Joe 90 - Reception

Reception

I liked the idea of it all being a sort of family thing and I also liked the puppets themselves more than the ones in Captain Scarlet. They had more character and were a bit of a move back to the earlier characters. The Spectrum puppets were all sort of "pretty boys", everyone was good-looking and all the Angels were very sexy and beautiful, but in Joe 90 we had old-lady housekeepers and that sort of thing, which I personally thought was much better.

David Lane (2001)

In his episode guide to the Anderson television series, John Peel questioned the ethics of Mac effectively "experimenting on" his adopted child in his development of the BIG RAT, and on the subject of Joe as a secret agent enquires, jokingly, "Presumably there are no child labour laws in the future!" The more violent style introduced in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is occasionally evident in Joe 90. In the episode "Hi-jacked", for instance, Joe kills an enemy with a grenade. Meanwhile, in "Project 90", Professor McClaine is menaced by a drill that threatens to pulverise his head. On the subject of violence, director Desmond Saunders says, "There was an unpleasant side to it which I never really understood. There was something about it that was very strange and sinister."

On the other hand, producer David Lane praises the series for its increased humour following the dark tone of Captain Scarlet and sees Joe 90 as much more family-orientated in comparison to its forerunner, summing up the series as "a great little programme." Anthony Clark of the British Film Institute commends Joe 90 for more effective characterisation than Captain Scarlet, and also compliments the quality of its scripts and Barry Gray's musical score. La Rivière underlines a connection between the child protagonist and the theme of espionage, writing, "The premise that drives Joe 90 taps into the fantasy indulged by most boys that they, even at nine years old, can be James Bond." Writer John R. Cook agrees with La Rivière's points on audience self-identification, describes the series as a "wish-fulfilment fantasy" and suggests that the character of Joe is a mirror image of the target child viewer. Comparisons have been made to later franchises with child protagonists who are in fact operatives for intelligence agencies, such as Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids films, released between 2001 and 2003, and the Alex Rider novels by Anthony Horowitz, of which the first instalment was released in 2000.

was too mechanical and needed humanising. And Joe 90? I think the concept was a good one, but again there was a lack of humour and a lack of feminine influence. If you ever see anything that's all male, apart from a war film, it's a bit dull, isn't it?

Sylvia Anderson (1992)

La Rivière noted the intimacy of the series and the predominantly male voice cast and characters, suggesting that Joe 90 is "very much a Boy's Own adventure." Out of the 30 episodes, only ten feature appearances from female characters, a fact which La Rivière attributes to the increased demands on Century 21 for its feature film productions, Thunderbird 6 and Doppelgänger. Peel suggests that the female absence leaves Joe 90, with many other Anderson productions, inferior to previous Supermarionation effort Thunderbirds, in which the character of Lady Penelope has a primary role in several episodes. Grouping Joe 90 with the earlier Supercar and the subsequent The Secret Service, Peel concludes, "It is hardly coincidental that these tend to be the least-loved of series; he had, after all, ignored half of his potential audience." For Peel, this return of the "standard Anderson sexism" is only one aspect of deterioration between Joe 90 and previous productions. Peel challenges La Rivière's asserted "kids play Bond" theme, writing that, "being a somewhat nerdy kid with glasses and brain implants was not really thrilling."

Premiered in the same year, 1968 ... Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its own final version of a "star child" as the embodiment of all the hopes of mankind in the coming space age, Joe 90 expressed for its child audience equivalent kinds of "golden living dreams and visions" of futuristic possibility, appropriate to the then general utopian Zeitgeist.

John R. Cook (2006)

Peel's view was contested by Anderson's belief that the series, with its bespectacled lead character of Joe McClaine, can raise the self-confidence of young viewers with glasses, stating, "Suddenly they were proud because they had something in common with Joe 90." Since the first appearance of the series in 1968, the epithet "Joe 90" has become popular as a term of endearment for such children as well as adults remembered for wearing oversized spectacles, such as snooker player Dennis Taylor. During UK re-runs of the series in the 1990s, similarities were also drawn between Joe and contemporary British Prime Minister John Major, also known for wearing large spectacles. Jeff Evans, writer of The Penguin TV Companion, criticises Joe's glasses by saying, "Joe simply dons a pair of scientific glasses, making him look like the class swot than a secret agent."

Cook reads further into the concept of child empowerment in Joe 90, writing that the series creates a "technological utopia" around youth, remarking, "Through the character of Joe, his brain hardwired at the start of each episode into the BIG RAT supercomputer, the young are shown to be literally at one with technology." He adds that the instant access to brain patterns that the BIG RAT affords to Joe may be interpreted as heralding the development of the Internet over a decade after Joe 90 was produced. With his intellectual horizons broadened, Joe becomes the manifestation of homo superior, yet his youthfulness grants him the power to change the fraught political world in ways that no adult could due to the limitations of their imagination. In this respect, Cook holds up Joe 90 as a precursor to the 1970s television series The Tomorrow People, which also concerned ideas of human transcendence in children. This idea, Cook says, was evident in the title of Joe 90 itself: "no longer is he a nine-year-old boy but instead his status and capacities have been multiplied tenfold to transform him into agent 'Joe 90', his name an appealing futuristic echo of the then distant year of 1990."

Joe 90 lacked some of the lustre of the earlier shows. It didn't have much success, although I was proud of the concept. Maybe the stories assumed too much importance and the inadequacies of the puppets showed through.

Gerry Anderson (2002)

Ultimately, Joe 90 has proven to be less successful than previous series made by Anderson. In the Anderson-related book, Supermarionation Classics, the model work and scripts are praised, but it is conceded that the series "failed to arouse more than a passing interest with some Anderson fans." Stephen Hulse refers to Joe 90 as "clearly the most child-oriented of the latter Anderson Supermarionation series" and "technically accomplished", but "one of the Anderson stable's lesser series". However, its spy-fi theme led on to the final Supermarionation series, The Secret Service, which too features an unconventional secret agent (a vicar, Father Stanley Unwin) and an intelligence organisation with a contracted name (BISHOP, an acronym for "British Intelligence Service Headquarters, Operation Priest").