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Confession #19: I Love the B&W Era

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In honor of today’s 48th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who (that would be An Unearthly Child, in 1963), I thought I’d talk a bit more about the early years of Who and why they’re worth your time to seek out if you’ve never had the opportunity to see them before.

For a general sense of what they’re all about, check out my recent posts on the First and Second Doctors’ eras, where I give a broad overview. Let me express a bit more love for that whole black-and-white era, though. There’s a special something – maybe you could think of it as an innocence – that doesn’t necessarily carry over into the color/modern era. The show is so earnest and new and takes itself so seriously, even though it also clearly knows it’s a bit rubbish in places.

Admittedly, it took me a while to warm to all that. Coming as I did straight off Series Four with Ten and Donna, I was taken aback at first, even though I knew I was stepping into the Wayback Machine when I sat down with An Unearthly Child that first time. Forty-five years’ worth of technological advances are nothing to sneeze at, especially where television is concerned. So even though I’d steeled myself for bad (by modern standards) effects – having grown up with Star Trek, I thought I had an idea of what it was likely to look like – and the black-and-white view, I wasn’t truly prepared.

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CafePress Shop Now Open!

I am extremely pleased to announce that the Confessions of a Neowhovian shop on CafePress is now open for business! We’re offering primarily T-shirts (also mugs) with designs I’ve made to celebrate Doctor Who and its newer fans. If you’re a Long-Term Fan, never fear – there’s stuff for you, too!

Here’s a small sampling of some of the designs:

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I really hope you enjoy the designs. Browse the shop for many more. If you see one that you like but you want to have it on something besides a T-shirt or mug, let me know which of CafePress’s items you’d like, and I’ll add it to the shop.

A link to the shop will always be available at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar here on the blog (see the widget with sample products). You can also get to it directly at www.cafepress.com/neowhovian. I’d love to hear your feedback. Happy shopping!

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Still Raze-y After All These Years

Review of Colony in Space (#58)
DVD Release Date:  08 Nov 11
Original Air Date:  10 Apr – 15 May 1971
Doctor/Companion:  Three, Jo Grant
Stars:  Jon Pertwee, Katie Manning
Preceding Story:  The Claws of Axos (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story:  The Dæmons (Three, Jo)

When the Doctor forcibly regenerated into Three, he was exiled to 20th Century Earth. While that made for some less expensive down-to-earth filming for about a series and a half, eventually he needed to get back out into the broadness of time and space to keep the show fresh and interesting. Thus begins the Time Lords’ co-option of the Doctor’s services for their own purposes.

Off the Doctor and Jo go, quite unwittingly, to just one more dystopian Earth-colony of the future where a mining company is prepared to raze the planet for its mineral wealth. Notably, despite having already had three adventures with Three, this is both the first time Jo has set foot inside the TARDIS and, resultantly, the first time she’s traveled with him away from her own planet or time. Unlike some Companions, she’s less than thrilled at first, though just like all of them, she’s thrown right into Yet Another Fine Mess.

This story is from Season 8 – the one in which every single story involved the Master – so the only surprise is that, barring passing mention by the Time Lords in episode 1, he doesn’t show up until episode 4 (of 6). When he does, though, it’s Delgado’s typical schmoov operator, complete with updated TARDIS defenses (and filing cabinets! what Time Lord would be without them?) and classic quotes (like “tried and true methods are best,” and “but of course that’s typical of the High Council of the Time Lords – know everything; do nothing”).

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Clownish and Clever

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Review of the Second Doctor’s era

1966 – 1969
The Power of the Daleks*
The Highlanders*
The Underwater Menace*
The Moonbase*
The Macra Terror*
The Faceless Ones*
The Evil of the Daleks*		 The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Abominable Snowmen*
The Ice Warriors*
The Enemy of the World*
The Web of Fear*
Fury from the Deep*
The Wheel in Space*		 The Dominators
The Mind Robber
The Invasion*
The Krotons
The Seeds of Death
The Space Pirates*
The War Games
*Partially or completely missing

When Patrick Troughton took up the role of the Doctor, he had a huge task ahead of him. Not only did he have to make the character his own (a challenge every actor since him has also faced), but he also had to convince the entire viewing audience that he was the same person. Had the gamble not worked – or had Troughton been less brilliant – our favorite show would have died an early death. Lucky for us all, Two was a wonderful Doctor.

Not much remains (since so many of these episodes were wiped and remain lost, presumably forever) of Two’s time on screen. However, the scripts and the audio recordings are still out there. Some wonderful reconstructions that at least get the general stories across are readily available (I highly recommend the BBC’s photonovels). One of the quirky characteristics of Two that has been lost in the æther is his frequent use of his recorder, which seems to diminish with time, just as the percentage of extant episodes increases.

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Irascible and Avuncular

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Review of the First Doctor’s era

1963 – 1966
An Unearthly Child
The Daleks
The Edge of Destruction
Marco Polo*
The Keys of Marinus
The Aztecs
The Sensorites
The Reign of Terror*		 Planet of Giants
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
The Rescue
The Romans
The Web Planet
The Crusade*
The Space Museum
The Chase
The Time Meddler		 Galaxy 4*
Mission to the Unknown*
The Myth Makers*
The Daleks’ Master Plan*
The Massacre*
The Ark
The Celestial Toymaker*
The Gunfighters
The Savages*
The War Machines		 The Smugglers*
The Tenth Planet*
*Partially or completely missing

I think a lot of neowhovians dismiss the First Doctor as a rather grumpy ol’ cuss, and to a certain extent that’s a valid characterization – certainly it is if all you’ve ever seen is the first episode of An Unearthly Child. But there’s a lot more to One than meets the casual eye. Among other things, there’s a lot of character development in the first three years, if you bother to look for it.

Clearly, the beginning of Doctor Who is an era in which the show is still getting its feet under it, finding and defining the Doctor’s character. If you take a look at the concept notes or background notes, you’ll notice that from the beginning, it was not the Doctor who was the main character (despite the title of the show) – it was Ian! The structure of the early stories make complete sense once one has that little fact in mind. The Doctor was there as little more than plot device at this stage.

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Breaking News!

Today, Gallifrey One put out the open call for panelists for their upcoming 2012 convention in February.

I am pleased to announce that I have been accepted as a panelist for "Let's Take It From the Top: Introducing New Fans to the Classic Show." Check out this and other panels on the convention website.

If you're at Gally yourself (17-19 Feb 2012 in Los Angeles), I'd love you to stop by to say hello! Whether or not you're interested in what the panel has to say, it would be nice to meet some readers.

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Confession #18: I’m a Bigger Geek Than I’d Realized

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As if the previous Confession wasn’t evidence enough, I’ve realized that my geek cred is perhaps higher than I’d thought it was. Here’s how I got the wake-up call.

One of my friends – the one who introduced me to Who, as matter of fact – recently went to an estate sale where he happened across a couple of Who-related books. They weren’t fantastically popular titles or anything, but each had some autographs in it. As such things often are, a few of them were hard to read. Here’s how he transcribed some of them, trying to figure them out.

  • carole amy ford?
  • S—–ke Wills?
  • wendy cadbury (zoe?)
  • nicholas c—–squiggle
  • john …very squiggly…_eu/vene?
  • very sqiggly but first name looks like neel/ro

Now I don’t know about the “average” fan (or the “average neowhovian,” for that matter), but I found I was able to identify these as fast as he was able to type them to me via chat. See how well you did.

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Marathon in the Works

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Recently I've had several conversations in which it seems obvious that it's about time for me to indulge in another marathon viewing of as many of the pre-Hiatus stories as I can get my hands on (out on Region 1 DVD or available as a photonovel at the BBC website). I'd made a plan to do that in the 8 weeks leading up to Gally as a way to get myself refamiliarized with the older stories.

After taking a look at the playlist, I've realized there's no way I can do it in eight weeks; I need more like sixteen. Conveniently enough, if I start tomorrow, I'll have those sixteen weeks (plus a few days for The Movie) before Gally! So, if you'd like to play along, next week I'll be attempting to watch through the following:

  • An Unearthly Child
  • The Daleks
  • The Edge of Destruction
  • The Keys of Marinus
  • The Aztecs
  • The Dalek Invasion of Earth
  • The Rescue
  • The Romans
  • The Web Planet
  • The Crusade [photonovel]

I might skip over The Aztecs – or at least give it only a partial viewing – because it's one I've seen more than once. Regardless, this is going to be a tall order! Feel free to comment on your favorites/least favorites, general impressions of One and his Companions, and/or the idiocy of my plan.

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Conceptual Gumbo – Just Add Salt

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Review of The Talons of Weng-Chiang: SE (#91)

DVD Release Date:  11 Oct 11
Original Air Date:  26 Feb – 02 Apr 1977
Doctor/Companion:  Four, Leela
Stars:  Tom Baker, Louise Jameson
Preceding Story:  The Robots of Death (Four, Leela)
Succeeding Story:  Horror of Fang Rock (Four, Leela)

This release is unusual for me in that it involves a story I’d already watched (albeit only once). It was interesting to go through it again with not only much more experience of the Whoniverse but also a memory of both the storyline and my initial reactions. With a bit more perspective, I came away with a new appreciation for Talons and an understanding of the fondness so many Long Term Fans have for it.

For anyone new to the story, let me just throw out the one thing that really bothered me on first viewing: the main Chinese character (Li H’sen Chang) is played by a (Caucasian) British actor (John Bennett). That and the fact that the titular deity (who was, by the by, actually a god of culture and literature) was pronounced “weng chai-ang” – like a coffeehouse drink – rather than a more nearly correct “wen ch[ah]ng” – with an [ah] as in “father” – very much rubbed me the wrong way when I first saw Talons three or so years ago. This time, I was able to take it all with a grain of salt, and let me tell you – it was much more palatable this time.

The story is pretty much a love letter to Victorian-era literature. It has elements of Sherlock Holmes, Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady, if you prefer the musical version), Phantom of the Opera, and various Fu Manchu stories that fed into the stereotype of the Limehouse (Chinatown) area of Victorian London, not to mention a bit of Jack the Ripper. Taken as a nod to all these rolled into one, it’s quite charming.

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Confession #17: I See the Whoniverse Everywhere

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When did my life turn into a Doctor Who episode?

I had a big personal loss this past week. Some people – those who’ve never had a close pet – won’t understand this, I suppose, but we had to put our dog down, and my life feels forever changed. Zoë was a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old Rottoyed. That’s what we called her; she was half Rottweiler, half Samoyed, and a sweet a soul as you could wish. She’d been with us since the age of 11 months, and was my first “baby.” I didn’t become a mom to human babies for the better part of a decade after we got Zoë, so she was our fur baby – a real and vital part of the family. And now she’s gone.

I mentioned to my husband that I was having trouble concentrating on my work (as I write, it’s been a mere two days since she passed), and that my grief feels like a physical presence in my skull. When he said that “in a Doctor Who episode, that would be literal,” I had to laugh. And start writing. It’s simultaneously scary and funny that this show I’d barely heard of four years ago has crept so thoroughly into my life.

So now I’m mentally outlining an episode about how certain pets have some alien (or otherwise advanced) genetic component that allows them to make a psycho-physical, trans-dimensional bond with a human (yes… that will do nicely). When successful, a Dog (or Cat, or other Pet – but I’m going to stick to Dogs because Zoë was a dog, and it’s easiest to write without too many caveats) can use that subliminal ley line to control the behavior of her human bondmate.

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