Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Animated Dr. Who Series

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the rockin-the-tardis dept.

smak writes "To celebrate the doctor's fourtieth anniversary, the BBC and Cosgrove Hall Films are webcasting a fully-animated adventure starring Richard E. Grant. You can watch the first episode of Scream of the Shalka and new episodes will be launched every Thursday. Enjoy." It requires Flash 4, but also looks pretty damn cool.

4 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by crumbz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I love Dr. Who, but the first four minutes of episode 1, the Shambala or whatever, was really really bad. And not the good campy bad. Just not good. As in bad. Oh well, I guess it is back to my old video tapes of Dr. Who from PBS in the mid-80s. Now where is my BetaMax?

  2. Why FLASH? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why is all this crap done in Flash or Shockwave or whatever? Don't they realize that the majority of their viewers (geeks) don't have Flash installed because it's just some method for advertisers to make us all sick?

    Put the damn things out in mpg and I'll watch 'em!

    Hell, I'll even get out my scarf first!

    1. Re:Why FLASH? by bug-eyed+monster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ahh, young nerds today, so full of righteous energy, so not very resourceful. Flash isn't too bad, it has no DRM (yet), it has no spyware or adware, no need to banish it forever. Grasshopper, this is how you access the few Flash sites that are actually useful:

      You have one stripped-down browser to do safe surfing (I use Opera 5 with no JavaScript, no Flash, no nothing, nice and safe). You have one browser to do e-errands like banking, buying, whatever that requires JS (I use Mozilla). Then you have the plug-in browser, that you use as a last resort to browse sites with Flash, Java, etc (I use Netscape 4.5, it works well, believe me!)

      When it's time to visit homestarrunner, or watch Dr. Who, you simply fire up the old plug-in browser, have your fun, and shut it down quick, and nobody's the wiser.

      Oh and please, don't go telling me the world is screwed up, that one should be able to use just the one browser for everything. That world ended when the first marketing consultant was spawned.

    2. Re:Why FLASH? by TomV · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's done in Flash, oddly, for the very reason you've posited - to make it available to the widest possible audience, *given the quality they wanted for this production*. MPG would have been very portable, but to allow the smoothness and image quality at full-screen, the file sizes would have excluded those of us not on broadband. With Flash there's less need to compromise between the neds of the 56k audience and the ADSL audience. Remember, the target audience is not geeks but people interested in a new Doctor Who adventure. Which potentially encompasses everyone in Britain over the age of 20 (able to remember when it was an almost universally watched kingpin of the Saturday Night primetime TV lineup for 26 years).

      There are hints at the BBCi site that these animations may run at least until the new live-action series starts on BBC1 in 2005, and even beyond that.