STINGRAY

"Attention Marineville, I am calling battle stations! We are about to launch Stingray!

As the grizzled Commander Shore puts it, anything can happen in the next half hour. Stingray, flagship of the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, defends Marineville on a weekly basis from the depredations of the undersea despot Titan and his Aquaphibian servants. Hero Troy Tempest pilots the super-submersible with the help of radio expert Phones and the mute amphibian beauty Marina.

Episode Listings

Episode 1 - The Pilot - The first episode of the series does a fantastic job of establishing the show's premise and characters, and provides a gripping story into the bargain. After a submarine is destroyed in mysterious circumstances, the WASP dispatches Troy Tempest and the real star of the show, Stingray, to investigate. Tempest's belief that hidden undersea civilizations exist is confirmed, when he discovers that Titan's Aquaphibians are behind the attack.

The story's pure comic-book fiction, with its quasi-Atlantean civilization and Sci_Fi trappings - a town that descends into the earth on hydraulic stilts, fish-shaped submarines, and Stingray itself, its strength lies in the gosh-wow-conviction with which it's played out - and the phenomenal puppetry and effects work. Most impressive, however, is the economy with which the script establishes the setting and characters. Ina few short scenes, we're introduced to all the heroes and villains, and the fascinating character of Marina.

As the first episode in the series, it's a little off to see the attention lavished on action sequences that only take up a few seconds in later episodes - especially when lengthy shots of Stingray's launch sequence and Marineville going to "battle stations" chew up screentime that could be used to build up the characters. Of course, from a kids perspective, that's what the show was all about - a city that lowers itself into a vast underground chamber is just plain cool.

Okay, it does have one or two faults. Titan's another of the one-note Anderson villains who has no motivation beyond simply being evil, and Tempest's "trial by fish" is just bizarre. But overall, this is an excellent introduction to the series.

Episode 22 - Tom Thumb Tempest - Clearly, the Stingray team were going through an ideas drought when they came up with this effort. While waiting on standby for a mission, Troy Tempest falls asleep after Phones turns the heaters on, and has a dream in which he and the Stingray crew are shrunk. And, er, that/s about it.

First off, it's a combination of two hoary old cliches - the Incredible Shrinking Cast idea that's turned up in everything from Land of the Giants to Doctor Who, and the "it was all a dream" cop-out ending that's a familiar from innumerable primary-school creative writing classes.

Both of these narratives devices cause problems for the episode. Since the characters are puppets, it's difficult to get any sense of scale. Placed in an environment where the characters are reduced to the size of, well, puppets, only serves to highlight the unreality of the show.

A bigger problem, by far, however, is the bland "it was all a dream" plot. The writer`s obviously made a stab at explaining why the dream happens at ll - Troy feels as though he's being belittled by Commander Shore - but that can't disguise the fact that the episode is entirely inconsequential. It's literally a story where nothing happens for half an hour.

Even the dream sequence itself isn't especially entertaining - party because it's so obvious that it's a dream, but also because it's clearly aiming at a surreal atmosphere, but falls far short. In the right hands, this could have been wonderfully bizarre, but it degenerates into sub-Tom-and Jerry shenanigans when Tempest dreams that the Stingray crew have interrupted the dinner party preparations of their nemesis Titan.

To be fair, the resolution is reasonably clever - Tempest and the crew start a fire, which wakes him up because the room he's sleeping in is hot. However, it's hard not to feel that the story's a wasted opportunity, since there's mileage in the idea of shrinking Stingray for real. That could've been an exciting adventure, so why use the tension-breaking "it was all a dream" device ?