Welcome to our Stingray Deep Dives! As we surge towards the super-sub’s 60th anniversary, we asked you to pick your favourite episodes of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic 1964 sci-fi underwater series that should receive in-depth, analytical retrospectives. Based on your picks, we’ve collated a top 10 selection of Stingray’s greatest episodes to receive a review – as voted for by you!
We’re continuing our countdown of Stingray’s top 10 episodes with the WASP’s turning their adventures into a blockbuster movie! But is the film’s producer, Mr. Goggleheimer, all who he appears to be?
Lights, Camera, Action!
As we’ve previously explored in The Man from the Navy, Stingray is a series that made ample room for a playful sense of humour that enabled the series to avoid taking itself too seriously, and in turn provide viewers with welcoming character-driven scenarios. Produced near the middle of Stingray‘s production run, Stand By for Action follows many similar comical narrative beats of that preceding episode on our countdown (although The Man from the Navy was made after Stand By for Action in production order). Evidently, the humour-heavy tone of the former perhaps influenced the later. Stand By for Action is one of Stingray‘s lighter, wittier adventures that pokes gentle yet unsubtle fun at underhand movie practices and the rapidly fleeting vanity of celebrity culture.
In Stand By for Action, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and its super-sub Stingray, piloted by its fearless crew, become the subject of a major motion picture. This novel premise is a far cry from discovering wildly alien underwater worlds or enemy races wishing to conquer the terranean world. This is one of those episodes where Stingray has terrific fun being Stingray – for better or worse…
This delightfully meta-flavoured premise gains extra punch with most of the Marineville crew portraying ‘fictional’ versions of themselves. The episode’s opening scene-within-a-scene of Troy Tempest being gunned down by an unknown assassin (Lt. Fisher) and subsequently ‘dying’ in a distraught Atlanta’s arms, coupled with Phones’ helpless ‘is he…?’, is a wickedly melodramatic way to kick off the episode. The pan-out to reveal that we are, in fact, on a film set is a neat visual gag – and a great use of the very real AP Films’ studio walls being utilised as a makeshift puppet-sized film set. Tom Thumb Tempest then isn’t the only Stingray episode to find creative ways of having its puppet characters interact with human-sized sets!
Similarities of The Man from the Navy persist when it’s decided by the film’s director, Marty, and producer, Mr. Goggleheimer, that Troy just doesn’t have the star power to give the film the profile it needs. In steps the world-renowned hunk Johnny Swoonara, who easily captures the attentions of Marina and Atlanta, much to Troy’s annoyance! However, Mr. Goggleheimer is in fact the nefarious surface agent X-20 in disguise, and this whole cinematic endeavour is nothing more than a hugely elaborate ruse to defeat the WASPs once and for all.
Cracks in the Script?
Stand By For Action is definitely one of Dennis Spooner’s less straight-faced episodes. It has more in common with Loch Ness Monster and Set Sail for Adventure rather than the more intense styles of Count Down or Rescue from the Skies. His earlier episodes are more action-orientated, but he evidently loosens things up here. It’s just so amusingly meta to think that the WASPs are basically producing their equivalent of A Hard Day’s Night, portraying exaggerated versions of themselves to tell, presumably, a day in the life of Stingray. Johnny Swoonara, played to wonderfully camp effect by Ray Barrett, is in fact a reconditioned Steve Zodiac puppet. He has more than a whiff of Elvis Presley about him, with his jet-black hair and suave manner, but it’s hard to imagine the honourably discharged Elvis crack up the way he does when X-20 delivers a devastating attack against Stingray when the submarine is out on filming manoeuvres.
Here however, the episode’s cracks do start to show when placed under scrutiny. What exactly is X-20’s plan, here? Was his intention just to kill Troy and frame it as an accident on the film’s set all along? An entire movie production had been set up, just for the bumbling underwater operative to fail to take Troy out in the most awkwardly visible manner possible? In reaction to X-20’s failure, Titan commands X-20 to outright destroy Stingray, but is Titan fully aware that Troy Tempest has been usurped by heartthrob Swoonara at the super-sub’s controls? The episode doesn’t entirely attempt to tie these loose threads together into a satisfying whole.
It’s also wildly amusing to realise that the Marineville crew instantly suspects Goggleheimer as the one responsible for attempting to kill Troy, yet they decide to continue making the movie anyway! This feels as much like a comment on the volatile nature of the film industry as the vanity surrounding Johnny Swoonara, who soon proves he’s not the man of action and courage his false image may have Atlanta and Marina believe. With Stingray eventually taken out of action from X-20 and Swoonara reduced to a blubbering wreck, Troy quickly asserts himself as the real star of the show by rescuing the damaged Stingray and its crew.
Courage, Lover Boy…
Hooper would sharpen up his own shortcomings with the later Titan Goes Pop, another episode that boasts a riotous disdain for celebrity culture, but much stronger in execution than Stand By for Action. For all of its faults in storytelling logic, it’s still a charmingly silly adventure with a pleasantly low level sense of threat. Stand By For Action may lack the thundering menace of The Big Gun, the desperate race-against-time energy of Emergency Marineville, or the slowly approaching sense of dread of A Nut for Marineville, but an overriding sense of carefree fun does much of the heavy lifting here. Stingray‘s more light-hearted episodes are rarely less than quite enjoyable, and Stand By For Action is content to be nothing more than just that.
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