 The Andersons sold their intellectual and profit participation rights to Thunderbirds and their other productions in the 1970s . As a result , they had no developmental control over subsequent adaptations of their works . Thunderbirds was first remade for TV in the early 1980s as Thunderbirds <unk> . In this anime re @-@ imagining , set 20 years after the original , the vastly expanded IR is based within an <unk> and operates 17 Thunderbird machines . It was inspired by <unk> , an updated story concept by Gerry Anderson and Reg Hill that later served as the basis for Anderson 's <unk> series <unk> . 
