Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...

This post was published more than 13 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. Not everything that is old is bad. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have mellowed and matured.

But given the age of this post, please bear in mind:

• My views might very well have changed in the 13 years since I wrote this post. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find pretty embarrassing today.
• This post might use language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate or offensive.
• Factual information might be outdated.
• Links might be broken; embedded material might not appear properly.

Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...

As a big fan of the original, I expected that I would hate this – yet I was pleasantly surprised. I liked how the CGI characters had kept the look of the original puppets (not trying desperately to update it as with Thunderbirds), and I liked how they kept the plot line largely similar to the original. Though, having said that, I haven’t seen their hats being used very much, and in the original series Captain Scarlet was Court Martialed for removing his on a mission. I also wasn’t too keen on the freaky eyes of the Mysteron characters (surely that’d give away the difference between normal people and Mysterons far too easily?) and the inadequate explanation for how Captain Scarlet became indestructable but not (permanently) evil.

The new musical score was excellent, and the whole show had a lot more glossy drama about it than the puppet series, which actually added to the show, particularly with the much greater use of characters’ first names.

Lieutenant Green’s sex change came as a bit of a shock, and really makes you question how far we’ve come in the past few decades – the original Lieutenant Green was the token black character, whereas now he’s the token woman, in a typically subserviant and almost secretarial role to Colonel White. Are we moving forwards or backwards here?

I was very happy with the new version of this. It’s almost as good as the original (better in some ways), and if it wasn’t shown at a time when I’m normally in bed, then I would watch it regularly.