Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

One of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's most famous series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons revolved around the exploits of Captain Scarlet, Spectrum's top agent who was killed by the Mysterons, replaced by a double which they could control, and who subsequently fell off a tall building which broke the Mysterons control. Luckily, this meant that he was now indestructible — the Mysterons power of retrometabolism meant he couldn't be killed unless every atom in his body was dispersed.

Unusually for a children's series, the body count in the show was high — the very first episode started with Captain Black opening fire on a Mysteron city and destroying it. Needless to say, the Mysterons didn't take kindly to this and, after re-creating their city, killed him and made a duplicate. Unlike the replicated version of Captain Scarlet, he had a deathly-palour and was firmly on the side of the Mysterons.

Produced directly after the immensely succesful Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet ran for a series of thirty-two episodes although, unlike it's more famous sibling, it was only thirty-minutes in length. One major advance in the series was the introduction of heads on the puppets that were for the first time in propoprtion to the bodies — the solenoids used to operate the mouth having been moved down into the body.

As with all the Supermarionation series, Captain Scarlet was heavily merchandised with items ranging from die-cast toys through to comics, board games and, obviously, tie-in novels. The books were released by Armada Paperbacks with three titles being issued in the space of two years. Repeats of the series in the 1990s on BBC2 led to a revived interest in the series and a number of new novelisations were produced under the Young Corgi imprint, all of which were written by Dave Morris.

A new CGI version of the series, titled New Captain Scarlet, was shown on ITV1 during 2005, although its Saturday morning transmission meant that it passed completely unnoticed by the majority of people.