Mar 17 2012

Danger 5

We must have watched a lot of television growing up, as I have thousands of episodes of hundreds of TV series stuck in my head..

Hogans Heroes, Petticoat Junction, The Goodies, Gigantor, The Brady Bunch, Wacky Races, Gilligan’s Island, Scooby Doo, The Partridge Family, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Rocky and Bullwinkle, F Troop, Bewitched, The Flying Nun, Mission Impossible, The Time Tunnel, Happy Days, Land of the Giants, Family Affair, Superman, Spiderman, Green Acres, The Flintstones…………

All quality viewing.

(Cathy grew up in the country where they only had ‘Kimba the White Lion’, ‘Adventure Island’, ‘The Magic Roundabout’,and ‘Mr Squiggle’. This must be why she has so much more room left in her brain to put things in.)

If your head is also full of old TV shows (Fitzgerald), can you imagine a cross between Thunderbirds, Get Smart, Bat Man, James Bond, Phantom Agents and The Young Ones?

That show is Danger 5,  currently screening on SBS on Monday nights at 9.30, and is available on SBS Catch Up TV.

Danger 5 is an elite group of international agents. Under the command of the mysterious eagle-headed Colonel, they are send from their secret exotic headquarters on various missions to thwart Hitler and his plans of world domination (in the 1960s!).

(The initial prologue episode ‘The Diamond Girls‘ screened only on YouTube as a series of five clips – which makes the episode numbering confusing.) 

Adelaide filmakers Dario Russo and David Ashby are the team behind Danger 5.

They must have also had a similarly misspent youth. Their first production, The Italian Spiderman, started as a Year 12 HSC project. They had an internet hit with this YouTube series. It attracted the attention of someone at SBS (as well as 4 million other viewers), and the Danger 5 project was funded.

Russo, 25, is quoted as saying that history was their starting point for most of Danger 5’s plotline.

“It’s all completely historically accurate of course, we didn’t have to make up anything at all,” he joked. “There are some scary historical truths in just about every one of these bizarre stories.”

Russo is convinced SBS is the perfect home for the new show.

“We figured two of SBS’s favourite things are boobs and Hitler; so we thought we’d put both in the same show and we’d be on to a winner,” he said.

PS Happy St Patrick’s Day