Interster

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Interster (Afrikaans, Inter-star) was a weekly science-fiction puppet television show made for children and shown in South Africa from the late 1970s. SABC children's programming was quite innovative during the late 1970s to early 1980s — the impossiblity of purchasing Thunderbirds forced the SABC to produce Interster, but also the technical challenge offered the opportunity to truly flex the SABC's creative muscles.

The main plot involved an undercover planetary defence agency operating from Cape Town under the guise of an interstellar shipping company. Real world political issues influenced the plot as the Earth is depicted as a galactic pariah by the Interplanetary League due to its cold war with the planet Krokon. The spaceships used in the show were called Impalas, named after the Atlas-Aermacchi AM 326-K and -B locally assembled South African Air Force aircraft.

There was a pragmatic reason for calling the aircraft Impalas - the basis of the models were 1/48th scale plastic model kits of the AM326, so that they would appear as recognisable to South African youth. The Impala was the mount of the South African Air Force's demonstration team - The Silver Falcons - thus providing another thematic link with Anderson's Thunderbirds which had been named for the United States Air Force demonstration team.

Despite, and perhaps because of the lack of contact with international children's programming, Interster wound up being technically superior to every aspect of Gerry Anderson's supermarionation techniques, and in fact remains in some ways very far ahead of its time:

• Puppets were internally wired, and moveable in a large range of motion.
• Their electronics were able to perform with considerably better motion than any of the Thunderbirds puppets - they were in fact computer controlled, with servos programmed and under the control of an Apple II personal computer.
• Models had a level of intricacy rivalling Star Wars' vessels, and in the case of the Impalas, actually exceeded that of the B-Wing, despite being 20 times smaller.
• Pyrotechnics were also more impressive, with explosions requiring a special permit.
• The longer story arc and individual plots were extremely sophisticated - to the point of actually rivalling the best of both Star Trek and Babylon 5. Interster could very easily have been prime time viewing, and perhaps if it had been its reputation would now have been legendary.

The stories are set in Cape Town, at the location of what is now the V&A Waterfront. Enemies were aliens from a distant space system — and were often viewed as representing black protagonists by journalists overseas. The entire series was produced in Afrikaans.

Plot wise, Inter-ster was far removed from any of the Anderson's stories. There was no unified government as seen in either Captain Scarlet or Fireball XL5 - South Africa alone possessed interstellar flight, and alone was in contact with the first aliens to visit earth, who hailed from Alpha Centauri.

In the stories, the protagonists were concerned with the defense of South Africa - the rest of the world was more of an abstraction. Interaction with the Centauri's was the primary interaction with South Africa. A number of fascinating concepts were explored - relative to humans, the Centauris are only the size of dolls, and their ships and technology are scaled to match. Perhaps the greatest triumph of the puppeteers are not just the human puppets, but the Centauris - for they were as intricate, but barely 10cm high as compared with the 32cm human puppets for simulataneous shots.

The plot contained a lot of content which could interest adult viewers : the romantic tension between the hero and heroine, the scientific genius of the controller of the Silver Falcon's operations controller, and the humorous quirks and jokes - in particular, in the first run in the 1980s, characters complained about the price of a meal, which raised laughs at the time for the implication that a R 35 for a good meal was ludicrous inflation (in 1979, R 1.00 = US$ 2.00), and yet by the time of the second run of the program in 1998, R35 for a good meal in a restaurant was cheap indeed given the Rand's freefall after the change in government - the little joke retained its poignancy despite changing circumstances, rendering Interster timeless.

The same team that produced Interster had cut their teeth in the late 1970s with Liewe Heksie, with the same sophisticated puppetry making its first appearance in the adventures of a well-meaning but absent-minded little witch. The internal-wiring puppeteers made their final work a set of musical crickets that played music for a children's program featuring two more puppets, Sarel Seemonster, a friendly sea monster which could blow steam from his nostrils, and Karel Kraai, a crow which was fully functional to the point of being able to remove his hat, for the children's TV program 'Wielie Wielie Walie', named for the first line of a traditional Afrikaans children's verse version of 'Ring a Ring a Rosie'.