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Thunderbirds was a science fiction series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Originally running as an animated puppet series, Thunderbirds was also spun off into spin-off comics published in TV Century 21 alongside The Daleks. TV Century 21 also published comics and short story starring Thunderbirds character Lady Penelope.
Crossovers with the DWU
As the conceit of TV Century 21 was that all its series took place in a single universe, several Thunderbirds stories from its pages crossed over freely with the DWU. This included allusions to Lady Penelope or the Thunderbirds's activities in the prose "cover stories", but also Lady Penelope being the narrator and main protagonist of a short story tying in with the release of Dr. Who and the Daleks in 1965. One two-page comic story also involved Penelope in a multi-series crossover story arc centering on the DWU planet of Astra, and another Thunderbirds comic story crossed over both with the DWU and with Fireball XL5 by featuring Nikita Bandranaik and Wilbur Zero.
Lady Penelope would later make one last cameo in the DWU in The Dying Days.
In The Lodger, the Eleventh Doctor also namedrops International Rescue as part of the line "I'm Captain Troy Handsome of International Rescue". In Resurrection of the Daleks, the guards on the Prison Station wear uniforms similar to those worn by the main characters in Thunderbirds.
Additionally, the Second Doctor novel The Indestructible Man features many elements that were borrowed from three of Gerry Anderson's series: Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, and UFO, although under thin aliases rather than an explicit crossover.
Cast and crew connections
The original Thunderbirds TV series from 1965-1966 featured the voices of a number of actors who also played roles on Doctor Who, such as Shane Rimmer, Jeremy Wilkin, David Graham and Ray Barrett. Cliff Richard and John Carson were involved in the feature-lengths films Thunderbirds Are Go (1966) and Thunderbird 6 (1968) respectively.
Sophia Myles, Ron Cook, Lex Shrapnel, Bhasker Patel and Nicola Walker all appeared in the 2004 live-action Thunderbirds film, adapted from the series, and the 2015 TV reboot, Thunderbirds Are Go, also included several actors involved in Doctor Who and its spin-off materials, such as David Tennant, David Menkin, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Angel Coulby, Kayvan Novak, David Graham, Reggie Yates, Sandra Dickinson, Adjoa Andoh and Teresa Gallagher. Crew members Derek Meddings, Ian Scoones, and Michael Wilson also worked on both shows, as did writer Dennis Spooner. John Peel is the author of Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet: The Authorized Programme Guide, as noted on the back of his Virgin Missing Adventures novel Evolution.
Christopher Fowler, writing the foreword for Simon Clark's Telos novella The Dalek Factor, compares the Daleks to Thunderbird 2 in how familiar and iconic they are.