Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Stingray, End Credits and song Aqua Marina



If you have never spent time watching Gerry Adams Stingray series from the mid 1960s you are missing something beyond words wonderful. 

Adams was the creator of the Stingray and Thunderbirds television shows that feature "Supermarination" puppets acting out the story lines.  (This is long before Team America was dreamt up by the guys who created South Park.)   Adams puppets were adults, not this "Jane and the Dragin" garbage, but adults doing adult things, like blowing up the enemy, not making friends and learning pansy assed lessons on friendship! F'n'-aye!

While most people remember Thunderbirds, Stingray offered something that was so bizzare, that its was shocking by the standrads of the 1960s.  How shocking?  Lets say that it was on par with Kirk kissing Uhura: an interspecies love triangle between a man, a woman and a mute water nymph named Aqua Marina who communicated through her eyes and puffy, kissable lips.  Stranger still, was how the affair was played out weekly: through the sexy lounge style ballad that the show used for its closing credits, backed up by silent shots of the mermaid swimming, then having a candle light dinner with the man, the man's girl friend looking longingly at his portrait, and back to mermaid swimming through the water.  Together, the music (which io so good, Bobby Darrin could have sang it and her girls swooning over it) and the closing credits make for a hysterically ironic moment in children's television.

The music is FABULOUS!  The production value is top notch.  Amazon sells the boxed set of the series and its worth every penny for the dialogue and the puppet intrigue. 

3 comments:

  1. Holy Hula, I LOVED Stingray. Nevertheless, I had completely overlooked the fact all the puppets look sort of crosseyed. Cool.

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  2. One of my earliest memories and I must have been two, three at the time - was it being on TV and I watched in our living room. Enthralled, the next day I tried to convey to my older borthers that I wanted to watch it again, but I was unable voice what it was, or when I saw it. It remained a mystery until one day about 15 years ago when SciFi started rerunning it and it looked familiar. But then they showed the underwater people (the bad guys) and it clicked.

    But I don't recall the puppets longing for each other.

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  3. That's Gerry Anderson's Stingray and Thunderbirds. Gerry Adams is the president of the Irish political party Sinn Fein.

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