Thunderbirds 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition Megaset courtesy A&E Home Video
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s...Supermarionation!Yes, yes, childrens, the weirdest show we all totally dig now is out in a brand spanking new set and I, for one, am both thrilled and a little bit ascared. See, when I was a kid, I remember stumbling upon repeats of Thunderbirds, the 1965 oddity from Space: 1999 guru Gerry Anderson, and thinking ‘oh my sweet holy shizz, what on God's green Earth are those?!’Puppets. They were puppets. And they freaked me the hell out. They also drew me in with their massive eyes and action-packed tales, but I couldn’t explain that then. No, back then it was just strangeness. Sweet, captivating strangeness.Some years later, I can happily report that the new 40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition box set is more fun to watch now than the show ever could have been then to my as-yet-uninformed mind. Maybe it’s because I can now appreciate the ingenuity Anderson employed to make main (wooden) man Jeff Tracy and his I...
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Jan 23, 2008 07:10 AM ET
- by Ken Fox
Heath Ledger in Candy courtesy THINKFilm
Not long before 3:35 pm on January 22, 2008, the short life and promising career of actor Heath Ledger came to a sudden, tragic end. It was around this time that Ledger's housekeeper and his masseuse discovered the body of the Australian-born actor in the bedroom of the Broome Street apartment he'd been renting in lower Manhattan. Ledger was not yet 29 years old.News of Ledger's death came as a terrible shock to nearly everyone, even though it now seems the low-key, Oscar-nominated actor had been privately battling his own demons for quite some time. His passing is the terrible surprise ending no one saw coming, an abrupt finale to a life and career that seemed to be all about the unexpected.Born and raised in Perth, Australia, and named after the darkly romantic anti-hero from Wuthering Heights (he has a sister named Katherine), Ledger left school at the age of 17 to pursue a career in acting. He eventually landed a role in Blackrock, a small independent feature about teen rape, fo...
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