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Visionary

In Reply To
HH

Subj: Re: So I just heard about that upcoming animated lost-episode Doctor Who project...
Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2016 at 11:03:16 am EDT (Viewed 3 times)
Reply Subj: Re: So I just heard about that upcoming animated lost-episode Doctor Who project...
Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2016 at 04:38:14 am EDT (Viewed 2 times)



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


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?


    Quote:
    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.


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.


    Quote:
    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).


It must make for an interesting style of treasure hunt.


    Quote:
    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!


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.


    Quote:
    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!


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.


    Quote:
    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.


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?


    Quote:
    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.


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.




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