In late 1962, as production on
Fireball XL5 drew to a close,
Gerry Anderson decided that an underwater series was the next logical step for APF: "We had been on land and in space, so where could we go next? One possibility was underwater." He was inspired by childhood memories of
U-boats in the
Second World War, as well as by the mysteries of the ocean: "I was ... fascinated by trenches in the ocean that are as deep as mountains are high. There are features that man has never seen and pressures that are almost impossible to withstand. I began to wonder if there were areas of the Earth which had been little explored and felt justified in writing some wacky stuff." APF's financial backer
Lew Grade, who had bought the company after the success of
Fireball XL5, approved the concept and commissioned 26 episodes. Anderson named the new series "Stingray" partly from a belief that
stingrays are dangerous animals (in reality, they are docile), but also because it "seemed an exciting title." The new studios, built inside a converted factory unit, contained three shooting stages: (£ million in ). The budget per episode was £20,000, which enabled APF, whose earlier productions had been in black and white, to film in
Eastmancolor. Though
Stingray would debut in black and white in its country of origin, the switch to colour filming was intended to increase the series' chances of being bought by a network in the US, where colour TV was already common. Sets were re-painted after
NBC supplied APF with a list of colours believed to cause problems such as flaring or bleeding; according to Anderson, this was unnecessary because in Eastmancolor, a set "would appear on screen exactly as you had painted it." Some colours were avoided as they did not come out well in black and white, and models and sets were painted differently to ensure that they did not blend into each other. During the production of
Stingray, APF became the UK's largest colour film consumer. The
framing sequences from the abandoned episode were subsequently used to create a
compilation film known as the "Feature Presentation" (see #Special episodes).
Characters and puppet design In her 2007 autobiography, Sylvia Anderson, who had voiced the regular characters of Jimmy Gibson in
Supercar and Dr Venus in
Fireball XL5, wrote that she devised Marina as a mute so that she could take a break from voice acting and "concentrate on the scripts and characters". Her voice parts in
Stingray were limited to uncredited guest roles in the episodes "Raptures of the Deep" (as Marina) Gerry Anderson said that Phones was inspired by memories of a sound engineer with whom he had once worked: "He spent so long with his headphones plugged in to various bits of equipment that he used to leave them on all the time, earning himself the nickname 'Phones'." Gerry Anderson said that he did not actually instruct the sculptors to base Troy on Garner; rather, he offered Garner's name simply to help them visualise the character, as they were struggling with his original brief (which merely called for Troy to be square-jawed and heroic-looking). Titan was based on a young
Laurence Olivier, or Peter Lorre. while Marina has drawn comparisons to both
Ursula Andress and
Brigitte Bardot. The Aquaphibians were modelled on an alien creature from the
Fireball XL5 episode "XL5 to H2O".
Stingray was the first Supermarionation series to feature puppets with glass eyes and poseable hands for increased realism. Another innovation was the creation of alternative heads to allow characters to display emotions: besides their "normal" heads, which had neutral expressions, the main characters could also be fitted with "smiling" and "frowning" heads. The female puppets' wigs were made of human hair; for the male puppets,
mohair was used as it was softer and easier to style. It was lowered and raised using hydraulics. For the underwater sequences, Anderson had originally envisaged filming inside a water tank, These scenes were ultimately filmed using a variation of a technique first used on
Supercar: mounting a model ocean floor against a
cyclorama and "flying" the puppets and models across the set on wires from an overhead gantry, while shooting the action through a thin
aquarium to distort the lighting.
Vegetable dye was added to the aquarium to make the water more noticeable. Several aquaria were used; constructed by a company that supplied fish tanks to
London Zoo, they were re-built with thicker glass after one of them burst from the water pressure. The move away from black and white sometimes caused problems as build-ups of algae in the aquaria caused the water to change colour. Food was dropped at various points around the tanks to keep the animals in shot. For the climax of the
Stingray launch sequence, in which the vessel shoots out of an underwater tunnel, part of the set was painted onto the aquarium to conceal the
air line that produced the accompanying rush of bubbles. Ocean surface shots in
Supercar and
Fireball XL5 had been filmed in an outdoor tank, but for
Stingray several tanks were built inside the studio. Among the challenges presented by these shots was the need to make the scale models appear realistic while filming on water, which cannot be miniaturised. Various powders were used to create foam and
whitewater. Each tank incorporated an artificial horizon system whereby the back wall was built low and the tank was deliberately overfilled to create a waterfall, blurring the divide between the rim of the tank and the painted-sky backdrop. The effect was sustained by collecting the escaping water in troughs and pumping it back into the tank. To conserve studio space, some scenes were filmed in a wedge-shaped tank that was tailor-built to align with the camera's
field of view. One of the effects shots in the series' opening titles shows
Stingray and a pursuing Mechanical Fish leaping out of the ocean and then plunging back under water. Although this involved complex movements with the wire models which made the shot extremely difficult to film, the crew were successful on the first take.
Opening and closing titles The title sequence consists of a series of action shots featuring undersea explosions, Marineville going to red alert and
Stingray doing battle with a Mechanical Fish. This is accompanied by dramatic narration from Commander Shore, who warns the audience to "Stand by for action! We are about to launch... Stingray!" before declaring that "Anything can happen in the next half-hour!" In the first 26 episodes, the title sequence opens in black and white before switching to colour; for the final 13 episodes, these first few seconds were replaced with all-colour footage. Jim Sangster and Paul Condon, authors of
Collins Telly Guide, praise the introduction, writing that "Of all the programmes we've looked at for this book, there is none with a title sequence as thrilling as
Stingray." Anthony Clark of the
British Film Institute calls the sequence "a mini-adventure in itself ... Children's TV had never before been this exciting." According to
John Peel, the
Stingray titles contrasted greatly with those of
Fireball XL5 and
Supercar, which were more "straight narrative openings". Peel also argues that
Stingray influenced the "rapid cutting, pounding rhythms and extreme stylising" of later TV title sequences. – a ballad about his love of Marina, performed by
Gary Miller with
soprano backing vocals – while Atlanta gazes wistfully at his photograph. ==Broadcast and reception==