Four Feather Falls

Four Feather Falls was the third puppet TV show produced by Gerry Anderson for Granada Television, from an idea by Barry Gray. The show was made on a tight budget and could not afford sophisticated special effects. To achieve the effect of the guns' muzzle flashes, small specks of black paint were carefully applied to the 35 mm negatives, so that they would appear as white flashes on the prints. The series was the first to use an early version of Anderson's Supermarionation puppetry process, although the term was not coined until Anderson's next series, Supercar. The original puppets produced... for the series were made by Christine Glanville and had papier-mâché heads. Because they were stationary, the viewer could not tell which character was talking unless its puppet moved up or down. This was unsatisfactory to Anderson, and the papier-mâché heads were replaced with hollow fibre glass heads with rods inside which could move the eyes — though the puppets could not blink — and wires which with a 12 volt current could move the mouths.
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