Thunderbirds International Rescue 2011 Animated Series 'Artwork'

Thunderbirds International Rescue

2011 Animated Series 'Artwork'

This article references my previous review, it might help to read this first here: "Thunderbirds 2011 Production Bible'"

Following the recent appearance of another of these production bibles selling through eBay, I have been taking another look at my copy, especially the artwork.

The book has only one image of each of the characters, the same Tracy family pictures being repeated as required throughout and unfortunately some of the characters not represented at all.

There is a cut-away of Tracy Island, home of International Rescue, but this has not been created for this book and is the uncredited work of Graham Bleathman. This has previously appeared in one of his books and he was interested to see its appearance here.

The Thunderbird craft are individually depicted with their overviews and some nice colour artwork but again only one picture, apart from one other page....

At the beginning of the book there is an opaque page featuring further images of each craft at different angles, and it is here where I noticed something. You can recognise each Thunderbird on this page compared to the colour artwork on their overview page apart from Thunderbird 2, bottom left, this actually turns out to be a totally different design of craft to that featured on its overview page. It looks like even at this stage the final designs had yet to be decided!

This then focused my attention on another design feature of this book, on most of the pages are feint background images of the craft, line drawings which I believed to be reused from the opaque page representation. It turns out that these line drawings are actually additional images of the craft from other angles and provide some interesting views.

Thunderbird 2 is included from the opaque page, there are two angles including a view of the pod. Even more interesting is that Thunderbird 3, which is described as a 'Multi Phase' craft due to its ability to separate, is shown as four individual sub sections! It is difficult to see if the other craft 'exactly' match between the colour overview pages and these line drawings, for example the nose on Thunderbird 1 seems to have extended in the colour image!

I’m sure somewhere the artist who created these designs has them in convenient 3D image files, the line drawings in the book are feint background images, some cut across two pages, some close up leaving detail off the page and all missing areas obscured by text passages and artwork!

So I set about seeing if I could separate them from the page and produce some clear identifiable pictures using those state of the art graphic tools…tracing paper and a pencil!

Here below then are my results showing images that provide additional views of the Thunderbird craft and one of 'Geddon'. In some I have been able to join up drawings where they crossed two pages. Blank areas are where the drawing went off of the page or character images, graphics or text covered that part. Below each one are the pages on which they appeared.

As has been found with this book, all sorts of unknown projects are out there and eventually turn up after years of sitting on some dusty shelf or on an old hard drive. Perhaps one day we may get to see what android 'Parker' was to look like in action!

Thunderbird 1

Thunderbird 2

The above page is the overview for Thunderbird 2 and colour representation, the background line drawing though showing the alternative design. In my review for the book, I compared the colour craft to a Star Wars 'Naboo Starfighter', the design of the alternative line drawing craft now more akin to a MCU 'Shield Quinjet'.

Thunderbird 3