Tracy Island is the home of the Tracy family in the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson 1960s television series Thunderbirds. Located in the South Pacific Ocean, the island's true function as the secret base of the International Rescue organisation and is heavily camouflaged.
Thunderbird 1 launches from a hangar underneath the island's retractable swimming pool, at the foot of the main house. Features such as the outside staircase descending to water, the large windows, and the prominent stone chimney suggest the design was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. The entrance to Thunderbird 2's hangar is concealed by a fake rock-face and leads onto the island's runway. On exiting the hangar, the palm trees lining the runway swing outwards to accommodate Thunderbird 2's wingspan. After taxiing along the runway, Thunderbird 2 takes off from a hydraulic launch platform. Thunderbird 3 launches from underneath the 'Round House'.
While secure jamming equipment preserve the island's security, it proves to be somewhat vulnerable in the pages of TV Century 21 due to the machinations of The Hood. Learning everything about the island by brainwashing the technically-minded Brains character and extracting all of his knowledge regarding the island, the Hood launches his greatest attack, destroying several Thunderbird craft and many of their hangars, with the exception of Thunderbirds One and Four. The canonicity of this storyline remains uncertain due to its roots in publication form only.
In the 2004 live action movie, North Island in the Seychelles island group (Indian Ocean) was the stand-in for Tracy island, with the buildings added using computer-generated imagery. In the film, the displayed plotted route from Tracy Island to London clearly shows the island as being located in the Atlantic Ocean, whereas in the original series it was located in the Pacific Ocean.
Read more about Tracy Island: Merchandise and Blue Peter, Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words tracy and/or island:
“Mrs. Zajac knows you didn’t try. You don’t just hand in junk to Mrs. Zajac. She’s been teaching an awful lot of years. She didn’t fall off the turnip cart yesterday. She told you she was an old-lady teacher.”
—Christine Zajac, U.S. fifth-grade teacher. As quoted in Among Schoolchildren, “September” section, part 1, by Tracy Kidder (1989)
“We crossed a deep and wide bay which makes eastward north of Kineo, leaving an island on our left, and keeping to the eastern side of the lake. This way or that led to some Tomhegan or Socatarian stream, up which the Indian had hunted, and whither I longed to go. The last name, however, had a bogus sound, too much like sectarian for me, as if a missionary had tampered with it; but I knew that the Indians were very liberal. I think I should have inclined to the Tomhegan first.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)