Hi, I'm LiGi! I was about six when I first discovered Thunderbirds. My dad, having loved the show when he was growing up in the sixties, bought the videos for me and my sister and we would sit for hours watching the amazing rescues and wonderful characters. I never saw them as puppets, they were always real in my mind. Each one has their own unique little personality quirks that made them seem so human and so lovable, and I couldn't stop myself falling in love with those incredible men who flew those extraordinary machines and saved peoples lives.

When I first heard there was going to be a live action movie I was thrilled, I could watch the boys I loved so much in real life motion! I can still remember sitting in the back of the car on the way home from the cinema, terribly disappointed and whining about the fact that the movie was centred on a teenaged Alan without the other brothers even getting a look in. I couldn't even work out which one was Virgil and which was Gordon they had so little screen time! But the movie does have one redeeming feature; the second I got home I dug out my videos and spent the next week or so re-watching the original series with more vigour than ever. I think I really made my parents regret taking me to see the movie as almost every night at dinner time I would point out something else that the movie had done wrong and how the TV series was so much better.

And about a year ago, my obsession – for that is what it had now become – started disrupting dinner times again. I had rediscovered my Boys in Blue! I had recently started writing fanfiction for a different fandom and was checking out what else was on the site when I stumbled across Thunderbirds and found that there were other people out there who loved them as much as I did. Other people who saw the boys as more than just puppets and had given them proper personalities. That night I went on Amazon and ordered a brand new DVD box set, as I had broken the old VCR player and couldn't watch the videos I had kept from childhood. The second the DVDs arrived in the post I was sat on the floor in front of the television, a glass of milk in one hand and the remote control in the other, just like when I was younger, a stupid goofy grin on my face as Jeff's voice started the familiar countdown, ending in my three favourite words: Thunderbirds are GO!