SuperM - merchandising guides

– Merchandising –

on June 9^th, 1966, two weeks after the last broadcast of the first season, appeared Blue Code, the first of 6 folders published by the Albert Heyn grocery chain. The folders appeared every fortnight on a Tuesday between june 9^th and august 18^th, 1966. On Saturday, September 3^d of that same year, two weeks after the last folder was published, the first Thunderbirds Extra album – there would be three eventually – announced the premiere issue of TV2000. This was three weeks before the first broadcast of the second season, thus spanning the summer gap between both seasons to keep the hype alive.

the Dutch Extra 1 album front with the text 'Thunderbirds Extra', 'alles over International Rescue', 'avontuur in de toekomst', TV2000' and a large pucture of Thunderbird 1 in flight and smaller pictures of Thunderbirds 3, 2 and 5 at the bottom

TV2000 – adventure in the future

TV2000 was a continuation of the German based Fix & Fox weekly and started as a loose leafed broadsheet, printed on glossy paper and, through its three year lifespan, contained comics culled from the British TV21 and Lady Penelope magazines and later other sources. It changed to A4 size as of issue 13, dated Saturday, April 1^st, 1967 and changed again to a plain paper magazine as of issue 31, dated Saturday, August 3^d, 1968. By that time Thunderbirds had all but disappeared from television and the artwork in the magazine had seriously degraded in quality. After this last change it ran for another year and a half during which the Anderson based comics slowly disappeared, as had the Anderson TV-series, to fold on Saturday, December 27^th, 1969 with issue 52.

During its all too short seven-year publishing history [1981 – 1988], the Supermarionation is Go! fanzine published merchandising guides for all SuperM series. Obviously they weren't exhaustive; SuperM fandom was still in relative infancy and Dennis Nicholson had yet to publish his Anderson merchandising 'bible', The Gerry Anderson Memorabilia Guide – From Twizzle to today.

Also, the virtual tsunami of 90s merchandising, inspired by the BBC's rerun of the series, is not incorporated here. I could have extended the listings myself but decided against it: I had to stop somewhere and scanning in and Web-ifying the SiG stuff involved a lot more time and effort than I had estimated. Besides, there's always Dennis' book containing 400 pages of books, comics, die-cast toys, swap-cards, hand puppets, figures, plastic model kits and hundreds of other licensed items, illustrated with over 3000 photographs if you really want to get the lowdown on every bit of Anderson memorabilia.

I did, however, include the listing of Dutch Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet merchandising already part of this site and indicated items available in Holland at the time [or manufactured over here]. And if that hasn't quite quenched your appetite, here is a page with a collection of ads that appeared in the magazines related to the SuperM series thoughout their print run. They're mainly from TV21 with a few originating from the Lady Penelope and TV2000 magazines.