The Secret Service: Complete Series (1969)
Film:
DVD:

Written & Directed by Gerry Anderson
Starring the Voices of Stanley Unwin, Gary Files, Jeremy Wilkin, Sylvia Andeson, and Keith Alexander

Features:

• Running audio commentary with producer David Lane on pilot episode
  
• Gerry Anderson bio
  
• "Secret Confessions" with Special Agent Matthew Harding
  

Released by A&E Home Video
Region: 1
Rating: NR
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Skip it. If you need a marionation fix, go re-watch some old Thunderbirds.

Gerry Anderson is damned legendary when one talks about genre television. From his "Supermarionation" classic Thunderbirds to live-action fare like Space: 1999, he brought a memorable handful of shows to the canon of "classic sci-fi television." He also, however, threw out a few pitches that just flat failed to make it across home plate. The Secret Service is one such pitch. Built around the concept of a priest who is secretly an agent for the British crown, the series is essentially a baker's dozen worth of repetitions of the same basic formula, with very little to differentiate each episode from the next and no spiffy model rocketships flying around to break things up.

The top-billing of Stanley Unwin should've been sufficient warning, honestly, to all and sundry that this show wasn't one of Anderson's most innovative. Unwin, a British comedian whose entire act consists of speaking "Unwinese," a mishmash English pidgin of his own invention, was riding a wave of popularity at the time, not least because of his appearance on a popular British concept album by The Steps. Hoping to cash in on the Unwin craze, or so it appears, Anderson designed an entire series as an excuse to use Unwin and hopefully draw audiences familiar with that name. What Anderson doesn't seem to have realized (or perhaps, given the show's limited thirteen-episode run, mayhap he did) was that his own name recognition was by this point a more powerful draw than Unwin's would ever be.

Each episode in the series consists of "Father" Stanley Unwin receiving notice of a special mission to be undertaken on behalf of B.I.S.H.O.P. Then, he uses the "minimizer" to shrink his assistant Matthew down to six inches tall, stuffs him in a special briefcase that contains surveillance gear, and then drops the briefcase somewhere unobtrusive so Matthew can creep out and look for clues when nobody's around. Now, while this is kind of a neat idea once or twice, it gets a little old over the course of thirteen episodes. The titular Unwin does little more than sit somewhere in radio contact with Matthew and talk him through things and occasionally go screaming down the road in a bright yellow Model T.

Basically, Anderson appears to have tried to cash in on an Unwin craze that wasn't nearly as strong as he projected, and failed to deliver all the action and gadgets that his younger viewers had come to expect from the show. The episodes are too much talk, too little excitement, and when you're aiming at the short attention span set, that's a cardinal sin. It's an interesting viewing from a purely TV-historical perspective, as it was after this show that Anderson made the jump to live-action, though he would eventually return to puppets with Terrahawks, after UFO and Space: 1999.

The DVD set is an attractively packaged two-disc affair, containing every episode of the series. The features list is a little thin, especially compared to some of A&E's other Supermarionation offerings. Of course, as a lesser-known show with a limited run, there may not be a wealth of material out there. A little information on Unwin himself would have been nice, as he was never the celebrity on this side of the pond that he apparently was in the UK. Overall, I can't say I'd recommend this heartily to any but the most die-hard Anderson completists for purchase. Given the short run of the series, a rental wouldn't be too bad if you're just curious or don't trust me that it's as dull as I say it is.