Category: Doctor Who

As the last adventure of the original series proper – separated from the first episode of the new series by fifteen years and the one-off TV movie starring Paul McGann – it almost seems like the DVD release of Survival has a lot of ground to cover, and a responsibility to bring the show’s story from the making of Survival itself up to – at the very least – the beginning of production on Christopher Eccleston’s first episode as the Doctor. And perhaps surprisingly, this 2-DVD set covers quite a bit (but not all) of that ground.

Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and script editor Andrew Cartmel – widely acknowledged as the architect of the seventh Doctor’s reign and the series’ return to a more mysterious and powerful Doctor – are along for the ride in the commentary for all three episodes of Survival, and are also the chief participants in the impressive documentaries accompanying McCoy’s final televised adventure. A lively two-part documentary looks into the making of Survival specifically, and makes a very strong case that this story could have been a turning point for Doctor Who and still casts a long shadow well into the revived series. Lisa Bowerman and several other guest stars are interviewed as well (Bowerman having gone on to essay – at least in audio form – the role of Bernice Summerfield, the first companion originated in the New Adventures novels that picked up the Doctor’s travels after his cancellation from television). Deleted scenes and some very amusing outtakes – many of them featuring McCoy going off the script, off the cuff and occasionally off his rocker – are also included.

The second disc features what may emerge as the meatiest original documentary yet to have emerged from the Doctor Who classic series DVD releases. “Endgame” tells, warts and all, the story of Doctor Who’s final few seasons on the air, a story of declining ratings that eventually led to the BBC quietly putting it on “hiatus”. The controller of BBC1 at the time, Peter Cregeen, is interviewed at length and deals with the subject quite frankly…and as much as any true fan of the show hates to say it, it’s hard to come away without appreciating the logic behind his decision to “rest” the show, even if one doesn’t appreciate the result. Later in the documentary, Cartmel, writers Ben Aaronovitch and Colin Brake, FX designer Mike Tucker and the stars of the show discuss what would have been the 27th season, a series of adventures that would have seen Ace bow out in favor of a new companion for the seventh Doctor. This “would have been” segment tantalizingly recreates glimpses of these unmade stories with original artwork and faux title sequences, and offers a peek into a future that was decidedly different from the direction that the authors of the New Adventures took.

Or would it have been? Numerous connections are made to the New Adventures, including the abandoned-as-a-TV-script-but-revived-in-print Marc Platt story Lungbarrow, and the probability that many of the writers who tagged along for the formative stages of the popular book series would have found their way into the ranks of the TV series’ writers. This brings me to one of my few complaints about “Endgame” – it stops short of really covering the “wilderness years” of Doctor Who, where the stories were told by the fans themselves. Given what a major influence that the New Adventures, the Missing Adventures, the BBC-published novels and the Big Finish audio adventures – or at least their writers – have been on the current series, the lack of a documentary at least offering a cursory glance at the expanded universe of Who is a major omission. If the new series wasn’t penned by the likes of Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman, and wasn’t offering up “special thanks” to Marc Platt, I could see leaving the New Adventures in the past. But when that very same series of novels included an early print story by Russell T. Davies himself, it’s a very large gap of the show’s behind-the-scenes story to leave unfilled, and a part of the story that should be told, if not here, then perhaps somewhere in the bonus features of the new series’ third season.

Other than that, however, I have no complaints about “Endgame”. Far less heavy viewing can be found on the second disc as well, from the cringe-inducingly funny 1990 “Search Out Science” special (McCoy and Aldred’s true final appearance in character for the BBC as a one-off educational video about space), and a compilation of Anthony Ainley’s cutscenes recorded for the 1997 PC game Destiny Of The Doctors (which has already been reviewed elsewhere on this site). Much respect is given to the late Mr. Ainley by his co-stars in the various featurettes, by the way, so the addition of this, his final performance as the Master, is a fitting tribute, however cheesy the meant-for-PC-monitors production values may have been.

For a DVD that’s built around three 25-minute episodes of a single story, Survival is jam-packed with some of the most memorable features that have yet been put onto a Doctor Who DVD, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. … Read more

Unlike everything outside of the Lost In Time box sets released a few years ago, The Invasion is a unique DVD release in that it’s a story with entire missing episodes. Parts one and four of this eight-part, ahead-of-its-time humdinger of a Cybermen story are missing from the BBC’s archives. Having worked with animation studio Cosgrove Hall (of Danger Mouse fame) on the web-based 2003 adventure Scream Of The Shalka, the BBC engaged their services once more with a much more difficult assignment. This time, Cosgrove Hall would be replacing two entire 25-minute episodes of a well-regarded classic Doctor Who serial…and though the two episodes were missing, enough reference material survived (to say nothing of the other six parts of the story) that die-hard fans would know what the missing segments should look like. Even for one of the most renowned animation studios in the UK, this was a high-profile, high-pressure assignment – especially since one of the missing episodes was the opening chapter of this story and would therefore be the very first thing seen on the DVD.

How did they pull it off? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Cosgrove Hall did their homework painstakingly – their representations of the sets and locations seen elsewhere in the live action episodes are truly impressive, and in some cases they were able to rotoscope live-action footage from the cliffhanger recaps of the surviving footage. The character designs are distinctive and, especially where the series regulars and main guest stars are concerned, they do a cracking good job of looking like who they’re supposed to be.

The bad news is that, in the end, for all of this effort, the animated episodes really aren’t that much more animated than Shalka itself. With the exception of a few obvious set pieces, the animation is largely limited to talking heads. The expressions and the likenesses make it easy to overlook some of that, though. For whatever their failings might be, however, I also owned The Invasion when it was released on VHS in 1993, and I like this bold experiment a lot better than having Nicholas “The Brigadier” Courtney rocketing through ultra-condensed narrations of the missing episodes, Masterpiece Theatre-style. (For those feeling nostalgic, Courtney’s VHS intros are included on the second disc as bonus features.)

Also on the second disc is the documentary feature The Evolution Of The Invasion, chronicling the story’s unusual history. Featuring interviews with Courtney, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury, Kevin Stoney, and numerous other members of the cast and crew, this feature packs in a simply stunning amount of information about a single story and its effects on the show’s future. That’s the thing you’ve gotta love about classic Doctor Who DVD bonus features: in the amount of time that many an American behind-the-scenes documentary spends chronicling the entire run of a single series, these guys devote it to a single story. Shorter featurettes focus on the making of the animated episodes, as well as the dedicated fans of the series who audiotaped the original airings of the 1960s episodes, which now provide the only complete document of many of the incomplete stories including The Invasion.

The episodes themselves include commentaries, with the first episode’s commentary provided by James Goss, the BBC’s project coordinator, Cosgrove Hall’s animation director Steve Maher, and Doctor Who Restoration Team audio expert Mark Ayres. The real gem of the commentaries, however, is episode four, in which Hines, Padbury and Courtney react to seeing themselves and their co-stars animated for the first time. They’re both amused and impressed at the same time, and all seem to think that it’s a great way to resurrect long-lost installments of the series.

I agree with them, but let me put a qualifier on that. It’s great to finally see The Invasion, in a form that’s slightly more involving than a series of telesnaps (which is how, for example, part four of The Tenth Planet was re-enacted for its 1999 VHS release). But as daunting as the task of virtually a half-hour of animation is, I’d like to see it become more involving still. I’m not demanding photorealistic CGI reconstruction of missing stories or episodes, but I’d also like to see something a bit more intricate than some of the Flash animation seen here (which, according to the commentary for part one, is precisely what was used to reconstruct the missing segments of this story). When one starts talking about the potential for DVDs of serials like The Moonbase, which has two surviving episodes and two missing ones, it seems to me like there’s a need for the animation to be a little more involving, detailed and eye-catching, because then it’s telling the bulk of the story.

The Invasion is a worthwhile experiment, and it’s a step in the right direction for those stories that are lacking some footage to make them complete. Hopefully it’s a process that the BBC will build upon in the future.… Read more

Promoted as the test subject for an upcoming line of somewhat more streamlined (in terms of bonus features) classic Doctor Who DVDs, The Sontaran Experiment is pretty unique – it’s the only two-part story in Tom Baker’s era, and one of the only ones featuring location work shot on video instead of film. (The entire story is shot on location, so while much is made of this point by students of the show’s history, I’m not entirely sure that it really mattered, since it would’ve been either all-video or all-film anyway.) With only two 25-minute episodes, this experiment is not unlike the Sontarans themselves: short, to the point, and with little in the way of frills.

The only real bonus feature produced for The Sontaran Experiment is the amusing documentary Sontarans: Built For War. Featuring contributions from the surviving actors and writers who have dealt with the Sontarans in Doctor Who’s long history (though the Sontarans themselves first appeared in 1974), this amusing, not-quite-hour-long documentary explores both the fictional development of the Sontarans and the behind-the-scenes realites of producing the stories that featured them. It’s a neat little piece which isn’t really specific to The Sontaran Experiment, but what the heck, why not? The other Sontaran stories waiting for DVD release each feature significant companion arrivals/departures that would probably dominate any bonus features. In any case, it’s a clever piece with a sense of humor – and for a “feature-light” release, the documentary’s about as long as The Sontaran Experiment itself, so I really don’t feel shortchanged.

There’s a low-key commentary on both episodes featuring Elisabeth Sladen, producer Philip Hinchcliffe (for whom The Sontaran Experiment was his first solo flight as a producer) and writer Bob Baker. The topics range from the health of actor Kevin Lindsay, who portrayed the Sontaran experimenter in question despite his ill health, and the health of Tom Baker, who slipped and broke his collarbone during production (in fact, the fall in question is actually seen in the show itself, though it cuts away to the next scene very quickly).

For a “budget” package, The Sontaran Experiment still manages to outstrip most U.S. TV DVD packages for the sheer number of bonuses for a specific episode.… Read more