Review: THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO Is a Surprisingly Awesome Adventure Series
One of the pleasures of coming to conventions like WonderCon is finding the hidden gems that you run into completely on accident. I got into room 151 early to make sure to catch the new the Voltron panel and was treated to the Thunderbirds Are Go panel, which turned out to be surprisingly awesome!
Thunderbirds was an interesting show that I would watch as a kid because it came on right after Doctor Who on Saturdays. When I say interesting, I mean completely kooky. The sets were elaborately done and the characters were puppets. This is the show that heavily inspired the film Team America World Police. I would watch it out of the pure fascination that a show like this existed.
Thunderbirds Are Go is a reboot of the original show that will available in early April on Amazon Prime. The elaborate sets are still there, and they were built by the talented folks at Weta, but the puppets have been replaced with CG characters, which, if you are a fan of the original show might sound lame, but it totally works. You can tell that there was a lot of time and care put into keeping the integrity of the original series while updating it for today’s audiences.
I was thrilled with the outcome of the show. They showed us the first episode, and I was left excited to see the rest of the season. The story follows the Tracy brothers who make up the team of International Rescue. They are responsible for the safety of the WORLD! Yeah, that is a lot of responsibility, but someone has to do it. With the balance of the world's safety in their hands, they are also on a mission to find out what happened to their father who has was killed years before.
The writing of the show is really well done. There was the appropriate amount of cheesy dialog that the kids will love, but it seemed like it was also smart enough to keep adults interested.
If you have Amazon Prime, then I thoroughly encourage you to check it out when it is released on April 4th. If you don’t have it like me, then this just adds to the incentive to get it.