413 Boothe, Reggie Boothe.

I had this dream, that I can’t remember very well, but it had those puppets like they had in Thunderbirds.  (For those of you too young to remember Thunderbirds think of Team America: World Police.  It’s that style of show they were trying to parody.)  I couldn’t remember anything in particular, but it made me go to youtube and look up Thunderbirds.  That show was just a tad before my time, so I have vague memories, at best.  It was bigger in Britain too, I understand. 

There were enough clips that I could get an idea what the show was like.  It became clear pretty quickly why the show was so popular.  I ended up watching as many clips as I could find, even though there were no full episodes.  (This lead to several days with the theme stuck in my head.) 

Anyway, while I was Thunderbirding, I ran across a clip from a show that I only ever saw one episode of.  I’d been looking for proof of it for years, but didn’t have any keyords to search with.  I only remembered that it had puppets like Thunderbirds.  Someone had finally uploaded some clips on Youtube. 

It was a show called Star Fleet.  (The original Japanese name is X-Bomber.)  It was created by Go Nagai, and had puppets similar to Thunderbirds, but was in a Japanese style.  It’s pretty stereotypical 80s Japan.  Giant warship flies through space fighting aliens with a giant combiner robot.  Anyway, I’ve been searching for this damn show for years, and ran across it on accident.  The funny thing is that I’d read about X-Bomber before, but had never seen images, so had no idea it was the show I’d been looking for. 

I had a similar experience with The Mysterious Cities Of Gold.  No one I knew remembered it.  It got to the point that I had almost decided I’d imagined it, until I found it on youtube.

There’s a lot of weird things about the English staff for Star Fleet.  Like the guy who does the voice of the red headed chunky guy is the dude who played the butt raping prisoner, Bogs Diamond, in Shawshank Redemption.  (Or Drake in Aliens, if you like Sci-Fi.)  In fact, if you snoop through the careers of many of the UK voice actors you’ll see they’ve been in a wide variety of roles in the periphery of your cinematic lives.