Frazer Hines
Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep (1968) [DVD/Blu-ray]
Contains some spoilers.
The coronavirus pandemic has obviously had far-reaching repercussions for pretty much every aspect of life, not least the world of arts and entertainments. The next full season of Doctor Who for example almost certainly won’t now make it to our screens until 2022 because of the delay in the start of filming. But it’s not all bad news, and indeed this year has actually been rather a good one for fans of the original classic series.
We’ve had the release of the 1976/7 Season 14 on Blu-ray which included some of the best-loved Tom Baker serials including The Deadly Assassin, The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It sold out so absurdly fast (totally unavailable to order a full two months before release!) that it had to be re-released a second time shortly thereafter – and that sold out almost as quickly. Let it not be said that there isn’t a market for this sort of thing.
There’s also been the unprecedented release of not one but two animated reconstructions of ‘lost’ serials in quick succession. This arises from the BBC’s policy at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s to wipe master tapes of old productions that were thought to have no conceivable rebroadcast value in the days before home media. Over a hundred episodes of Doctor Who were among the material destroyed – a disproportionate number of them starring Patrick Troughton – and while a few have been unearthed and recovered in the years since, there’s still 97 of the original 253 episodes missing from the archives with no realistic chance of copies turning up. Read the rest of this entry »
Doctor Who: The Faceless Ones (1967) [DVD/Blu-ray]
It’s not been all that long since the end of series 12 of Doctor Who and our last update here on Taking The Short View, yet in that short time it seems like the world has been turned upside down in every conceivable way.
Cinemas were among the first business to have to shut down because of the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, followed soon after by ‘non-essential’ retailers including shops selling both new and used books, CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays. Even television has been hit, with long-running dramas having to shut down production for the duration. Streaming and download services have picked up some of the slack of course, while those of us of a more old-fashioned disposition have rediscovered the value of having extensive home media archives crammed onto groaning shelves around the house.
One new release that did just squeeze under the wire before the general shutdown was the latest addition to the BBC’s Doctor Who home media range, “The Faceless Ones. I’d pre-ordered it weeks before the release date, when coronavirus was completely unknown, and was pleasantly surprised when it turned up on my doorstep just when everything was going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. It’s been a welcome distraction, and the viewing of the episodes strictly rationed to eke out the pleasure of watching a ‘new’ Doctor Who tale for the very first time. Read the rest of this entry »
Doctor Who: The Macra Terror (1967) [DVD/Blu-ray]
The first part of this year has been good for Doctor Who fans, with no less than four new home media releases in the first three months of 2019. The latest of these hit the shelves on Monday and is a brand-new version of the four-part 1967 serial “The Macra Terror”.
It’s the latest in the BBC’s series of animated reconstructions of ‘lost’ stories, where the original broadcast episodes were wiped by the BBC shortly after transmission and only the soundtrack remains thanks to a fan’s off-air recording at the time. The first of these recovery projects was “The Power of the Daleks” which I reviewed back in 2016 when it originally came out. Since then there’s also been a new version of 1979’s “Shada” in which similar animation was used in place of scenes never actually filmed at the time due to industrial action, meaning that the story was never completed or broadcast. Again, you can catch up with a detailed review of the end result that I wrote a year ago: to be honest, I found the back-and-forth between new line art sequences and the surviving original filmed footage rather jarring.
These are expensive projects and I’d wondered if the sales had been sufficient to justify any more of these reconstructions. But it appears they were, and hence this month Who fans got a brand new release to add to their doubtless already groaning collection of merchandise. However, I confess that I initially wasn’t wildly excited by the prospect of “The Macra Terror”, never having been particularly eager to see the story in question which to me had always sounded rather humdrum in synopsis. Read the rest of this entry »
Taking the Short View 