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.