Parker retains his voice

Big news this week concerning the new "Thunderbirds" series which is in production... and David Graham is to reprise his role as Parker!  This is wonderful news and will allow us to have a tangible link back to the original Supermarionation series.  Of course he will sound older (it was nearly 50 years ago after all) but to hear Parker drop 'is haitches and transpose them onto words beginning with vowels will be lovely.

In case you have been living on the Moon, the new series is being made jointly by ITV, Weta and another company (I've forgotten their name... apologies) as a part physical/part digital production: the characters will be CGI but the sets will be live models.  How they will do this is a mystery, but with Weta on board (they handled the effects in "Lord of the Rings" most notably) it should look pretty spectacular.

I still have some lingering worries though... and these hark back to the big pile of robo-poo that was the 2004 live action "Thunderbirds" directed by Jonathan Frakes.  While Thunderbirds 1 and 3 at least bore some similarities to their 1960s counterparts they were too small.  Thunderbird 5 was a good design, but too far removed from the station in the original and TB2 was just awful.  TB4 was a pointless total redesign, as were the Mole and Firefly.  As for FAB1... don't even get me started on that!
What I'm dreading is that the new series has craft which are even further removed from the originals.

In 2004 there was an attempt to remake Thunderbirds for the TV, but when the rights were sold to the film company the series was aborted.  There IS a glimpse of what it could have been like in the form of this teaser...

In this remake the characters were still puppets, but more like the "Team America: World Police" type with flexible faces.  TB1 in this clip is even less like the craft I grew up with than the film version... not nice.
Hopefully the new designs will be modern, yet faithfully close to the originals.  The current USS Enterprise from the recent "Star Trek Into Darkness" film is undeniably the same ship we saw in the 60s.  Everything has been redesigned, but it retains the shape and beauty of the original.  I hope we get something as kind as that... and not like these reimagined horrors from another British institution:

(Image from http://dalektricity.wordpress.com)

Thunderbird 2 was also redesigned for this aborted series, but all I have seen is this model made by a fan:

LINK  While it's a beautiful model there's something about it I just don't like... I think it's the whole nose section.

Anyway... fingers crossed that in 2014 we can have a new series of "Thunderbirds" to make us all smile... rather than throw things at the TV when THIS appears...