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50 free Thunderbirds trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Thunderbirds landed on ITV in 1965 and never really left. Gerry Anderson's marionette rescue drama gave children of several generations a countdown to shout along with, a hidden island base to dream about and a fleet of craft whose launch sequences are still copied by blockbusters today. This quiz covers the whole 60-year story: how the Tracy family's rescue organisation launches from its island, the people and voices behind Lady Penelope, Brains and the Hood, the best-loved episodes, the two 1960s feature films, the 2004 live-action movie and the CGI remake that ran from 2015. It suits pub quizzers who grew up on the BBC2 repeats, fans who can name every pod vehicle, and anyone who has ever muttered 'Thunderbirds are go'. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more than you arrived with.
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Q 01Jeff Tracy's sons all take their first names from which group of real 1960s Americans?
The Mercury Seven astronauts
The Mercury Seven astronauts lent their first names: Carpenter, Glenn, Grissom, Cooper and Shepard. Jeff himself was an early lunar astronaut before founding International Rescue.
Q 02What slides aside at the foot of the Tracy Island villa so Thunderbird 1 can launch vertically?
A swimming pool
A swimming pool hides the hangar, a design Den of Geek found alarming given the risk of 'a great big rocket ship appearing out the bottom' of it. It still ranked the island the seventh-best secret base in film and TV.
Q 03What lining Tracy Island's runway swings outward to clear Thunderbird 2's wingspan at launch?
Palm trees
Palm trees tilt back as the transporter taxis out, then the craft tips up a ramp to launch, which the series says beats its VTOL thrusters for fuel efficiency.
Q 04Which marque lent its name and a real £100 grille to Lady Penelope's pink six-wheeled FAB 1?
Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce sent a genuine radiator grille, Spirit of Ecstasy included, reasoning the show might 'inspire a child to own one, one day'. Its designer put two axles at the front purely for looks.
Q 05Which reply by Penelope's chauffeur in Thunderbirds was the working title of a co-creator's memoir?
Yes, M'Lady
'Yes, M'Lady' was the original title of the co-creator's autobiography before it became My FAB Years. The chauffeur hypercorrects his Cockney by adding aitches where none belong.
Q 06Which Star Trek: The Next Generation actor directed the 2004 live-action Thunderbirds film?
Jonathan Frakes
Jonathan Frakes, a fan of the original, also plays an uncredited police officer arresting the Hood's minions. He blamed the flop on opening against Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2.
Q 07In Terror in New York City, which landmark collapses while being moved on rails to a new site?
The Empire State Building
The Empire State Building was being shifted for a Midtown regeneration, and its fall traps reporter Ned Cook in an underground river. Gerry Anderson based it on a real store that was jacked up and moved inch by inch.
Q 08Which British pop-punk band took the 2004 Thunderbirds film's theme song to UK number one?
Busted
Busted's 'Thunderbirds Are Go' topped the chart and won the 2004 UK Record of the Year, faring better than the film, which Gerry Anderson called 'the biggest load of crap I have ever seen'.
Q 09Which BBC children's show showed viewers how to build their own Tracy Island when the toy sold out?
Blue Peter
Blue Peter's Anthea Turner built one from household waste in January 1993, and the BBC eventually sold her demonstration on VHS. Radio Times later called it one of the show's most iconic moments.
Q 10The giant reptiles of Attack of the Alligators!, APF's first use of live animals, were really what?
Juvenile crocodiles
Juvenile crocodiles from a private zoo in northern England stood in, and an anonymous tip-off brought an RSPCA inspector to the studio, who took no action. One got loose mid-shoot and sent the effects director sprinting from the tank.
Q 11Gerry Anderson coined 'Supermarionation' during which series, APF's first for Lew Grade's ITC?
Supercar
Supercar was in production when the name was minted as a promotional tool, Anderson admitted, to set APF apart from Muffin the Mule and Flower Pot Men; it never described a real process.
Q 12Why were the Thunderbirds puppets' heads noticeably too large for their bodies?
The lip-sync solenoid
The lip-sync solenoid that snapped each lower lip open in time with the dialogue lived in the head, and scaling bodies up to match would have meant enlarging every set. Later series moved the mechanism to the chest.
Q 13Which feature did Thunderbird 2's designer add purely so it would stand out beside real aircraft?
Q 21Who voiced Lady Penelope in 1960s Thunderbirds, co-created her and was secretly the puppet's model?
Sylvia Anderson
Sylvia Anderson reprised the voice in 1994 when Penelope appeared to Edina in an Absolutely Fabulous dream sequence, and guested in the 2015 remake as Great Aunt Sylvia.
Q 22Whose real voice, heard often by the crew, became the Cockney accent of Lady Penelope's chauffeur?
A pub wine waiter
A pub wine waiter at the Kings Arms in Cookham, Berkshire, supplied the accent, and on Gerry Anderson's advice Parker's voice actor dined there to pick it up.
Q 23David Graham voiced Brains and many villains, plus which regular he reprised in the 2015 remake?
Parker
Forward-swept wings
Forward-swept wings were pure aesthetics: 'All aircraft have swept-back wings, so I thought I'd sweep mine forward,' the designer said. Graeme Shimmin rates it the best aircraft in fiction.
Q 14How many interchangeable equipment pods does Thunderbird 2 choose from before launching on a rescue?
Six
Six pods slide along a conveyor until the right one sits under the craft, and together they make up nearly half its volume. Thunderbird 4 usually rides along in Pod 4.
Q 15What colour is Thunderbird 4, the rescue submersible piloted by aquanaut Gordon Tracy?
Yellow
Yellow Thunderbird 4 is too slow to travel far by itself, so the Daily Mirror asked why a craft that 'can't even go anywhere on its own' counts as a Thunderbird at all.
Q 16Which pod vehicle appears in Pit of Peril, City of Fire and The Duchess Assignment?
The Mole
The Mole is one of the few pod vehicles to appear in more than one episode, and commentator Fred McNamara ranks it fifth among all the Anderson shows' vehicles.
Q 17Which Tracy brother spends solitary three-week tours aboard the space station Thunderbird 5?
John
John's quiet, astronomy-loving nature made him the natural pick, and his puppet's looks were modelled on Adam Faith and Charlton Heston. He gets a week's rest on Tracy Island between tours.
Q 18Which Tracy brother, an off-duty painter and pianist, pilots the heavy transporter Thunderbird 2?
Virgil
Virgil's voice changed between series: David Holliday, the cast's only American, went home after Series One and Jeremy Wilkin took over for Series Two and the films.
Q 19Gordon Tracy won an Olympic title in which stroke before joining International Rescue?
Butterfly
Butterfly gold preceded service in the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, the WASP borrowed from an earlier Anderson series, where he captained a bathyscaphe.
Q 20Jeff Tracy, the Air Force colonel who founded International Rescue, grew up on a wheat farm where?
Kansas
Kansas wheat-farmer's son Jeff rose to colonel in the US Air Force; his mother, the farmer's widow, later joins the island household as Grandma.
Parker, a reformed cat burglar and safe-cracker, got the same voice 50 years on; its sculptor based the face on clichéd butlers from black-and-white English comedies.
Q 24Under which alias does Brains build the Skythrust airliner, a name the 2015 remake later made real?
Hiram K. Hackenbacker
Hiram K. Hackenbacker is one of several covers: the board behind Skyship One knows him only as 'Mr X', and the 2004 film went with Ray Hackenbacker instead.
Q 25The Hood shares a parent with which Tracy Island resident, whom he torments telepathically?
Kyrano
Kyrano collapses in agony under these intrusions yet passes them off as faintness, never betraying the Tracys; which parent the two share is never revealed.
Q 26Which Tracy Island resident, daughter of Jeff's manservant, is youngest brother Alan's girlfriend?
Tin-Tin
Tin-Tin was conceived, a co-creator wrote, to 'redress the balance' of a male-dominated puppet cast, and Jeff paid for her maths and engineering degree in gratitude for her father's service.
Q 27The Hood, International Rescue's masked enemy, plots from a temple in the jungle of which country?
Malaysia
Malaysia's jungle temple holds a statue of his half-brother, before which the Hood stands to make his telepathic calls; he does not appear at all in the second series.
Q 28In the pilot Trapped in the Sky, the Hood bombs which atomic-powered airliner on its maiden flight?
Fireflash
Fireflash cannot land without setting the bomb off, so International Rescue's Elevator Cars catch it on the runway; the original design sketch had it flying for BOAC, not 'Air Terrainean'.
Q 29How was the Series One finale Security Hazard written to recoup money after two episodes overspent?
As a flashback clip show
As a flashback clip show it needed just 17 minutes of new footage, after Attack of the Alligators! and The Cham-Cham had both blown their budgets.
Q 30In final episode Give or Take a Million, a child prize-winner visits Tracy Island for which holiday?
Christmas
Christmas on the island even gets snow: Brains has everyone shut their eyes, then switches on a snow-making machine he built after hearing the odds of a white one were slim.