Posted in: TV | Tagged: 21st Century Films, films, gerry anderson, puppets, supermarionation, Sylvia Anderson, thunderbirds

Thunderbirds: Unseen TV Series Footage Unearthed in Garden Shed

Great news! Unseen footage of the Thunderbirds TV series has been discovered in the Buckinghamshire garden shed of a former series editor.

Film cans containing unseen footage of the Thunderbirds TV show have been found in a garden shed in the UK. A family found the cans – light-tight containers used to enclose film – in a Buckinghamshire shed belonging to their father, who was an editor on the show and died recently. Stephen La Rivière of Century 21 Films, which received the 22 old cans, said they mainly contained Thunderbirds material from the 1960s, including an alternative version of an episode that was never broadcast. It is hoped the footage – filmed on the Slough Trading Estate in Berkshire – can be shown to the public as part of the series' 60th anniversary next year.

According to the BBC, Mr La Rivière said he was contacted by the family last year. The footage and canisters were difficult to identify because of their condition, but "clearly the majority of it was Thunderbirds". The only way to get a proper look at the material was to transfer it to digital, so they began the "very, very slow" process of scanning it. A lot of the material was the same as what had been aired until he saw some that had not. What he saw turned out to be an alternative edit of an existing episode that had a previously unseen scene.

"It took weeks, bit by bit," said Mr La Rivière. "Every night, I'd get a link for a download of the latest one that had been scanned… you'd never know what you'd get. Eventually, listening one night… this one played out, and it was not the same as broadcast," Mr. La Rivière said, adding that the film can be damaged, exposing the contents to the elements, so there was some restoration work to do on the material first. He hoped the footage could be shown to the public in 2025, after 60 years of "lying around waiting to be discovered."

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