Warren Ellis on Thunderbirds

From Warren Ellis' Wired UK Column:

Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing - it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves.

It is also about astronauts. Real-life astronauts have become an unremarkable bunch. We only hear about them these days when they die. Hell, by the end of the 60s, the brilliant and imaginative pilot Scott Carpenter was selling crap on local TV. But in Thunderbirds, Jeff Tracy is an eccentric billionaire, able to convert his private Caribbean island into a secret cosmodrome for exotic aircraft and a re-usable space vessel, with enough scratch left over to support a cutting-edge skunkworks lab, servants and an inexhaustible volume of vermouth. Are you a government minister despairing over the seemingly unsolvable need to get kids interested in science? Thunderbirds says that science is awesome because you get to fly in space and live on a high-tech island full of booze. Beat that for incentive.

Warren Ellis on how Thunderbirds inspired Global Frequency:

I defined GLOBAL FREQUENCY from the start as Rescue Fiction. if not explicitly Post-9/11 Rescue Fiction. Because Thunderbirds is the anti-Superman. Now, I just woke up, so it’s okay if that doesn’t make sense. But immediately after 9/11 I found people on message boards ACTUALLY SAYING OUT LOUD that they wished Superman were real because he would have saved the WTC. And that is an anti-evolutionary wish. What you say is, I wish the dozen or so people who knew this was going to happen could have informed someone who’d actually listen and that we had had the sense/madness to engineer a mechanical response to someone attacking NYC with flying death tubes

Thunderbirds: Darwin’s Airforce