NBC, which aired it as parts of its Saturday morning children's block from 1963 to September 1965. In the UK, the series was regularly repeated on the ITV network until 1974, followed by an additional re-run in 1985. Critical response According to Jim Sangster and Paul Condon, authors of Collins Telly Guide, "the sheer ambition of the show is its charm." Matthew Millheiser of review website DVD Talk praises the series: "Fireball XL5 might be kitschy, might be chock-full of scientific inaccuracies and glaring anachronisms that was par-for-the-course for cheesy sci-fi of the time, and even might have a few clunker episodes in the mix. But the care, innovation, and sheer imagination in each episode are positively infectious." He goes on to describe the series as "simple, clean, clearly delineated fun" and "the perfect type of children's entertainment: it doesn't talk down to its audience, it doesn't bog down the characters with a faux sophistication or glib hipness, and it has enough dazzle, charm, and imagination to make the show enjoyable and entertaining for adults." For Anthony Clark, Fireball XL5 "marks the start of the truly great Anderson-produced puppet show [...] [W]hen you sprinkle the episodes with humour, lace them with action and tie them up with Barry Gray's fantastic music, the result transcends the show's rudimentaries, transforming it into something enduringly special." Comparing it to the Andersons' follow-up, Stingray, which he considers to be very similar, Clark describes Fireball XL5 as "[p]erhaps [...] a little more playful and a little less slick, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in energy and pace." According to Paul Mavis of DVD Talk, the series is "not as ambitious ideas-wise" as Stingray yet "still charms, thanks to its simple yet nicely designed production and that velvety, strangely ethereal black-and-white world it creates." He also states that "while there aren't nearly as many elaborate 'hardware' set-ups as later Anderson outings [...] the budget-imposed simplicity adds an amusingly ironic, sleek modernist tone" to the series. In contrast, Stuart Galbraith IV describes the "hardware" as "pretty retro even by 1962 standards", adding that the overall production "looks more like Rocky Jones, Space Ranger than Thunderbirds." On the writing, he notes that while earlier episodes are mostly "strange-planet/Earth-under-threat-type stories", there is an increasing focus on character development as the series progresses. Mavis argues that the characters are limited by the fact