Thunderbirds 2086 was originally a Japanese anime series entitled Science Rescue Team Techno Voyager created by Banjiro Uemura. Through his fascination and love for the original Gerry Anderson productions for ITC that he created his own Thunderbirds...
Aside from Thunderbirds 2086, there have been a number of other abominable Thunderbirds adaptions over the years. There has been a variety of stage shows in the 1970s and 80s, spoofs, compilation movies, the official remake from ITV, the Kickstarter Thunderbirds 1965 project, all of which we have come to love (or hate depending on your taste) over the years. But the two I am discussing have come to be regarded as highly disregarded four worded names, as much as 2086 it seems. At least I find 2086 to be in no way offensive to the original 1960s production, nor has Gerry Anderson publicly stated his displeasure towards it. I am indeed talking about the abominable Turbocharged Thunderbirds and the disgraceful Thunderbirds movie. If you don't believe me about the poor opinion about the film, Rotten Tomatoes and Imdb prove it.
For several decades, Gerry Anderson had been hoping at some point he could remake Thunderbirds under his own supervision. He had sold the rights to ITC during a mid-1970s financial crisis, and therefore had to gain the remake rights back in order to reboot his beloved series. Many of his various proposals of series concepts that never took off the ground were heavily inspired by Thunderbirds. One of which was T-Force. It was around the time of the performances of Thunderbirds: F.A.B. when Anderson formed with Terrahawks' visual effects supervisor Steven Begg to create a set of new Thunderbirds crafts. He was keen to make some alterations to the Thunderbirds format for a 1980s audience (but by 2000 he was aware that these differences would not have been acceptable to viewers). In T-Force, International Rescue's HQ would have been a huge sub shielded from detection. Thunderbird 2 would be a much larger ship, and the pod vehicles would have been customised by Brains for each rescue. Lady Penelope would have had a pink Porsche than a rolls-Royce and was even suggested that she would have gold plated hair so she could pick up radio waves! Even more bizarre, she would have taken pills that would have enabled her to see in the dark. Unfortunately, unsuitable financing was not available for the series and so it never materialised.
In 1993, another Thunderbirds inspired series proposed by Anderson was GFI (Gee Force Intergalactic), originally titled G-Force. The series took some of the inspiration from T-Force, but was to be a 13 episode series created in cel-animation. The animation of characters would have taken place in Moscow and in London for the vehicles. The brief for the series is as follows;
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The 13 episodes had all been drafted, with over half of them worked into full scripts by Tony Barwick. Only 1 episode was completed - Warming Warning before the series was cancelled. The Russian animation turned out to look very poor in comparison with the London animation. The cost of redoing the Russian animation elsewhere made the completion of the series financially prohibitive, so GFI was abandoned.
Obviously in the 1990s, Thunderbirds mania was huge and talks began over a remake. In 1994, ITC's Los Angeles head office announced that a live-action Thunderbirds film was in development and would be ready for a Christmas 1995 release. Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin was linked to the project, with Bob Hoskins beig suggested to play Parker. Tom Cruise was apparently interested in playing Scott Tracy, with Emma Thompson, Patsy Kensit and Joanna Lumley all under consideration to play Lady Penelope. For the film's intended upcoming release, ITC reformatted 13 classic episodes for broadcast on Fox's Broadcasting System's Fox Kids' Network as Thunderbirds USA, retitled as Turbocharged Thunderbirds. The run time was cut down to 23 minutes as a standard US TV half-hour. The dialogue was rewritten and the entire soundtrack was dropped for new music composed by Randall Chrissman. New sound effects and new voices (provided by Dena Mauer, G. King, Scott Brotherton, and Mike Gibbons), provided a disastrously bastardised new version of the series. The unforgivable result is more compatible with the then-popular children's show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
