For those who don't know anything about it: Apparently with some of the earliest Doctor Who programs the BBC no longer has any master copies, and since they aired before home video recording they're pretty much gone forever save for audio recordings made by fans at the time.

So what they're doing is taking those audio recordings for a story arc from those missing episodes and doing an animated series recreating them.

What a clever idea... I gather this isn't the first time that they've recreated missing moments that way. I find it interesting that I'm far more likely to watch an animated recreation of a sixties episode than I ever would be to watch the original if they could ever find it.

Wouldn't be the first time - I understand that a couple of stories have had that treatment - albeit in part. HH can probably list them off the top of his head.

I did see a clip of what I think was the first regeneration the Doctor had recreated in animation. It's interesting to me that they're doing these in black and white.

You head out to help out Wales for a few days and new Doctor Who news starts happening!




More annoyingly, the BBC had a complete run of Doctor Who until 1974 when some idiot woman in archives decided nobody would ever want to watch these programmes again and began tossing them in skips.She did that with a great deal of irreplaceable early BBC material to save valuable shelf space.

About fifty or so of the episodes she trashed have been recovered from elsewhere, mostly from overseas stations that bought rights to show the series and never returned the tapes. The most recent find came from Nigeria a couple of years ago (although one episode was stolen from the cache before it could be returned).

The fan who first discovered that the episodes were gone from the archive (The Doctor Who production team allegedly didn't know) found out when he finally got permission to take personal copies of some stories for his own use (in a pre-VCR era). He particularly wanted a copy of the first Daleks story from 1963, but found out it had been thrown out that very day! He went to the bins outside BBC centre and retrieved it!

There are also clips from some of those episodes still available. A BBC children's magazine programme called Blue Peter regularly did Doctor Who features and tended to hold on to clips it borrowed; hence we have a copy of the Hartnell to Trougton regeneration scene that would otherwise be lost, for example. Australian TV edited some episodes for disturbing content. Most of the edited episodes are lost; the edited-out bits have survived!

Another useful source was dug up by Doctor Who Magazine. Back in the 60s, the BBC employed a photographer to take still shots of programmes during broadcast (yes, from the TV screen), to be used for overseals sales promotions and as a record of designs etc. The magazine tracked down the widow of the guy who had done this work and managed to get his complete collection of screenshots for 85% of the episodes from the 60s, probably 100 pictures an episode. This collection has been the basis for storyboarding the animated episodes so far.




A splendid idea, and much welcomed.




There have been some attempts before, but on stories where one or two out of six or seven episodes were missing. Three dirrerent animation companies have made the attempt so far, with differing degrees of success (and different strengths and weaknesses). "The Power of the Daleks" is almost entirely missing, but if they were going to pick just one story to revive through animation this is the one!

It is also the first Doctor Who story I remember watching, when I was four.

Is Wales that disconnected from modern civilization? Most Americans forget it exists entirely... Is it one so those lands that only exists linked to ours for brief, fleeting moments?




I have some sympathy for her. Clean shelves are a rare resource to have. Plus, from my own experiences, people within an industry often don't see the value of stuff related to the creation of entertainment that fans later do. I know a ton of artwork and animation cels ended up in dumpsters as well, for instance. But still... Tossing out the only copies of the final product? That's insane.




It must make for an interesting style of treasure hunt.




I feel like I should be appalled that they let someone with connections just borrow the master recordings for their own home viewing, but considering that wasn't nearly as bad as they were treating the tapes as a whole...

That woman is seeming more and more like the mother who threw out everyone's comics and toy collections when they went off to school.




Ha... Okay, that I love as an ironic comment on censorship in general.

I think I saw that regeneration clip, as well as an animated recreation of it.




That's a clever bit of reconstruction. It's interesting to me that they're trying to so faithfully recreate the episode as it was. I can understand it for filling in parts of an otherwise complete story, but when recreating 100% of the footage for this story I might have been inclined to let modern storyboarders and the like play around with it and the more limitless possibilities of animation versus old BBC budgets. Would that not have gone over well with Who fans?




Aha... Well, as there are fans who have some memory of it, perhaps that answers my question above. Regardless, it seems like a fun project!

On a tangential point, I saw that DC is doing an animated feature based on the Adam West version of Batman, with as many of the (still surviving) cast members they can assemble. Recreating the shows of our childhood in animation may begin to be a trend.

Well, I went to to Anglesea, which is to Wales what Wales is the Britain. It's a large island connected to the mainland by two bridges. A couple of millenia ago it was druid central, the place it took the Roman Empire 25 years to conquer from the time of their second invasion (the one that stuck). The place we were staying, a 17th century converted stable looking out onto a field of ponies and donkeys and a lake, had vaguely heard of the internet but not wi fi or cell phone connection.







Given the value such products now have to the BBC, the decisions to dump old material is even more heartbreaking. When episodes of the 1968 serial "The Web of Fear" turned up two years back and were put on itunes, they jumped to the top ofr the world sales chart!







Oh, it gets better. Back in 2012, rumours started circulating that a Doctor Who enthusiast who also runs a film restoration company might have comne across some missing episodes in some lost corer of the world. Specualation ran rife. Eg: A huge crate of material had just arrived at Liverpool. He had retrived episodes but was now holding the BBC to ransom for their return. It was a huge con trick. The episodes had been found but were in the middle of a war zone and likely to be destroyed. Every single missing episode had been retrieved but the BBC was hoarding them. By summer 2013 when it was confirmed that this guy had returned to Nigeria on business, the webpage thread about this subject topped its 1000th index page.

Meanwhile "senior fan" Jeremy Bentham (he of the previously described dumpster diving) announced that he knew for a fact it was all a hoax. Others swore to have seen the retrieved episodes and even listed them (the lists were wrong). A photograph was posted showing some film cannisters on Liverpool dock, clearly displaying the old 60s BBC logo. The businessman himself posted an ALL CAPITALS Twitter message denying he had any episoded at all. Fans began to prepare to burn him in effigy, or possibly not in effigy.

The real story eventually came out. While working for a Nigerian TV station to restore some old film from a now-defuct other Nigerian TV station, this guy had come across a bunch of cannisters of old BBC product, including six episodes of "The Enemy of the World", of which four had previously been lost from the archive, and all five episodes of "The Web of Fear", along with dupicates of some existing archives stories. He had photographed them and returned to the UK to negotiate their return.

The problem is, this stuff is valuable. The more people freaked over its possible discovery the more convinced the Nigerians were that they were sitting on a fortune. The BBC just doesn't have the money that a major studio might have to buy back copies of their own product. Eventually "a deal" was done. In the interim, episode 3 of "The Web of Fear", introducting popular supporting cast member Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, mysteriously vanished and has not been found since. Fans remain convinced of a conspiracy but are not united in agreeing a villain.

Three years on, there is still a hardcore minoroity convinced that this movie restorer guy found more than he's admitting but is holding on to it for a better offer. Or that a milionaire collector in Australia has swiped the goodies for his own enjoyment. Or that the Nigerian government is holding them hostage. Really, just google it.







Bentham was then a pop music producer and had the cash to pay £5,000 to the BBC for copies of some material. He remains a controversial figure in Who fandom, having been "an official consultant" to the show during the turbulent 80s and very vocal against other factions of fandom, including the one led by opiniated youngster Peter Capaldi. Allegedly.




Doctor Who Magazine tracked her down and interviewed her. She was quite unrepentant.




Of course, it wasn't called a renegeration until eight years after that, when Jon Pertwee morphed into Tom Baker.







I think there's scope for new versions.

60s television storytelling was very different to today's product. Most BBC output, including Doctor Who, was performed like a play, in order, before four or five constantly-rolling cameras, with a director calling which monitor would actually record onto the film tape.The cost of splicing film meant a minimum of cuts and the tightness of the schedule (a 25-minute epsiode 48 weeks of the year) meant little time for retakes. This lead to some excellent flubs, including Hartnell mispronoucing "fault locator" as "fornicator".

Additionally, the series had a tiny budget for what it was trying to achieve, no higher than the budgets accorded other shows set in doctor's surgeries or solicitors offices with recurring sets. While this led to some amazing improvisation - the TARDIS was stuck as a police box to prveent having to manufacture a new shape at each destination, its materialisation sound was a key scraped on a piano wire in a toilet bowl etc - it also means that some FX really do not hold up well these days. For example, some Dalek hordes are cardboard cut outs.

So vintage Doctor Who might well benefit from an edited cut with more modern graphic values and better music soundtracks. Some DVDs have been put out with "improved" visual effects to mixed response, but I think a talented team might be able to run with an animated version of some older material.

Another option might be to animate some never-before-filmed stuff from the extensive audio collections out there, some of which includes full-cast material featuring stars that are no longer alive.

Nope - that's the Isle of Wight: Only appears in the summer...

(Which, to my surprise, appears as the base location in the Strike Witches/One Winged Witches manga. Sort of.)