Video Previously unseen footage from the classic British TV show Thunderbirds has been found in a garden shed and restored – where possible – for viewing next year.
The family of a recently deceased former editor of the show found a collection of 22 rusty and cracked film cans in their Buckinghamshire shed. The film inside is currently being restored and digitized. They contain a lot of old material, but also some extended scenes and a previously-unseen new ending to one episode.
Stephen La Rivière of Century 21 Films – who is leading the restoration drive – told the BBC recovering the footage “took weeks, bit by bit.”
“Every night I’d get a link for a download of the latest one that had been scanned … you’d never know what you’d get. Eventually, listening one night … this one played out and it was not the same as broadcast.”
If you’ve never watched the show, the video below offers a good primer and a peek at the recovered footage.
Thunderbirds was originally conceived as 30-minute episodes, but some were extended at the request of management. It’s thought that the extra footage came from one of these extended episodes that never aired.
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Thunderbirds was the invention of British auteurs Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and was broadcast in 1965. It told the tales of International Rescue, a clandestine group set up by an American financier and his five sons to save human lives. The team had five aircraft, Thunderbirds 1 through 5, which roamed space, the surface and underwater realms of Earth doing the right thing – mostly.
The series was filmed using a process they called “supermarionati