Fireball XL5 From Century 21

At the beginning of the sixties, A.P. Film’s were about to end production on Supercar. Producer Gerry Anderson and art director, Reg Hill got to work on coming up with new ideas for the next series.

I read somewhere, one idea involved a day dreaming young boy who imagined himself as a space pilot called Joe Ninety. The concept would have been a mix of puppets and live action. However, this was apparently proven to be too costly.

But staying with the idea of a space themed series, Gerry and Reg came up with ’Century 21’, a space series set in 2962, and featuring a spacecraft of the same name. Century 21, along with a fleet of similar spaceships would patrol the Galaxy for the United States Space Patrol.

Reg and Derek Meddings worked on the spaceship design with Derek coming up with the pre-production sketch of Century 21.

This design found its way into issues of TV Comic, when the artist, Neville Main had presumably been given pre production artwork as reference prior to the series airing on television. Another similar design could also be seen as a guest star called ’Super R’ in the 1963 Supercar Annual, this time drawn by Eric Eden.

A concept brochure was created by Gerry, Reg and Derek to pitch the series to Lew Grade’s Associated TeveVision Ltd.

Changing the name to Fireball XL5, the series was given the go ahead and brochure was put to one side and forgotten.

Years later, following Reg Hill’s passing, the brochure was found at the back of a cupboard at his home.

In 2002, Fanderson, the Gerry Anderson fan club, gained access to the brochure and reproduced the sketches from it as part of their collector card series. Apart from the spacecraft which is credited to Derek Meddings, all the rest are credited to Reg Hill.