watching it regularly. I don't know about Showtime or anything else, I was watching it on the local FOX affiliate.

When I heard about this show when I was a kid, I was really excited. However watching it, I was sorely disappointed.

Being a big fan of the Gerry Anderson original, the one thing I liked was how the in the original, even though the Thunderbirds had incredible machines, they still had limits & had to work around them. They only had so many specialised vehicles (the mole, firefly) so the stories tended to show how the dangerous situations were overcome using ingenuity, & cleverness.

In Thunderbirds 2086 however, International Rescue (now a huge none secret organisation) had dozens & dozens of thunderbird machines, that would just so happen to be designed exactly for whatever emergency the team had that week. Even as a kid I felt the stories were not as good as the original. But to be fair, I think the original was a hard act to follow, plus it was a Japanese cartoon, so maybe they didn't have the same exposure the the original that we had.

So far I have been able to get several videos.

The series got a full showing only in two markets -

The USA and UK

Once it made it to weekday morning TV, it was mostly shown on local stations like the one I watched it on while living in Simi Valley, CA. I got up every morning before school at 6am to watch this show. No wonder shows like this never got good ratings look what time they are on!

It was also shown on Showtime and Los Angele's early cable system Select/ON TV before it was on local TV.

There is limited information out there but most of it can be found searching on TV.com (formally TV Tome) and good Google search.

The videos end up on Ebay usually in PAL format which requires either being converted into the North American video standard (NTSC) or played on a PAL to NTSC VCR. I have had my videos transfered to DVD and I'm currently working on a complete and update site with a lot of information.

As for the series itself, some may find it boring. There isn't a lot of shooting/fighting and there really aren't any villains until "Starcrusher" enters the scene about half way through the series.

It seems they were forced to add a villain to the plot of the series. Most of the episodes are self-contained and there really isn't a cycle to follow, which allows the episodes to be shown in any order and still make sense.

The series is loosely based on Gerry Anderson's Thunderbird marionette series of the 60's which I believe can still be seen on G4 (aka Tech TV)

If not the videos of that series are very easy to find due to its popularity.

I recommend both series

THUNDERBIRDS 2086, an anime adaptation of the 1960s show, was my first ever introduction to anime, or Japanese animation. I could have done better considering all the wonderful shows the genre has to offer, but this show makes for a great starting point and years later I still have a soft spot for it.

The premise is pretty much the same as the original show: an elite rescue force commandeers a fleet of special vehicles to disaster areas. Any updates made are fairly typical: as back in the 1970s-80s space operas were the rage, the show not only features perils from space (a critical space station reactor, a mutated plant, an explorer ship returning after nine decades), but also alien encounters (notably the recurring antagonist Star Crusher, an unseen but near-omnipresent being who can control peoples' minds). Fortunately the Thunderbird vehicles are suitably upgraded and made into awesome mecha: a shuttle that merges with two other ships to create a juggernaut carrier, a submarine, a space station, and a collection of other awesome mech, that the series puts to use in various episodes.

A word of warning though: despite the various adventures the cast experience, they aren't too well characterized - a young hero, his love interest, a veteran, a Texas cowboy and a token black cadet and their commander and that's about it. These aren't the cast from the original show, so that could put TB fans off (and ironically at the time of its first airing in Japan anime viewers were put off because it wasn't Japanese enough – no giant robots or alien invaders). Still, the episode stories are fairly good and more interesting (more dramatic and tense, as befits anime) to my mind than what the original show had.

The series boasts some spectacular space visuals, fairly good dubbing by anime veteran Peter Fernandez (SPEED RACER, STAR BLAZERS) and a stirring musical score from Kentaro Haneda (one of Japan's finest composers and piano players). It makes for a great compelling watch.

This Jap Anime cartoon was shown on Prism or Showtime if I remember correctly. I have ben searching for the name of this show for several weeks now and finally found it!! The Thunderbirds were a high tech rescure team who could rescue victims in the air on land or sea. Sort of Navy SEAL paramedics with a little of the Transformers and Voltron thrown in. A great animated seris if you can find it.