Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

Saw the whole thing in the cinema this afternoon. I DO NOT RECOMMEND seeing it in the cinema - the picture quality is so crappy that every line is jagged as if it's been faxed, and with every second of soundtrack left in, but without the budget or reference to animate it, long stretches of almost every minute are basically 2-D puppets standing still and blinking. This will be bearable watching an episode at a time as the most convenient way to experience this lost-ish story, but all at one go, sitting still for 2 hrs 45, it is VERY TEDIOUS. The animation is very cheap and patchy - you'd expect that, but it's probably shoddier than you're expecting.

yeah none of these things are superb animations, I'm shocked they're banking on a cinema experince for this. why?

Sharmill are a film distributor. Cinema experience is the entirety of their business.

ah well, I'll save my money and pop Stones of Blood or Battlefield in the DVD player then.

Class is actively terrible.

The completist in me wants me to watch the rest, having only seen ep 1 so far, but am having trouble summoning the enthusiasm

The first two were OK in a kind of Torchwood-lite way.
The third was a Season 3 mid-season-lull episode which would only work if you're invested in the characters (but who we hardly knew).
Ep 4&5 two-parter was INTERMINABLE.

i'll skip it then

too bad because it seemed like not a completely awful idea for a spin off

Class is actively terrible.

yeah, I said that after 1 & 2 (obv) but then tried 3 and tapped out hard. It's still for 15-yr-olds though, not 35-55yo man-nerds, so nbd.

if only the bbc had a family-friendly science fiction show that didn't talk down to kids and teenagers or insult their intelligence

watched "power" in the cinema and i liked it better than sic did. the animation was a cheap rush job, i'm not a fan of showing stories in omnibus format, and i'm not exactly sure the theater showed it in the right aspect ratio, but god it's such a good story for that era. great whitaker script, really well constructed, great tristram cary soundtrack. troughton lays the recorder thing on a little thick for my liking and episodes 4 and 5 suffer from the era's typical mid-story drag, but the way the story just keeps ratcheting up the tension until finally all hell breaks loose... it reminds me of king crimson's "starless", if that's not too off-the-wall a comparison. i see why the fans love it so much. before watching the animation i'd always preferred _evil of the daleks_ but i'm sold on this one now.

great tristram cary soundtrack

it's just reused sound from the first Daleks story (again!). not that it's not great, of course, and Mark Ayres audio restoration overall is the best thing about this new version.

British DVD release is a fiasco, they've partially announced a BR version in February which will have a colourised version on it as well and there will be a second release into the BBC store just before Christmas of the colourised episodes for download with an unspecified discount for people that have already bought the b&w download.

I'm really not sure what it's for at all, particularly if the animation is as shoddy as it looks.

Colourised version is commissioned by BBC America after the fact, being done by a Canadian company. BBC don't have the freedom to stop it being done, and if they didn't make it available for sale, they'd be in for a shitstorm of complaints from entitled dickheads.

it's just reused sound from the first Daleks story (again!). not that it's not great, of course, and Mark Ayres audio restoration overall is the best thing about this new version.

― sad, hombres (sic)

the audio restoration was nice - ayres always does a good job - but i have to admit the fake stereo weirded me out a little bit.

god we're going to wind up with twelve different animated reconstructions of all the episodes, aren't we, each of them commissioned by a different department and all of them dodgy. this is our post-apocalyptic future: arguing about which reconstruction of "the space pirates" is the least worst.

I watched the telesnaps version of Power of the Daleks today. First episode's extremely weak, trying to rely on the actor change instead of doing anything interesting -- I had no interest in Vulcan or examiners. The denouement in the final episode is boring too.

I noticed that the Doctor's music-playing as a distraction was reused to better effect in Four to Doomsday, and the servile Daleks got reused in the execrable Victory of the Daleks.

The actor change is pretty bloody interesting tbf! Whitaker blends that into the examiner plot once that starts, with Polly's initial doubtful will to trust that this is the Doctor being strengthened - despite Ben continuing to disbelieve - by the way he snaps into focus when faced with a mystery and a threat. But once they're alone again, he stays as opaque to the companions as initially.

Yeah, the denouement has always been "pull the End-Of-Story lever," without being able to see if anything interesting was done with it, and the animated version utterly fails to repair the confusion too.

i liked the first episode and the last episode.

for me the weakest part of classic who has always been the lives and conflicts of the people the doctor interrupts. they're grey, boring people in grey, boring costumes played, for the most part, by grey, boring actors. they have to literally wear nametags for me to tell them apart. that moment in episode one when you cut from the doctor in the tardis to two anonymous mooks talking about grain requisitions or something is the toughest part of a story for me.

but troughton's performance in that first episode was him bringing his a game from day one. (unlike later actors, where they'd usually start out a new doctor with the second story of the season to let them get their feet, troughton's first recorded episode was the first episode of power of the daleks, no?) he really leans into the uncertainty and confusion. i think it was right of whitaker to not have anything else going on, even if as a result we do get one of the many, many dalek episodes where the episode 1 cliffhanger reveal is... gasp... DALEKS! (having the doctor called "the examiner" by most of the characters is a clever conceit on whitaker's part. there's no real reason the examiner wouldn't have a name, of course.)

i also found the sixth episode more satisfying than i thought i would. watching contemporary who, or contemporary television in general, i tend to want to watch something where the ending makes some sort of sense and/or has a satisfying denouement. maybe i am projecting my own fears too much onto what was always just a piece of throwaway pop culture, but i was struck by the psychological realism of the way it portrayed war, the chaos, confusion, the way nothing makes sense. one gets the sense that the doctor, clever as he is, was not quite sure what he did to win. maybe i give whitaker too much credit here.

one can, if one tries hard enough, find the sort of ironic justice for which the doctor would become notorious. in "evil of the daleks", the daleks isolate the human factor in order to remove it from humans- instead the doctor adds it to the daleks, thus causing them to destroy themselves. (v. cynical on whitaker's part, really.) so likewise, in power of the daleks, the daleks spend the entire story seeking power, and in the end the doctor gives them more than they want, thereby destroying them. but mostly, if we're to be honest, he just blows them up.

The double-meaning of the title is very thoroughly laid into the story, which I hadn't appreciated watching a recon. Harder to miss when you've got the same 1.5 seconds of characters and telephone cords power cables looping over and over.

unlike later actors, where they'd usually start out a new doctor with the second story of the season to let them get their feet, troughton's first recorded episode was the first episode of power of the daleks, no?)

No, this was never a thing:
Pertwee's first is obviously his first shot, because it's all on 16mm OB due to a studio strike and them having to get something ready to air.
Tom's was his first, and shows it, because it was made by Letts and Dicks as the last story in the production block of Pertwee's final season, UNIT, terrible CSO and all. (To repeat myself, Tom's real first season - and Hinchcliffe/Holmes' - runs from Ark In Space to Terror Of The Zygons. In that case, they shot the second story first, but because it was all OB, not for getting-the-character-down reasons; and it was months after his own first story.)

Colin's obviously couldn't be the second story of the season, as his first story had already aired ten months before, at the end of S21.
Sylvester's couldn't be, because Cartmel hadn't been hired and been able to commission scripts for the second, third and fourth stories of the season until months after JNT had commissioned and approved Pip & Jane's script into pre-production.
McGann's couldn't be bcz etc etc...

Davison's first story to air was shot FIVE MONTHS after his first episode shot, but also - JNT propaganda aside - not for any sensible "getting to grips" reasons. With no script editors and no plan on how to follow up the events of Tom's last season, AND limited availability of Davison between seasons of sitcoms, the office simply had to start commissioning and shooting scripts that had been tentatively developed so far. So his second story was shot, then his fourth, then he went off to shoot an entire season of Sink Or Swim, then Dr Who resumed and he shot his third story, and then they shot his first.

Eventually JNT appointed a script editor and they commissioned the guy that had written Tom's last story to write the story that immediately followed it. But Kinda, the last story shot before Castrovalva, was commissioned on September 25th, and Castrovalva, the first story to air, was commissioned on April 8th. Four To Doomsday started shooting on April 13th.

(Just checked and the time crunch on S24 was such that Cartmel was hired a month after JNT commissioned the Bakers, and he commissioned the other three stories within 10 weeks, with trial scripts from two weeks after he started. But looool forever at JNT and Pip & Jane: Time And The Rani, in 1987, was based on one of their terrible Dr Who Choose Your Own Adventure books from 1986, which itself had been adapted from pitches they'd had rejected from telly Who in 1984. Yes, after he'd had the entire program cancelled under him, salvaged it only by whipping up press fervour, lasted one year before being forced to fire his star personally or be axed again, JNT decided to debut a new Doctor, with his best chance of getting publicity and drawing new or returning viewers, by commissioning something that had been too shit to make three years earlier.)

i had that choose your own adventure book. it was at least better than the other one i had, which was by william emms.

but yeah, the whole jnt era was one long car crash. it's a miracle that anything good at all came out of that period.

thanks for the correction re: production order! i knew the chaos bidmead went through with "project zeta sigma" falling apart and all, but didn't realize that filming episodes out of intended broadcast order to accommodate cast changes was never a deliberate policy on classic who.

i think i'm more forgiving of you on the animation because when it comes to classic who i sort of expect it to be a cheaply done rush job. obviously the restoration team and their dvds do not fit that mold- with them it was cheaply done brilliant work- and if those were my expectations i'd probably be a lot more disappointed. but when i think of "power of the daleks" i don't think of the dvd line but of the surviving clips of the original broadcast- patrick troughton looking in the mirror at a still photo of william hartnell, a "dalek army" made up of extremely obvious cardboard cutouts, a dalek running smack into the camera (i laughed when they actually animated this last; my wife had to elbow me in the ribs). the brass may not have cared, but the people who did the work did, and that's really all i can hope to ask for.

I had two of the Find Your Fate books - a David Martin which was very bad, and the Michael Holt, which was kinda competent. I may have tried to read the P&J one borrowed off someone at school, and tapped out bcz the Rani is terrible.

My local library has a bunch of the Big Finish stories that I borrow in digital format, and I'm going through the McGanns right now ("Chimes of Midnight" easily my favorite so far, and just finished "Minuet in Hell"). Any other notable ones from other Doctors I should check out?

as well as Chimes of Midnight, Robert Shearman wrote two Colin Baker stories called The Holy Terror and Jubilee, they're two of my favourites of the Big Finish plays I've heard.

(he wrote another two Colin Baker stories as well, and one with Derek Jacobi playing the doctor, but I haven't heard them)

Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

After the new show started the audio series started getting a little too "trad" for me, but I do recommend the "companion chronicle" Peri and the Piscon Paradox in the strongest possible terms.

^ absolutely, that's another Nev Fountain and one of the best

anyone in America going to see Genesis Of The Daleks in the cinema on Monday night?

nah but i've really been enjoying twitch's doctor who marathon. i didn't really connect with the who fan scene in indiana - nice enough folks but really merch-focused. i also found that a lot of the fans i ran into didn't seem to really, uh, watch the show? which i thought was weird, but whatever, i didn't see last season either.

LONDON 1965

I can’t justify dumping my kids on my wife so I can go see it

take the kids, plus a sofa, teach them how to watch from behind it

whatever, i didn't see last season either.

catch up imo, Asbill + Pcap is an A++ companion / doctor combo

I ordered the Tom Baker blu-ray set that's coming out soon, it has Genesis in it... I'll watch it then!

This is a fun bit of pedantry: https://www.herocollector.com/en-us/Article/doctor-who-the-logos

all the post-reboot Doctor Who logos have been complete crap except the newest one

Is the new Doctor debuting in September

they haven't announced the air date of the debut episode yet... September or October likely

all the post-reboot Doctor Who logos have been complete crap except the newest one

― com rad erry red flag (f. hazel)

Aw I'm kind of fond of the cheesy Tardis in the letters Matt Smith one. It's pulpy.

title sequence for all seasons of doctor who after pertwee has always been cheesy rubbish, it just depends on what your appetite is for cheese

obviously as a doctor who fan it is enormous

This is a fun bit of pedantry

bemusing that it doesn't include the 1970-73 logo, esp when it's discussed so much!

ordered the Tom Baker blu-ray set that's coming out soon, it has Genesis in it... I'll watch it then!

yeah but not in restored picture quality on a big screen with lots of ppl laughing

new logo is the worst since McCoy's, I also like the cheesy DW TARDIS from the Smith era

but that's like the worst one! it's not a show about Doctor D.W. Who

They're all pleasant enough or cheesy enough but the Pertwee and Baker-Davison-Baker ones are the best by miles. They feel like actual logos, as opposed to random fonts laid out randomly.

I like the changes in the new logo but the font itself is a bit characterless.

it's not a show about Doctor D.W. Who

How do you know that's not his secret real name?

because I read that wretched Marc Platt novel that had his "real name"