It's the other way. A second season for UFO (iirc) would have seen a much enlarged moonbase with Shado HQ moved from under the film studio to the lunar surface and taking place 20 years later. However the ratings dropped towards the end of the run so a second season was shelved but a lot of design work had been done and Anderson was determined to do something with it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_1999#Conception_and_development
Neil Gaiman pays his respects. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6SV1yX-Kp5c#![/yt]
Well if you include his supermarionation shows, he'll most likely be best remembered for likes "Thunderbirds" and "Captain Scarlet".
I observed something interesting at my local mall when that film came out. There was a huge poster on a stand, and it looked pretty good, The interesting thing? The people that stopped to look at it were not the teens and youngsters it was directed at, but guys in their 30s and 40s. And that's the audience it should have been aimed at. My dream project would be a live action Stingray made by Michael Bay. Yes, I'm odd.
No doubt because they remembered it from their childhood, nostalgia can be powerful. Now of course it would be wrong to target soley at 30-40 somethings when making a film. But from an initial point of view that's your audiance, you work on expanding it to include other demographics from there. Remaking a show either as a movie or into a new TV show can be tricky, you have to be viewed as being respectful to the original or risk allienating part of your potential audiance. From memory in the uK at least the Frakes filmed was viewed to be less than respectfl, esp. when Gerry Anderson wasn't involved in it.
The massive amount of coverage and tributes all over the press and media show that he clearly is recognized as a major figure - in Britain at least. And he's probably the only tv producer to have his own fan club. As others have said, Thunderbirds is and always will be his most successful and best remembered series. The fact that 45 years later, the vehicles and characters such as Brains and Lady Penelope are still recognized as cultural icons, such that they can be used in tv commercials and the like without any need of explanation or introduction, must demonstrate that. What's perhaps not best remembered is what Gerry Anderson actually did. (My girlfriend demonstrated this to me the other day when she commented that she thought he was a puppet maker.) And his MBE was awarded for "services to animation" which demonstrates that the honours committee only thought Dick Spanner, Lavender Castle and New Captain Scarlet were worthy of note - or that they too had no idea what he actually was famous for.
Yep Thunderbirrds have been used to advertise at least 3 products I can think of, Kit Kats, Water and specsavers. But then again the Daleks have been used in Kit Kat ads.
I have a VHS copy of the anime Thunderbirds (think it was called "Thunderbirds 2061" or similar), I picked it up many years ago because I thought it was a continuation of the real Thunderbirds but was disappointed to find it pretty much a loose reworking. Hopefully some day I can transfer it to DVD as I've never seen it listed anywhere on disc.
Tangently on topic...as a young child between the ages of 6 to maybe 8, I caught sporadic episodes of Stingray, Fireball XL-5, and Thunderbirds when I visited my grandmother in south Georgia. WCTV aired those various series on early Saturday mornings during the late 60s through early 70s. A few year later, it aired Space: 1999 during the early afternoon on Saturday. Oddly enough, I don't remember any channel in Birmingham, AL airing any Gerry Anderson productions during those same years. Anyway, at that easily confused age, I somehow got it in my head that the various characters were handicapped, that they were paralyzed from the waist down and required "wheelchairs" to get about. the fact many of the characters used interesting conveyances to reach their designated vehicles rather than simply walking and running to them led to this mistaken assumption. Never mind that the different series did show puppets "walking"; I somehow "blocked" those facts as they would have disproven my "reasoning". Anybody else here come up with some crazy ideas relating to those shows? Sincerely, Bill