With all things Gerry Anderson hotting up now that Thunderbirds are back on the telly, I took a look at the roots of Firestorm, the new and exciting Kickstarter -funded project in pre-production from Anderson Entertainment. Their cool website has regular updates. Here's their teaser which appeared on You Tube in September last year.
Coming hot on the heels of Anderson Entertainment's debut project, the Gemini Force One books, Firestorm, as I discovered has already had one outing on TV 12 years ago. Alas, most of us will not have seen it back in 2003 as it was shown largely in Japan. This does make sense as it was an anime show. You can read about it on various sites and naturally Wikipedia.
Amazingly, and I was amazed, you can see lots of episodes of the 2003 Firestorm on You Tube in their original Japanese. Each episode run to around 25 minutes and here's episode 1. I was really surprised that only 2000 odd people have viewed it. The vehicles are brilliant, which got me thinking about merchandise.
Now Andersonites much better informed than I will know, but I didn't - there was indeed a set of small plastic toy vehicles released by capsule kings Yujin for the 2003 Firestorm series in Japan.
There are quite a few sets of these available from one seller on the Bay but at £55 a pop they're not cheap. I couldn't find any other merchandise connected to the Japanese Firestorm online, not on Ebay or Amazon. I had thought of consulting my bible, Dennis Nicholson's Guide, but it was published 10 years before Firestorm even appeared on Japanese TV!
With no English-dub available of this old anime it seems, Anderson Entertainment have got a clear field to re-ignite Firestorm for a brand new worldwide audience hungry for more Thunderbirdesque TV.
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