Captain Black (Captain Scarlet)

In the series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Captain Black was originally a top agent for Spectrum who led an exploratory mission to Mars. When his team encountered the Mysteron city, a misunderstanding led to the Mysterons' city being destroyed, and the Mysterons retaliated by killing Captain Black and creating a Mysteron replica of him under their control. This replica became their primary terrestrial agent for the duration of the series.

Yes, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons was created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the same team behind Thunderbirds, Stingray, and other Supermarionation shows. Produced by their company AP Films (later Century 21), it aired in 1967 and used the same advanced marionette puppetry and miniature effects techniques. The show was notable for its darker tone compared to Thunderbirds.

Captain Black is a marionette character, brought to life through the Supermarionation puppetry technique developed by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's production team. The puppets used in Captain Scarlet were more realistically proportioned than those in earlier Anderson series like Thunderbirds. All characters in the original 1967 series were puppets; a CGI-animated remake titled New Captain Scarlet aired in 2005.

Both Captain Black and Captain Spectrum's Captain Scarlet are Mysteron agents, but with a crucial difference: Captain Black remains fully under Mysteron control throughout the series, while Captain Scarlet retains a human retrogade mutation that gives him his original personality and the ability to recover from injuries. This makes Scarlet Spectrum's primary weapon against the Mysterons and Black's former colleague turned enemy.