Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons - Puppets

Puppets

See also: Supermarionation

Supermarionation, a technique in which the movement of the marionette puppet's mouth is electronically synchronised with character dialogue, had been formulated by Gerry Anderson for Four Feather Falls in 1960. Until production for Captain Scarlet, the head of the puppet had been disproportionately large in comparison to its body, as the head contained a solenoid that formed the key component of the lip-synch mechanism. The production team was not able to scale up the body to match the head, as this would have made the puppets hard to operate and have necessitated a proportionate scaling-up in the size of the puppet sets. Since Gerry Anderson had expressed frustration with this caricatured design during the production of earlier Supermarionation series, and wished that the puppets would more accurately reflect human biology, before production commenced on Captain Scarlet the producer, Reg Hill, and his associate, John Read, designed a new type of puppet in which the solenoid was instead placed inside the chest, to permit a head of realistic proportion. The costume designer for Captain Scarlet was Sylvia Anderson, who was influenced by the work of French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, in particular his 1966 "Cosmonaut" collection, in designing the Spectrum uniforms.

After test-sculpting in Plasticine, the puppet heads were moulded on a silicone rubber base and made using fibreglass. At heights ranging from 20 to 24 inches (approximately one-third life-size) the next-generation puppets were no shorter than their predecessors. For previous series, puppet eyes had been sized out of proportion to the heads, but as part of the realistic look introduced in Captain Scarlet, the eyes of production personnel were photographed and the images scaled down for attachment to the eye sockets. As had been the case for earlier series, a number of alternative heads displaying a range of expressions were created for main character puppets, including "smilers", "frowners" and "blinkers". Since episodes of Captain Scarlet were filmed in pairs, one on each of the puppet stages available at the Century 21 Studios, duplicates were made of the "expressionless" template of each main character. For the pilot episode, an "agony" head was specially sculpted for the Captain Scarlet puppet for a brief reaction shot of Scarlet's Mysteron double being shot by Captain Blue.

The increased realism of the puppets meant that their mobility was significantly reduced, ironically leaving the new design less lifelike than Anderson had hoped, as he recalls: "Suddenly, all the movements had to be as realistic as the puppets and that made it difficult for the puppeteers to animate them." To minimise the amount of movement required, the puppets were made to stand on moving walkways or sit at moving desks: for example, Colonel White's desk on Cloudbase is seen to rotate, while Lieutenant Green is seen to operate the Cloudbase main computer from a sliding chair. Puppeteer Jan King recalls:

The Captain Scarlet puppets were not built to walk. They were too heavy and not weighted properly anyway ... It is virtually impossible to get a string puppet to walk convincingly on film unless it is a very caricatured puppet. In Captain Scarlet, if a puppet had to move off-screen, it was done in a head-and-shoulders shot—the floor puppeteer would hold the legs of the puppet and then move the puppet physically out of shot at the right time, trying to make the body and shoulders move as if the puppet were walking.

The "under control" puppets described by King were stringless and controlled from the waist. One resulting advantage was that a puppet could be moved through a doorway without necessitating a break in the shot. For shots displaying characters such as the Angels seated in aircraft cockpits, variations of the "under control" design, comprising just a head and torso, were manipulated by levers and wires positioned underneath the set. This development of Supermarionation would be named "Supermacromation" when Anderson returned to puppetry in the 1980s with his later production, Terrahawks.