Stingray

I think without doubt or fear of contradiction that the greatest ever opening scene of any TV series has to be Gerry Andersons Stingray. Yeah I know it’s all subjective but even now after almost 50 years I still get that tingle when it runs. Its so damned exciting you just get caught up in it and you actually believe that “anything can happen in the next half hour”.

Now just to throw a spanner in the works I do have to state that very quickly that as a kid I began to think that not one of the stories ever lived up to the opening sequence and that awful ending “Marina” song was so sickly sweet I was scared all my teeth would rot and fall out ...or maybe that was later when Ayesha Brough and Gabriel Drake were rewiring my brain in UFO.

Anyway, there is that great but crazy scene in the opening sequence where Stingray leaps out of the water with a Titan Terror fish following. I always wondered what the back story to that might have been and I figured it was a last ditch attempt to shake of the Terror fish which had previously snuck up on Stingray and let loose a couple of torp’s . So some decades later I thought I would recreate that underwater attack scene from my childhood head.

I imagine there are some that wonder what the hell I’m on about re the opening sequence so here you go and remember this was 1964 …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45NtEXv7DZs

By the way, I think that following hot on the heels of Stingray has to be the opening sequence to the Prisoner but I’m happy to be persuaded different.