Francis Matthews voices Captain Scarlet, the Spectrum agent who is killed in episode one, reconstructed by the vengeful Mysterons, then resurrected with their retrometabolism power, leaving him free of their control and able to survive bullets, explosions and high falls. The 32-part series, filmed in Slough with a £1.5 million budget, pairs episodes on twin stages so puppet crews can shoot two stories simultaneously while Barry Gray’s electronic theme counts seven staccato beats between scene cuts. Set on Cloudbase, the airborne carrier 40,000 feet above Earth, the show fields an international cast of colour-coded officers: Ed Bishop as Captain Blue, Donald Gray as Colonel White and the Mysterons’ echoing voice, Cy Grant as Lieutenant Green, and the all-female Angel fighter squadron led by Elizabeth Morgan’s Destiny Angel. The Mysterons, unseen computers on Mars, wage a “war of nerves” by reversing matter to create explosive duplicates of people and machines, announcing each strike with twin green rings projected onto their target. First transmitted on ATV Midlands on 29 September 1967, the series reached 10.9 million UK viewers by Christmas and later aired in more than 40 countries, though U.S. syndication limped to only six episodes in the Netherlands. Repeated on BBC2 in 1993, it pulled four million for its network premiere, and after 9/11 the BBC postponed “Winged Assassin” and “Big Ben Strikes Again” for their hijacked-aircraft and nuclear-device plots.
Production Details
Associated Television / 1 Season / 32 Episodes / 1967
Created by: Sylvia Anderson, Gerry Anderson
Showrunner(s): Gerry Anderson
Writer(s): Tony Barwick, David Williams, Peter Curran
Producer(s): Reg Hill
Music: Barry Gray
Main Cast
Francis Matthews as Captain Scarlet (voice)
Ed Bishop as Narrator / Captain Blue (voice)
Donald Gray as The Mysterons / Colonel White / Captain Black (voice)
Cy Grant as Lieutenant Green (voice)
Jeremy Wilkin as Captain Ochre (voice)
Gary Files as Captain Magenta (voice)
Martin King as 2nd Policeman (voice)
Elizabeth Morgan as Destiny Angel (voice)
Charles Tingwell as Fairfield (voice)
David Healy as President Roberts (voice)
Paul Maxwell as World President (voice)
Sylvia Anderson as Melody Angel (voice)
