Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons - Production

Production

When talks to find an American broadcaster for Thunderbirds fell through in July 1966, production for the series' second season ended with the completion of just six episodes at the behest of ITC financier Lew Grade. Having overseen Gerry Anderson's work since the creation of Supercar in 1960 – and going on to buy his production company, AP Films, during the making of Fireball XL5 – Grade was enthusiastic for Anderson's programmes to be transmitted abroad, in the lucrative American market, and decided that a new concept would do more to attract potential bidders than a second season of Thunderbirds.

As a result of the cancellation, Anderson was required to come up with an idea for another Supermarionation series. He had once been inspired by the thought of creating a live-action police drama in which the hero would have unexpectedly been murdered halfway through the series and replaced by a new lead character. Now giving fresh consideration to this idea, Anderson resolved that a selling point for his new series could be a character that can be killed at the end of each episode and resurrected by the beginning of the next. This, coupled with contemporary theories about the possibility of life on Mars, led to the idea of an interplanetary war raging between Earth and its neighbour and a worldwide security organisation being called on to defend human civilisation. After further thought, Anderson decided that "Scarlet" would make an unusual codename for this organisation's "indestructible" agent who can come back to life, while "Blue" could be his partner's designation. From this, Anderson reasoned that all the personnel should have colours for names so as to form the whole "Spectrum" of colours, and decided that someone called "White" should be the leader of the Spectrum Organisation, much in the same way that white light is composed of, and can be broken down into, the colours of the spectrum.

I thought we should make a show about the Martians, but then there were doubts being expressed by scientists as to whether the so-called "canals" on Mars were really man-made. Since we were well into pre-production, I came up with the idea of making the Martians invisible, so if they did come up with conclusive evidence that there was no life on Mars, I could say, "Ha-ha, yes there is—but you can't see it."

Intrigued by the often-heard phrase "life as we know it", Anderson wanted to set the aliens of his new series apart from the conventional extraterrestrials of 1960s television and cinema. He therefore worked from a basis of "life as we don't know it", and made the Mysterons that were to feature in the series a race of sentient computers as opposed to organic lifeforms, although this is not explicitly stated in the television episodes. The initial intention was that the original Mysteron civilisation came from another galaxy. Having established a settlement on Mars in the distant past, they fled the planet centuries later, abandoning their computer complex.

Contemporary recollections of the Second World War proved to be an inspiration for a number of design aspects. For instance, Anderson recalled that RAF pilots had found it difficult to counter German attacks during the Battle of Britain, since taking off from the ground meant that it took considerable time to intercept the enemy. He therefore made Spectrum's headquarters an airborne aircraft carrier called "Cloudbase". The Mysteron rings were inspired by an advertisement for the Oxo line of food products, which included an image of the brand name sliding over a frying pan and the outline of a woman's body.