end of Series Two, his speech impediment had been eliminated. With Parker, Brains was Graham's joint favourite voice role for series. In the mid-1980s, Gerry Anderson proposed to develop a Thunderbirds re-make, T-Force. As part of the updating of characters, vehicles and settings, Brains' myopia and stutter were to have been removed, and the character re-imagined as an eloquent computer scientist. In the late 1990s, before Jonathan Frakes replaced Peter Hewitt as director of the then-undeveloped live-action film adaptation, co-producer Tim Bevan approached comedian Rowan Atkinson with a view to offering him the role of Brains. Anthony Edwards, who portrayed Brains in the completed 2004 film, enjoyed the role primarily on account of the character's stutter. In an interview for Starburst magazine, Edwards stated that his children "made me be absolutely true to the original Brains – it was very important to them." Marit Annen, the film's costume designer, pictured the character as "the kind of archetypal forgetful scientist; the only thing that's hi-tech about him is his shoes". The glasses that the live-action Brains wears, while intended to be reminiscent of the original "pebble lenses", were made as smaller and "slightly more modern" half-frame spectacles. Character biography Born on 14 November 2001 or 2040 in Michigan, United States, Brains was orphaned at the age of 12 when his family was killed in a hurricane. He was eventually adopted by a professor at the University of Cambridge, and discovered later on by Jeff Tracy, founder of International Rescue, while he was lecturing in Paris. Brains is a highly-intelligent mechanical and aerospace engineer who is considered to be fifty years ahead of his time, and the world's greatest aircraft designer. A highly valued if somewhat absent-minded and socially maladroit member of IR, he designed the Thunderbird machines and other vehicles and facilities used by the organisation and its agents – indeed, much of the hardware and infrastructure. He is also known to invent in his spare time; he once built a chess-playing robot called Braman (which fortuitously serves as an auxiliary computer in the episode "Sun Probe"). Brains' technical expertise is sometimes required in the field, in which case he usually accompanies the Tracy brothers in Thunderbird 2. It has been mentioned a number of times, in at least Thunderbirds are go, that Brains has a tendency to overengineer his inventions to ensure reliability and an ability to work in unexpected