Doctor Who: Galaxy 4 (parts three and four)

That was a very pleasant surprise. I never thought that I’d dislike “Galaxy 4,” but based on what I remember from reading the novelization many years ago, and occasionally skimming through other people’s reviews, it never seemed like it was anybody’s idea of a winner. (I only ever skim reviews of missing stories, preferring to know as little as possible when I get the chance to see them. Works out really well for me that way.) But this was a perfectly charming and engaging little adventure. It’s simple, and simplistic, certainly, but it was done extremely well given its limitations. The surviving third part reminded me – of all things – of the much later “Terminus”, what with all the sounds of things in the studio bumping into bits of the awkwardly-built sets, and actors moving without a great deal of speed in situations that demand them, because the space where they are acting is too small for running.

Switching back to animation for part four, I was amused by the script’s decision for the Doctor to charge one of the alien ships by running a very long extension cord between it and the TARDIS. I paused to remind our son that this was made in 1965. The idea of channeling energy through the air was still a little alien to TV viewers of the day. I reminded him of The Avengers installment “The Cybernauts”, which introduced the then-radical idea of broadcasting power to transistors*. “The Cybernauts” was actually shown in the UK for the first time just two weeks after this serial. Elsewhere, they discuss starting both ships’ “motors.” It may be science fiction, but it’s so very much a product of its time.

Most happily, our son says that he really enjoyed this one. I like that it could have been blunt and obvious and stupid about it – gee, the nice-looking women are the villains and the beasts are the goodies – but it’s subtle and pretty smart instead. The Rills are hesitant to reveal themselves because they are certain the Doctor and his friends will be repulsed by them, but they dismiss their fears, because they judge based on character, not appearances. I could imagine one of the modern Doctors telling the chief Rill how beautiful he is. In 1965, they didn’t go quite that overboard. So the kid got a good reminder of not letting prejudices get in the way, and being willing to cooperate, and enjoyed a well-made piece of 57 year-old TV and its well-made contemporary animation. Bring on those Snowmen, BBC Studios!

Doctor Who: Galaxy 4 (parts one and two)

And now back to 1965, for the debut serial of the third season of Doctor Who. “Galaxy 4” was written by William Emms and was among the last stories overseen by the program’s original producer, Verity Lambert. William Hartnell is our cantankerous time-travelling anti-hero, accompanied in this story by Maureen O’Brien as Vicki and Peter Purves as Steven. Even two years and eighty-odd episodes in, the show is still in its early exploratory phase. Much of the business about landing on alien planets is about learning what science concept of the day is going to be important. There’s very little action, but there are odd little robots, a very weird gang of women called Drahvins, and a cliffhanger revelation of a hideous sucker-eyed thing who lives in an ammonia-filled room.

Doctor Who was, then, very much for ten year-olds who couldn’t conceive of the incredibly fast-paced and action-packed world of entertainment to come. But while this story’s reputation is such that its new release didn’t excite me too much, it turns out that must have been a thunderous cliffhanger for the kids of the day. Even with all of modern film and TV at his disposal, our son enjoyed that episode ending very much.

“Galaxy 4” was junked by the BBC in the mid-seventies after they figured there was no further profit to be made in keeping it. The serial is the latest to have been animated and reconstructed by a freelance team, and was released in November with a fine edition that includes both color and black and white versions of the four episodes, the surviving third part, a six-minute fragment from the first, two documentaries, and several commentaries. An American release is said to be coming in March. I have the same minor complaints about the animation as I’ve expressed in these pages before – too few angles and cuts, gangly anatomy – but I appreciate the very hard work that the small team puts into these. “Galaxy 4” is hardly William Hartnell’s most exciting 100 minutes as the Doctor, but I’m glad to have the chance to see it.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (parts five, six, and seven)

My previous two posts feel a little harsher than I intended them. I wouldn’t say that “The Evil of the Daleks” is at all bad, but it is really slow and while certain discoveries or recreations from the Troughton years have more than exceeded expectations – such as “The Faceless Ones” and “The Enemy of the World” – this one is good, but it’s not the masterpiece that legend claims. Although, happily, this is among those very rare Who serials that gets better as it goes along. The first four parts are pretty good. The last three are very entertaining.

Our son mostly agrees with my thoughts on its pace, although he liked this far more than any of the other animations they have released recently. Part five ends with three newly-born Daleks, having received a “whatever, Dr. Science” injection of “the human factor,” curious and excited and rolling around like happy toddlers, and the kid just fell apart laughing. These carefree and fun Daleks continue to amuse throughout the story’s concluding parts, leading to my favorite bit in the whole shebang. One of the mean Daleks gets sick of this bunch having infected dozens of others into questioning authority and talking back. The mean Dalek exterminates one of a noisy pair. His friend slowly extends its sink plunger to sadly touch the dead shell, quietly disbelieving that his talkative buddy is gone.

I sometimes wonder about the pipe dream American Dalek TV series that Terry Nation had hoped would start production soon after this and get his merchandising money flowing again. Nation had hoped that some studio could land a deal with a network, and then sell a bigger-budgeted film series back to the UK, with a dashing hero or two trying to save the world of the future from a pending Dalek invasion, with treachery and danger at each new planet on the way back to Earth. Boomers have always had a lot of affection from even the shortest-lived American adventure series of the 1960s – Honey West or Land of the Giants or The Green Hornet – in part because even though most of these shows didn’t last long by the standards of the day, they were merchandised like crazy and made it to the full 26 episodes, whereas later generations would see their flash-in-the-pan flops over and done within a month or two, before word of mouth could get around.

I kind of see The Daleks! (or whatever it would have been called) as something like that, something that Irwin Allen fans or nostalgists who remember The Invaders fondly would have kept alive through tape trading until Nick at Nite or TV Land or meTV resurrected them. It’s good that “Evil” was not indeed “the final end” as it was intended, and everybody’s glad the Daleks returned five years later, but I’d still like to see what could’ve been.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (parts three and four)

You know, the Daleks were just more interesting in the sixties, before power creep set in and they had to be all sneaky and crafty because they were not indestructible army-killing super-tanks yet. At this stage, they’re so easily disposed of that Jamie and a friend literally destroy one by slamming it into a fireplace really hard. And their body count is so low that a supporting character completely freaks out when one of them murders a criminal who’d wandered in to rob the place. That’s two men they’ve killed! Two!

As much as I’m enjoying the Daleks in this, and as much as I’d love to have episode three recovered so we could see Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines have a really surprising shouting match, this story really is the most disappointing experience. They’re all a little slow and measured by contemporary standards, and use that pace to establish mood and atmosphere, but “Fury From the Deep” moved like lightning compared to this. They could have compacted these four half-hour episodes into two and it would still be walking slowly in place waiting for the story to get to Skaro.

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (parts one and two)

Say, wasn’t this in live action the last time we saw it?

As is the way of these things, there’s still a baffling gap between the British release of old Who and the domestic. New Who we get a couple of hours later. Archive stuff, we have to wait two or three months. It’s like it’s still 1985 or something. The newest animated reconstruction is for the mostly-missing “Evil of the Daleks,” and it came out last month in the UK and is due next month in America. We looked at the surviving episode in July, our son still giggles about the Dalek telling Victoria not to feed the flying pests, and honestly, this one moves like molasses. The animation on these rebuilds is continuing to improve and impress, but it feels like the writer, David Whitaker, was really struggling to fill this one out to its running time.

Its great reputation came from somewhere, however, so I’m sure this one’s going to get better. I like Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines’ interaction, as always, and I like the little Easter eggs that suggest pretty much every band worth seeing in 1966 had played London recently enough for their posters and flybills to still be on the tops of the stacks glued to the walls. About the only thing I felt this really needed was a little bit when the Doctor and Jamie – who has not yet met the Daleks – are wondering who their unseen enemy is.

“You don’t think it’s the Chameleons again?” Jamie asks. What the Doctor should have replied was “Pfft! Those losers? Hardly.”

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks (part two)

Earlier today, the BBC announced the forthcoming release of their next animated reconstruction of a lost serial. “The Evil of the Daleks” was first shown in 1967, and, unusually for British television in those days, it was actually shown again a year later as a summer repeat, but the corporation soon did what they often did and junked the films and wiped the tapes for reuse. A film print of episode two was returned in 1987.

To celebrate the news, I suggested to our son that we give the surviving episode a spin and he couldn’t have agreed faster. He did briefly muse that it was a shame that it wasn’t the first installment of the serial that was available, but I reminded him that the first episodes of Dalek serials typically don’t actually have Daleks in them until the cliffhanger, and he said “Oh, yeah…”

Anyway, he enjoyed it a lot, and concluded that he was glad it was part two that was available because of a short scene where a Dalek, menacing the companion-to-be Victoria, played by Deborah Watling, warns her: “Do not feed the flying pests!” He mused “One of the reasons I like the Daleks is the mix of pushiness and slight ignorance. They don’t know what birds are… and they don’t care!” Bigots are like that.

“The Evil of the Daleks” will be released in the UK in September.

Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep (parts five and six)

As much as I’d like to claim that I’ve spent the last three evenings completely lost in the fun of escapism and remade lost sixties TV, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future, because this release of “Fury” is attached to the real world in a specific way. I haven’t spoken much in the pages of this blog about the pandemic. We’re very, very fortunate to have good jobs and can work from home and are earning enough to pay off bills and set a little bit aside just in case the economy were to start taking a crash dive. Ordering DVDs from another country is a luxury.

I’m worried about what might start happening in the near future. Amazon UK’s international shipping prices went from “incredibly cheap” to “unbelievably exorbitant” overnight, and so I ended up ordering “Fury From the Deep” from Base.com. Within two weeks of my package arriving, Base sent a follow-up email to North American customers announcing that they are no longer shipping outside of Europe. It feels like a harbinger of bad times coming.

Sorry to have a downer of an entry. We did enjoy the story very much, and I’m so pleased with the great work by the animation team. I hope that they’re able to release another classic serial in 2021, and maybe they’ll release it to a happier world. Fingers crossed!

Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep (parts three and four)

They did a really good job in this serial foreshadowing Victoria’s decision to leave at the end of it. Perhaps Peter Bryant, who had taken over as producer, looked back at what a raw deal Michael Craze and Anneke Wills were given when his predecessors wrote out Ben and Polly at the end of “The Faceless Ones” and decided that they needed to do better. So Victoria gets plenty of opportunities to express that she is very tired of this life and sick of being terrified by monsters everywhere they go. The Doctor and Jamie are not entirely empathetic to her position on this. They’re having too much fun.

We switched to the black and white presentations of parts three and four in the new set, and our son quasi-complained that it just made it even more frightening. It really is something else; he went behind the sofa for the eerie cliffhanger to part three, and spent most of the following half hour behind it. It’s a shame that any television is lost – it should all be available for people who wish to enjoy it – but I wonder whether the loss of part four isn’t one of the greatest losses in all of Doctor Who. The audio and the animation is darker and creepier than our son was ready for, and incredibly effective. The recovery of most of “The Web of Fear” proved that Who was on fire that season telling scary, effective stories about monsters in dark tunnels with incredibly good visuals. I wish very badly that this episode still existed to see how it compares. If I could pick which of the 97 that are still lost could come back next, I think it would have to be this one.

There are some small flaws with the original production, like Robson being obnoxiously obstinate and unreasonable even before the seaweed gets him, but overall I’m incredibly pleased with this. I know how it ends – even if I have forgotten everything about Victor Pemberton’s novelization of the story for Target Books, I remember how they save the day – but I’m really looking forward to seeing it tomorrow night.

Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep (parts one and two)

For the latest animated recreation of a lost Doctor Who serial, we’re back in time to March 1968 and the six-part “Fury From the Deep.” It has a reputation as one of the creepiest and most frightening Who installments, and it delivers. This is just completely terrific. It’s set in the far-flung future of 1975, where residential huts on industrial complexes have great big videophones in the back wall between the kitchen and the sliding doors*, and where some strange and ghastly thing is crawling around in the pipes. Worse, there are very, very eerie men who wander around the complex with seaweed up their sleeves who exhale toxic gas.

The BBC, in their dimwit way, destroyed the serial after its expected sales potential had expired, with the only surviving bits some clips that an overzealous censor in Australia snipped out and sent to a government archive to show they’d done their job. How frightening was the bit they cut? Well, the animated version of the eerie men – Mr. Oak and Mr. Quill – belching gas at Maggie Harris had our son hiding behind the sofa, as indeed it should. I then showed him the original clip, included on this splendid new release, and he said “I don’t get what’s so scary about that.” Kid can find a lotta bravado in just twenty minutes.

I’m about 99% completely thrilled with the animation. Because we’re human and we quibble, I could grumble that many of the characters seem to have really long arms, and they often don’t do a good job filling the frame with the characters, and the guy who was played by John Abineri really doesn’t look like John Abineri. But that’s okay; the character’s meant to be Dutch and Abineri’s accent wasn’t very convincing in the first place anyway. Considering the budget limitations these have, I’m very pleased.

The animators also threw in their now-customary Easter eggs, including a wanted poster for Roger Delgado’s Master in the background of a scene. I made the mistake of pointing it out, prompting the kid to bellow “Why would a private industrial plant have wanted posters in it?” I paused and pointed out that it would probably make sense for any place in Britain in the 1970s to stick “have you seen this man” posters up, what with all the aircraft hangars and nuclear power plants and small village churches the Master had been blowing up. When I spotted a very familiar date as an Easter egg on some blueprints a little later, I kept my mouth shut. The eggs are cute as anything, but they will take a nine year-old viewer completely out of the experience…

Doctor Who: The Faceless Ones (parts five and six)

It’s kind of the nature of action-adventure television that the hero needs to have a really good challenge in each story, against villains as resourceful as the protagonist. So in a weird way, it’s kind of refreshing to see the Doctor pitted against some adversaries who are way, way out of their league. The Chameleons did not think this thing through. The Doctor’s able to exploit a massive, massive flaw in their science and technology, and hold all but two of them hostage because these bad guys’ tech is flatly not up to the challenge of interstellar invasion. A more polished script would show these villains as desperate and pitiful rather than malevolent. It’s a missed opportunity, but I did enjoy the tables turning in parts five and six.

In fact, “The Faceless Ones” belongs to a very rare group of original Who stories – “Mawdryn Undead” and “Time and the Rani” are others – that end much more satisfactorily than they began. It’s still very unhurried, but the end of this adventure sees all the humans acting decisively and intelligently, and I like the way the Chameleons know when the jig is up. The fellow that they capture spills the beans on the operation with very little pressure, and Donald Pickering’s character, who’s been playing his main villain part as a posh airline pilot calmly ordering his subordinates around, is intelligent enough to see this is not going to end well for him, and immediately begins negotiating. It’s a shame part six is missing; Pickering and Patrick Troughton have a very interesting face-off toward the end. The animation’s as good as we can hope for, but I’d love to see those actors playing that scene.

Incidentally, while I wish that I could be only positive about the animation, I do think they missed a huge opportunity. When all two dozen of the humans who are connected to their duplicates are located, I’d love to have seen an overhead shot, from an angle much higher than the original director could actually have managed, of all twenty-five bodies laid out in the parking lot. I wish the camera moved around more in general. Why limit themselves to just what the BBC could have done in 1967?

“The Faceless Ones” is a little infamous because of the poor way that they wrote out the Doctor’s companions Ben and Polly. The producer at the time didn’t want to continue with the actors Michael Craze and Anneke Wills, so they only appear in parts one, two, and six, and only on location in the last episode, so the BBC could dispense with them as quickly as possible. The story is set literally the day after the previous season’s “The War Machines,” which means that Ben and Polly could pick back up with their old lives as though they’d never been away. It also means that WOTAN, the Chameleons, and the Daleks in the next story were all operating in London in the third week of July, 1966. The World Cup was happening in London at the same time, and Gemini X returned to Earth. Wish I could read a Who-universe newspaper from that week. The Swinging Sixties, man.

We’ll return to the David Tennant days of Doctor Who in May. Stay tuned!

Doctor Who: The Faceless Ones (parts three and four)

Some of the animation in this reconstruction is really quite nice. The team does a really terrific job with airplanes, and so while I’m not completely sold on the movement of figures, I could watch what they do with jets for forty-five minutes without complaint. I do think the production as a whole is limited by the glacial pacing of the original story, and not helped by the lack of music. Black-and-white Doctor Who was occasionally like that; when they overspent in one area, like a day or two on location at Gatwick Airport, they had to cut back in another.

Our son’s enjoying it more than I am, honestly, but that’s by no means a fault with the current presentation, which is definitely a case of the best they can do with what they had to work with. I enjoyed seeing a little modern day Easter egg thrown in: the newspapers have headline stories that a menace that the first Doctor had battled the year before, the War Machines, had been defeated. That’s actually going to be an important plot point in part six. Heck, the original production crew should have dropped those newspapers in when they made this in 1967. That’d be some great foreshadowing! Otherwise, the mandate to be as accurate a presentation of the original production kind of keeps them hamstrung. There’s a bit where the RAF sends a fighter to follow the Chameleon Tours’ jet. As I say, it looks great, but if we suddenly had some Thunderbirds music as the fighter spirals out of control, it’d be even better.