Anderson's backer, Lew Grade of the British commercial TV station ATV, was delighted at the overseas success of the series. He was happy to finance a new series, Fireball XL5. The puppets in this series were even more complex than earlier. They featured moving eyes, moving lips, and different facial expressions (though of course, thanks to the strings and wires necessary to make the puppets work, walking through doorways was still a problem). The model-making of sets, spaceships and planetary surfaces was remarkable at a time when most science fiction TV consisted of bug-eyed monsters, and "Flash Gordon" style rockets. Fireball XL5 and its crew was the cream of the World Space Patrol, exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new civilisations (hang on, that sounds familiar). It was launched along a mile-long ramp (a launch system which had been considered by real space scientists who were trying to work out how to get rockets to reach a high enough velocity to break out of Earth's orbit).
What set the 1962 series apart was the merchandising. Until now, the marketing of TV tie-ins was limited to occasional children's books and jigsaws. Canny Gerry Anderson licensed toy manufacturers to produce model kits of the spaceship, toy puppets of the heroes, toy ray-guns, and all manner of different articles. It was a master stroke, and became a regular feature of Anderson's series.
After Fireball, Anderson produced his first series in colour. Colour television was now becoming a major selling point in the United States (and it was around the time that the NBC network declared itself a 'colour network', and introduced the multi-coloured peacock logo). The fact that Stingray was in colour ensured another trans-Atlantic success for Anderson. The series' scripts were now becoming as clever as the photography and special effects. Many of them were written on two levels, so that parents could enjoy a quiet smile while their offspring enjoyed the derring-do of the puppet heroes. (After all, there were very few children's series then - or now - which feature a relationship triangle between the hero, his girlfriend, and the woman he works with and also, apparently, loves. Oh, and he works with his girlfriend too. And his girlfriend's father is his boss. And the woman he works with is friends with his girlfriend. This makes an episode of Peyton Place look tame!)
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