So many classic Gerry Anderson series share plenty of recognisable elements - daring adventure, fantastic technologies, and life-saving heroics. But other shared elements crop up from time to time - plenty of vehicle names, mission titles and acronyms are recycled from series to series. You can't help but do a double-take and wonder where you may have heard certain names before!

Let's investigate the various instances where such names and titles were recycled throughout Gerry Anderson's worlds!

World Armed Forces

On close inspection, it transpires that Anderson wasn't above reusing exact same titles for organisations, missions or individuals throughout the Anderson worlds. Some of the most commonly utilised outfits are the various globally unified military forces which populate just about everything from Stingray to The Secret Service. Such distinct bodies as the World Navy, World Army, and World Air Force crop up sporadically from series to series, and all named as such. 

The World Air Force appears in the Captain Scarlet episodes Treble Cross and Flight to Atlantica, but also in Joe 90's Talkdown and Arctic Adventure. Similarly, the World Navy is namechecked as such in both Stingray's The Man from the Navy and Thunderbirds' Atlantic Inferno.

Intriguingly, employing the same organisations throughout these series can be interpreted as evidence that most of the classic Supermarionation series do indeed exist in the same shared timeline. However, the possible shared canon of these series always remains a thorny, vaguely defined issue, and it's more likely to assume this continued usage of the same names as just a case of convenient and efficient recycling from series to series. Most of these series existed in a future timeline fashioned to similar aesthetic details, so why not use the same names? What else would they be called?

Century 21 to Fireball XL5

An unmade AP Films production highlights how Gerry perhaps had an entire bank of space-age phrases standing by for whatever deployment he felt they'd be best suited for. 

Riding high on the success of Supercar, AP Films had high hopes for further series of the marvel of the age, along with two brand new productions. One of these was born as Century 21, which showcased the space-age heroics of Steve Zodiac, accompanied by the beautiful doctor of space medicine, Venus, and their missions in the year 2962 aboard the fantastic United States Space Patrol craft, Century 21. 

Obviously, this concept would be refined to become Fireball XL5, but it's nonetheless delightfully intriguing to see how early the name 'Century 21' was being employed. That title would rear its head again as the proposed name for AP Films' new comic in early 1965 when the company expanded its operational output into publishing, but vetoed to become TV Century 21. The third time would prove to be the charm with the name Century 21 when it was at last embraced as the new name of AP Films from 1966 onwards. 

The other concept AP Films had proposed to Lew Grade following Supercar was a production whose methods, vehicles and characters would find renewed life further down the road. This untitled series would have blended Supermarionation with live action and focused on the adventures of young boy named Joe and his dreams of becoming an astronaut. In these flights of fancy, Joe dreams himself as the space-age astro-hero Joe 90 who pilots the SPV 1 Zero (Space Patrol Vehicle 1 Zero). The fantasy sequences dreamed by Joe would have been filmed in Supermarionation, with real actors being filmed for the 'real' scenes.  

The names 'Joe 90' and 'SPV' would find better uses in later series, while the mixture of Supermarionation and live action characters would be attempted with 1969's The Secret Service. This unnamed series has to be one of the most fascinating 'what-ifs' from Gerry Anderson's lengthily career, which included many proposed productions that never got passed the conceptual or pre-production stage. 

Sun Probes, World Presidents & M.E.Vs

Smatterings of other instances of titles used in one production reoccurring elsewhere pop up. 'Operation Sun Probe' has two uses in two markedly different Anderson productions - Thunderbirds and Doppelganger. Operation Sun Probe is used as the official designation of the jeopardous mission undertaken by the colossal Sun Probe rocket to capture a piece of the sun and return it to Earth. Elsewhere, in the very different world of the 1969 live action sci-fi drama Doppelganger (also known as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun), Sun Probe gains a new lease of life as the title of EUROSEC's mission to investigate the startling appearance of a newly discovered tenth planet in our Solar System. 

It's safe to say that the Sun Probe is far more synonymous with Thunderbirds as the name of the stricken space vessel that demands International Rescue's help. Doppelganger's use of Sun Probe feels much looser, and it's oddly jarring to hear something so closely linked to Thunderbirds reappear in the far bleaker, less optimistic space-age adventure of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's only live action sci-fi film.  

Elsewhere, the World President, a character most commonly associated with the world of Captain Scarlet, is mentioned but never seen in Terrahawks. Similarly, Terrahawks also cheekily recycles the title M.E.V. as the name of Terrahawks' own vehicles. The Martian Exploration Vehicle is the cockpit section of the gargantuan Zero X, able to unplug from the front body of the craft and become a multi-terrain vehicle capable of ground travel. Terrahawks' M.E.V. performs much the same function, but boasts a more streamlined appearance and hovercraft-style functionality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, long-time Anderson scribe Tony Barwick was script editor and the main writer on both of these series.

The reusing of vehicle names, mission designations and more proves to be something of a supersonic can of worms throughout Gerry Anderson series. If puppets, models and sets could be reused, why not the actual names of various characters and vehicles, too? Tracing the individual histories of certain specific names and phrases reveals eye-opening mini-sagas of how these titles were either recycled from series to series or were kept waiting in the wings for their most appropriate use. 

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