From his Wired UK column:
I thought some of you who have kids or deal with kids might appreciate this. I am going to try and use this to justify why my son needs Thunderbirds on DVD and even more Lego's.
Quote:
| Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing - it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves. It is also about astronauts. Real-life astronauts have become an unremarkable bunch. We only hear about them these days when they die. Hell, by the end of the 60s, the brilliant and imaginative pilot Scott Carpenter was selling crap on local TV. But in Thunderbirds, Jeff Tracy is an eccentric billionaire, able to convert his private Caribbean island into a secret cosmodrome for exotic aircraft and a re-usable space vessel, with enough scratch left over to support a cutting-edge skunkworks lab, servants and an inexhaustible volume of vermouth. Are you a government minister despairing over the seemingly unsolvable need to get kids interested in science? Thunderbirds says that science is awesome because you get to fly in space and live on a high-tech island full of booze. Beat that for incentive. |
