Joe 90 facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Joe 90
Genre	Science fiction
Created by	Gerry and Sylvia Anderson
Voices of	Keith Alexander Sylvia Anderson Rupert Davies Gary Files Len Jones Martin King David Healy Jeremy Wilkin Liz Morgan Shane Rimmer
Composer(s)	Barry Gray
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of series	1
No. of episodes	30 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Reg Hill
Producer(s)	David Lane
Cinematography	Julien Lugrin Paddy Seale
Running time	25 minutes
Production company(s)	Century 21 Television Productions
Distributor	ITC Entertainment
Release
Original network	ATV
Picture format	35 mm film
Audio format	Mono
Original release	29 September 1968 (1968-09-29) – 20 April 1969 (1969-04-20)
Chronology
Preceded by	Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
Followed by	The Secret Service

Joe 90 is a 1968-1969 British science-fiction television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and filmed by their production company, Century 21, for ITC Entertainment. It follows the exploits of nine-year-old schoolboy Joe McClaine, who becomes a spy after his adoptive father invents a device capable of recording expert knowledge and experience and transferring it to another human brain. Armed with the skills of the world's top academic and military minds, Joe is recruited by the World Intelligence Network (WIN) as its "Most Special Agent".

First broadcast on the ITV regional franchises between 1968 and 1969, the 30-episode series was the sixth and last of the Andersons' productions to be made primarily using a form of marionette puppetry dubbed "Supermarionation". Their final puppet series, The Secret Service, would include extensive footage of live actors. As in the preceding series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, the puppets of Joe 90 are of natural body proportions as opposed to the caricatured design used for Thunderbirds and earlier Supermarionation productions.

Though not as successful as Century 21's earlier efforts, Joe 90 has been praised for the characterisation of its main puppet cast and the quality of its scale model sets and special effects. Commentators have interpreted the spy-fi theme and use of a boy protagonist as both a "kids-play-Bond" concept and an enshrinement of children's imagination. The series has also drawn some criticism for its lack of female characters.

As with its earlier productions, Century 21 produced tie-ins from comic strips to toy cars. The series was syndicated in the United States in 1969, repeated in the UK in the 1990s and released on DVD in the 2000s. A live-action film adaptation has been proposed more than once but remains undeveloped.

Premise

Joe 90 is set in the then near future, widely believed to be 2012 and 2013. The scriptwriters' guide stated that the year is 1998, while other sources place the series at an unspecified point in the early 21st century. The episode "The Unorthodox Shepherd" is implied to be set in 2013.

The series revolves around the eponymous Joe, a nine-year-old schoolboy and the adopted son of widowed computer expert Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine. Ostensibly an ordinary father-and-son pair, the McClaines live in an Elizabethan-style cottage on the Dorset coast. In the basement of the cottage is a secret laboratory containing Mac's latest invention, the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer (referred to by the acronym "BIG RAT"): a machine capable of recording a person's knowledge and experience and transferring it to the mind of another. The BIG RAT is centred around the "Rat Trap": a spinning, spherical cage in which the pre-recorded "brain patterns" are uploaded to the recipient.

Sam Loover, a friend of Mac and an agent of the World Intelligence Network (WIN), recognises the potential of Joe and the BIG RAT and persuades Mac to pledge their services to the organisation. With the aid of the BIG RAT, Joe becomes a spy unlike any other: by taking on the brain patterns of expert adults, he gains the skills needed to undertake dangerous missions, while his youth helps him to avoid arousing enemy suspicion. As long as he wears a pair of special glasses, which contain electrodes that store the transferred brain patterns, he is able to carry out all manner of assignments – from piloting fighter aircraft to performing neurosurgery to playing the piano. Known as WIN's "Most Special Agent", Joe 90 reports to Shane Weston, the network's commander-in-chief in London, and carries a specially-adapted school case that contains radio transceiver and high-capacity handgun. The series ends with a clip show episode set on Joe's 10th birthday, in which a number of his missions are recalled as flashbacks during a surprise party.

Like earlier Supermarionation series, Joe 90 features secret organisations, rescue missions, global security threats and advanced technology: the latter exemplified by the "Jet Air Car", a land-sea-air vehicle invented by Mac as the primary means of transport for him and Joe. Like the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (WASP) in Stingray, the World Intelligence Network (WIN) is a global organisation referred to by an acronym. In the fictional world of Joe 90, the Cold War – significant when the series was first broadcast, due to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia – has ended and a world government has been formed. WIN is the successor to the Secret Intelligence Service, the Central Intelligence Agency and the KGB, which all merged to form the new global spy network. Although the first episode sees Joe hi-jack a prototype Russian fighter and bring it to England, this is revealed to be a fiction imagined by Weston to explain the types of espionage that the boy will perform as a WIN agent. This plot twist, which also reveals that Russia and the West are now allies, has been praised by media historian Nicholas J. Cull for its "progressiveness of spirit" and for demonstrating Gerry Anderson's wish to "[take] an end to the Cold War as a given in his work". Cull states that Anderson was motivated by what he viewed as a "duty to the rising generation to avoid perpetuating Cold War stereotypes".

However, despite the existence of a world government, the nations of Earth are still divided into Western and Eastern blocs. Here, Cull argues, Joe 90 is similar to earlier Anderson series in that it "unashamedly capitalised on the Cold War cult of the secret agent whose skills defend the home from enemies unknown". Hostile entities include the Eastern Alliance, which dominates Asia and appears in the episodes "Attack of the Tiger" and "Mission X-41". "Arctic Adventure" and "Attack of the Tiger" combine the threat from the East with dangerous nuclear technology: in the former, Joe attempts to recover a lost atomic warhead from the ocean floor while avoiding enemy submarines; in the latter, he must destroy a nuclear device before it is launched into orbit to hold the world to ransom. In contrast, "Big Fish" portrays nuclear technology as a force for good: in this episode, Joe pilots a damaged nuclear submarine out of the territorial waters of a Latin American police state.

Voice cast

Four of the regular Joe 90 characters: (left to right) Sam Loover, Shane Weston, Mac and (in front of Mac) Joe.

Compared to Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 features a smaller cast of just five regular characters. Like the preceding series, it has been described as more "English-sounding" than Thunderbirds, the Andersons having dispensed with the idea that the main character should be a "square-jawed, fair-skinned male with a Mid-Atlantic accent". Instead, Joe 90 focuses on the strong American supporting characters of Sam Loover and Shane Weston.

• Len Jones as Joe McClaine. For realism, Joe was voiced by boy actor Jones instead of an actress (as was usually the case for child characters in earlier Supermarionation series). Gerry Anderson commented that having a woman voice a boy "always sounded rather odd to me. It never sounded like a real little boy ... With Joe 90, I suggested finding a British kid and making him repeat the lines parrot fashion." He described Jones' performance as "only adequate, but at least it sounded authentic."
• Rupert Davies as Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine. At the time of production, Davies was well known for playing Maigret in the TV series of the same name, a role that had left him typecast. He was the most distinguished actor yet to contribute to an Anderson series. In Gerry Anderson's biography What Made Thunderbirds Go!, Simon Archer and Marcus Hearn describe Mac's "warm yet distinguished" English tones as a "perfect counterpoint" to Sam Loover and Shane Weston.
• Keith Alexander as Sam Loover. Alexander had previously voiced characters in Thunderbird 6 as a replacement for Ray Barrett. During the 1960s, he also provided the voice of another puppet character, Topo Gigio, on The Ed Sullivan Show in the US.
• David Healy as Shane Weston. Healy, an American expatriate actor, had voiced guest characters in Captain Scarlet and often played transatlantic characters in British television.
• Sylvia Anderson as Mrs Harris, the McClaines' housekeeper, who is unaware of their involvement with WIN. Anderson was best known for voicing Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds and its film sequels.

Supporting characters were voiced by Alexander, Healy and Anderson as well as returning voice actors Gary Files, Martin King, Jeremy Wilkin, Shane Rimmer and (for one episode, "Viva Cordova") Liz Morgan. Rimmer and Morgan were not credited for their contributions. Files said that he was "tickled pink" to be working with Davies, commenting: "I hated the way that so many so-called producers wouldn't meet his eye. He was Maigret forever, you see, in their eyes." On her one role in Joe 90, Morgan said: "They needed a voice, they called around and everyone else was out shopping. So they called me in."

Broadcast

Joe 90 debuted on ATV Midlands and Tyne Tees Television in late September 1968. Broadcasts on LWT, Southern Television and Anglia Television began shortly after. The series reached Harlech and Channel Television in November and Granada Television on Christmas Day. Granada, which started its run with the Christmas-themed "The Unorthodox Shepherd" rather than "The Most Special Agent", was one of several broadcasters to transmit the series under the alternative title The Adventures of Joe 90. In the US, Joe 90 aired in first-run syndication in 1969.

The series had several UK re-runs during the 1970s but was not shown on Yorkshire Television until 1981. Some broadcasters used an alternative version of the title sequence beginning with a zoom-in shot of Joe's special glasses accompanied by a voice-over from Tim Turner stating: "These are Joe 90's special glasses. Without them, he's a boy. Wearing them, he's an expert." These words, intended to warn young viewers not to endanger themselves by copying Joe's exploits, have sometimes been wrongly attributed to Keith Alexander.

In 1994, Joe 90 was shown on BBC1. Rights holder PolyGram cleared the series for broadcast on the condition that the title sequence's "zooming" Joe 90 logo be replaced with a static version to distinguish it from the logo for G.I. Joe toys. The video tapes used for broadcast were 16 mm transfers of the original 35 mm film and were edited for timing reasons: cold opens were moved so that all episodes began with the title sequence, while the end titles were shrunk to allow a CBBC presenter to read out viewer birthday cards. A simultaneous run on Nickelodeon presented the episodes in their original forms. In 2009, the series aired on the UK Sci Fi Channel alongside Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet.

Adaptations

In 1981, the New York branch of ITC Entertainment released a Joe 90 compilation film, The Amazing Adventures of Joe 90, comprising the episodes "The Most Special Agent", "Splashdown", "Attack of the Tiger" and "Arctic Adventure". Intended to boost US syndication sales, the film was one of several Anderson anthologies to be released in the 1980s under the promotional banner "Super Space Theater". "The Most Special Agent" was re-edited to remove its framing sequences, thus giving the impression that Joe's theft of the MiG-242 is a real mission rather than a fiction. The British Board of Film Classification rated the film PG, though the episodes are individually rated U.

In 2001, three Joe 90-themed "trailers" were filmed to accompany the BBC nostalgia series I Love The '90s. Each of these depicts Joe entering the BIG RAT and receiving the brain pattern of a 1990s household name, from Liam Gallagher to Vic Reeves to the character of Garth (played by Dana Carvey) from the film Wayne's World. The trailers are included as a special feature on the Joe 90 Region 2 DVD box set.

In the 1980s, the rights to the ITC productions belonged to PolyGram Television. They were later sold to Carlton International and then Granada International, which merged with Carlton in 2004 to form ITV Global Entertainment, a division of ITV plc. In the 1990s, PolyGram proposed a live-action film adaptation of Joe 90. In 2003, Variety reported that a film version was in the planning stages with Disney producing. The film remains undeveloped. In 2005, while discussing obtaining remake rights from Granada, Anderson said: "We have regular meetings and although they are very polite and very nice, nothing ever happens." Anderson died in 2012.

Merchandise

Tie-ins included a range from Century 21 Toys comprising friction-drive and battery-operated versions of the Jet Air Car and Sam Loover's car. Also available were Joe's WIN briefcase (complete with replica gadgets and pistol) and his WIN badge (reading "Most Special Agent").

Joe 90 was also given its own weekly comic, Joe 90 Top Secret, published by City Magazines, which ran for 34 issues and presented the TV episodes in strip form, while also including strips based on the TV shows The Champions and Land of the Giants. In September 1969, Joe 90 Top Secret merged with TV21 (formerly TV Century 21) to form TV21 and Joe 90. After a further 36 issues, the Joe 90 strips were dropped and the title reverted to TV21. Other print media included 1968 and 1969 Joe 90 annuals by Century 21 Publishing/City Magazines as well as two short novels by May Fair Books: Joe 90 and the Raiders and Joe 90 in Revenge.

During the 1990s, Joe 90 appeared as a comic strip in the Funday Times. Strips from the discontinued Joe 90 Top Secret were reprinted in a new publication, Joe 90, which was launched to tie in with the 1994 BBC repeats. After seven issues, this merged into Fleetway's Thunderbirds comic.

Home video

In the 1980s, Channel 5 (later PolyGram Video) released the series on home video in the UK. The eight-volume set featured the episodes "The Most Special Agent", "Splashdown", "Attack of the Tiger" and "Arctic Adventure" in their re-edited forms from the 1981 compilation film The Amazing Adventures of Joe 90, which itself received three video releases in the 1980s. Re-released in 1992, the set used 16 mm prints of poorer quality than the original film.

In 2002, Carlton released a five-disc Region 2 DVD box set sourced from a digital remaster of the original 35 mm prints. This was followed by Region 1 and Region 4 releases in 2003. A French-language release – Joe 90: Agent Très Spécial – hit the Canadian market in 2004. Through these releases, the episodes that make up the compilation film were made commercially available in their unedited forms for the first time.

DVD releases:

Blu-ray releases (UK):

Images for kids

• 

  Examples of model work for Joe 90: Mac's Jet Air Car (left) and Sam Loover's vehicle (right), both at 1⁄24 scale, parked in front of WIN Headquarters. Loover's car was made open-top to accommodate the puppets' head wires. In the end, scenes set inside the car used "under-control" versions of the puppets that were operated from beneath the set.

See also

In Spanish: Joe 90 para niños