Interster

Anyone familiar with Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation shows of the 1960s onwards should find this rare 1981 offering from South Africa interesting. I understand that 39 episodes were made in total although only 37 were transmitted. The first 13 episodes have been released on DVD. The story involves a space defence force based in Cape Town protecting the planet from sinister forces. The spoken language is Afrikaans and I have been unable to find either a dubbed version or an English subtitle set. This makes evaluation quite difficult as the show appears to be in the form of a serial and has rather a lot of dialogue. The budget was clearly a lot less than that of the Anderson shows. It cannot compete with the sheer visual complexity and variety of the likes of Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet. Most of the verbal action takes place in half a dozen or so set locations and these areas are quite nicely detailed. Where Interster scores well is the catchy soundtrack and realistic puppet movements. There are no visible strings so I assume that the puppets were controlled electronically. This would put the show on a par with the puppets of the Terrahawks series which was also made in the 1980s. It would be nice to see the whole series released with subtitles, making it available to a much larger potential audience. A fanbase set of subtitles would be of benefit, however, having created scratch srt files myself for half hour programs, I know just how time consuming an operation this is.