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

This post was published more than 15 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.

I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 15 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and wrote about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.

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

• My views may well have changed in the last 15 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
• This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
• Factual information might be outdated.
• Links might be broken, and 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.