Can something be considered a tradition when nothing about it is consistent from year to year? I suppose it can when it’s a Security Hazard tradition… Welcome to the wildly inconsistent, not-quite-annual review of all things Security Hazard from the past 12 months! Grab a mince pie, or something stronger (overbaked Christmas cake?), and catch up on all the Anderson-flavoured action from this blog as we prepare to shift from 2024 into 2025. New year, same old silly Security Hazard.
Rib Ticklin’ M’Lady
My 2024 has been dominated by one specific project, so it’s probably important that I get this one out of the way first.
Months of production, hours and hours of interviews and panels, and about four weeks of video editing solidly from dawn until dusk. Security Hazard’s 20th Anniversary Retrospective on the 2004 Thunderbirds movie was a huge undertaking, and I’m delighted to say that since it debuted on YouTube in November the audience reaction has surpassed all expectations. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to post comments and share memories about the movie. Yes, thank you even to the people who quite rudely told us the movie is complete trash and we shouldn’t have bothered. After all, even naughty children get coal in their Christmas stockings.
Give Niche A Chance
There’s a common theme to most of the work I’ve undertaken for Security Hazard in 2024 – championing the underdogs from the worlds of Gerry Anderson. It wasn’t my goal but it just sort of happened because that’s where opportunities arose this year. C’mon, who needs popularity when you can be intensely obscure?! So, in addition to the Thunderbirds movie, here are a few of the lesser-spotted Anderson or Anderson-related works that I’ve covered in 2024…
Back in February I was living and breating all things Altares, and I have no regrets! If you like your shot-by-shot Security Hazard reviews analysing every single detail, then I have to say I’m particularly proud of the way this one for The Day After Tomorrow: Into Infinity came out, so give it a try! It was my first time tackling a fully live-action Anderson project, and it certainly won’t be my last…
Elsewhere, the Thunderbirds 2086 kit built video was a casual bit of fun for anyone looking to tune out of reality for an hour. Meanwhile, the Four Feather Falls map video is a ridiculously nerdy guide to the early Supermarionation series that you never knew you needed. By the way, in case you want to treat yourself to a late Christmas present, or need to show some love for the Four Feather Falls fan in your life, you can still buy art prints of my Four Feather Falls map from shop.securityhazard.net!
With the help of Filmed In Malta, we uncovered newspaper clippings revealing a little more of Gerry Anderson’s reasons for working in Malta in the early 70s. But, best of all, I got to speak to the actor Peter Borg all about his experiences being directed by Gerry Anderson on the set of The Investigator. You all know how obsessed I am with The Investigator, so let me give you some additional context which might explain why interviewing Peter was such a standout moment from my year…
Picture the scene: I had just stepped off the plane at Heathrow after a 10-hour flight. I was back in the UK on a secret mission to go location touring with friends for our retrospective on the 2004 Thunderbirds movie. I’m on the London Underground, absolutely exhausted from the transatlantic flight, when out of no-where I look at my phone and I have a text from Maltese actor Peter Borg confirming the time for our interview. Yes, while I was jet-lagged to heck, Christoph from Gerry Anderson’s The Investigator was texting me while I was getting ready to visit the South Bank and gawp at a bridge Bill Paxton stood underneath at one point twenty years ago. If it sounds like a fever dream to you, imagine how I was feeling!
So, even if you have no love at all for The Investigator, I urge you to watch the mini-documentary I produced based around my conversation with Peter because I had the time of my life making it. I was amazed just how much Peter actually had to say about The Investigator. It may have been shot 50 years ago and never broadcast, but Peter remembered so many details perfectly and gave a fantastic insight into the production that you will not hear anywhere else. I also thoroughly enjoyed researching his acting career outside of his Gerry Anderson connection, and loved uncovering things I never would have learned otherwise about Maltese television, film, and theatre.
Essentially, I came for The Investigator, but I stayed for the brief history of entertainment in Malta. For me, this one wasn’t just a highlight of the year, but a highlight of everything I’ve done under the Security Hazard banner to date. Please, please give the video a watch below:
Going Live
Thanks to the amazing team at Anderson Entertainment, I’ve continued to fill the airwaves with Gerry Anderson fun and games with several live streams this year! From celebrating official product launches to chairing lively debates and interviewing special guests, every show has been a pleasure to produce and host. Catch-up with the videos below!
Personal highlight: me attempting to interview a virtual avatar of Captain Scarlet live on air and the whole thing constantly feeling like it was seconds away from falling apart completely – tune in for that one…
Bluesky Ahead
I’m on Bluesky now and you can follow me at jackknoll.bsky.social. I can’t promise it’ll be any better than the nonsense I was posting sporadically on X/Twitter, but if nothing else I’m enjoying the change in scenery.
New Old Thunderbirds
In 2024, Century 21 Films uncovered several important Thunderbirds artefacts, including unseen early film prints of episodes, some of which differed from the broadcast versions. On YouTube, they’ve been sharing the findings of all their discoveries and research, and the implications it has for our understanding of how Thunderbirds was made. This new research particularly impacts how we look at the early episodes which started life as 25-minute stories that were later extended to 50 minutes. I heartily recommend that you subscribe to their YouTube channel to stay up to date with their work re-examining what we thought we knew about the making of Thunderbirds.
Meanwhile, it’s been over eight years since I wrote my in-depth reviews of every episode of Thunderbirds and attempted to pick apart every frame to learn and speculate a bit more about the show I love. The newly presented evidence by Century 21 Films now contradicts some of the speculation I threw into my original blog posts about the episodes. Indulge me as I share one specific example of what I’m banging on about: Film trims have surfaced which show that at least some sequences for Trapped In The Sky involving the TX-204 were filmed in 1964, before the decision was made to make every episode of Thunderbirds an hour long. Therefore, it’s not only unlikely that the TX-204 was added later, but it also supports a relatively new theory that Trapped In The Sky was always an hour-long, rather than a 25-minute episode extended later like many of the other early Thunderbirds episodes. And this all disproves my speculation from 2016 that the TX-204 was a late addition to the episode.
Some of you are bored stiff by that kind of nit-pickery. I think most of you are thrilled by it, and I’m with the latter portion of y’all. I’m delighted that there is new information available to help piece together the puzzle of how Thunderbirds was made. The fact that this new evidence disproves what I was speculating back in 2016 just demonstrates exactly why it’s so great that this new evidence exists at all – now we don’t need to speculate because we can actually see things as they really were!
But, of course, it leaves us with a problem. Should my disproved speculation be allowed to remain in the public eye? Well, the short answer is that it does no harm to keep a record of what we thought was true eight years ago, because that in itself has some historical value. But, in the same way that Captain Scarlet is indestructible and you should not try to imitate him, please remember that my Thunderbirds reviews are eight years old now and Security Hazard is an unofficial, unlicensed, uncensored, uninvited, unsalted, unwashed blog written by a fan with delusions of grandeur. Please, please, please check multiple sources if you’re serious about this stuff – nowadays I always try to do that when I’m writing, but it wouldn’t do if you believed every word I said at face value. After all, a lot of things were said by people more important than me in 2016 which turned out to be about as reliable as Elevator Car 3’s remote control system (lil’ bit o’ satire there).
Twenty-Twenty-Five
In the not-quite-tradition of these not-quite-annual summary posts, I’m now going to write something fairly non-commital in this section about what’s maybe coming in the new year.
One Anderson series that I’ve never properly touched on before will be getting the weekly episode review treatment in 2025. If you’re up to speed on the latest Gerry Anderson blu-ray news you’ll probably already know what it is. Stay tuned for those articles in the coming months!
Also – LEGO. Remember when I used to post about that? Well, the biggest Gerry Anderson LEGO thing I’ve ever done will hopefully be completed at some point during 2025, so I’ll probably be documenting that! Provided, of course, that the humble plastic brick doesn’t get any more expensive than it already is…
Speaking of which, a special thank you to Watson and Ben Wolf Page for being monthly subscribers to my Ko-fi page (great segue, Jack)! Any donations, whether they’re subscriptions or one-offs, help to cover hosting fees for the blog, making more videos, and yes, buying LEGO to turn into beloved Gerry Anderson vehicles.
Otherwise, that’s all from me until 2025! Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and S.P.A.
Jack
Security Hazard 