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Lost Doctor Who Episode Found
JSDopefish writes "In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn't happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It's Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, 'The Dalek Masterplan.' No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don't know, in the '70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren't an issue then. There's something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total."
The really old Dr Who shows are being repeated (possibly in order) on the ABC in Australia. I thought my kids (7 & 5) would only be interested once they got to (a) colour episodes and (b) Tom Baker.
Boy, was I wrong! These are kids who still don't understand that Dad once had a *black and white* TV, but they love the shows with the first doctor. Even when I was a keen Dr Who fan, I found the first Dr pretty tough to watch, but my kids never miss it.
I'm still waiting for them to tell me the TV's broken because there's no color...
Here's a question for all those die-hard Dr Who fans out there. Is there a mention in any publications (The Dr. Who Technical Manual, for instance) what software the Dalek's ran? I know at their core they were the shrivelled remains of a Kaled, but all those servo motors, life support systems and weapons had to be running some type of OS. Might it have been Debian? apt-get install davros? Just a thought.
In this new digital age where lots of people collect every episode of their favorite TV shows we won't have to worry about this again. Long live P2P.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
"You do realize that they just witheld this episode so that the demand for new material would go up"
Seeing as how reruns didn't really exist when Hartnell was the Doctor, no I didn't realize that.
"Derp de derp."
"Get your 100 tacos ready!...(Score:2, Funny)"
Sorry to be a square, but could somebody explain the reference?
"Derp de derp."
Well they could do it as DVD sets for each season like they do for many of the TV shows that make it to DVD. I have the Star Trek TNG on DVD's and it came in 7 boxes of 7 DVD's each. So why not one set for each year that it was out. and a set for each doctor that they find the Lost shows from.
One of my cousins used to do the special effects for Dr Who. He did K9 and wrote some of the scripts. He even spent some years trying to get another series off the ground after Terry Nation died
In their time they were not that bad. If you compare them to the Star Trek 'effects' of the same vintage there is no comparison, the BBC effects were low budget but they were much more imaginative. Star Trek's idea of originality was a new pattern of ridges on a new kind of alien's forehead.
Of course over in the UK we teach this thing called evolution in the schools so there is kind of an assumption that aliens are likely to be completely different.
The other thing is that the BBC still does a lot with radio, we are quite used to seeing stuff that leaves much to the imagination.
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Dr. Who had 26 seasons.
That's an awful lot of boxed sets =).
To be honest, a lot of the earlier ones wouldn't sell enough to justify the manufacturing cost. Space (the Canadian sci-fi channel) showed the early episodes while I was going to school up there and the ratings were abyssmal.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You should see K9 and Company... it was an attempted spinoff series with a really hideous theme song. It featured Sarah Jane and K9 (or a duplicate of K9, I forget which) and lasted for only one story.
Anyways, it was created during the Tom Baker era, but that didn't stop it from being pretty poor stuff. (At the time, I ate it up of course, on account of having a huge crush on Sarah Jane.)
Which is why it was so disappointing when they lost the ability to write cliffhanger endings. That's been a staple of radio series writing.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Do you realize how many episodes of Doctor Who were made? You'd need a police box to store them all!
Old, low-quality B&W TV footage wouldn't take up anywhere near the same space as a modern show shot in color and on (reasonably) high-quality film.
For an idea of this, check out the size you can fit most VCDs into - Somehing like the old Dr. Who episodes would realistically count as "perfect" quality at VCD bitrates (and I say that as someone who finds even modern Hollywood blockbusters distractingly artifact-ridden on most DVD releases). Stick that on DVD-sized media (rather than CD, as with most VCDs), and you could probably fit an entire season on a single DSDL disc.
However, I do have to point out a small problem with the original question, as asked:
They should take all the "lost" ones and put them on a dvd collection.
Forgive me for noting the obvious (which I suspect the author might have intended as a joke), but you can't release the lost episodes, by definition. Only the unlost ones.
I may have the name wrong. I am talking about the director or producer who took over for the last year of Tom Baker. As far as I'm concerned, he ruined the show. Up til then, it was fun, it did not take itself too seriously, it just did a good job with a piss poor budget, and that was fine. I remember one comment in particular that summed up his regime, that up until he took charge, Tom Baker had used little or no makeup, but he insisted on full makeup. Why mess with success? he got more budget for special effects, but that was a losing proposition. Dr. Who was famous for cheesy special effects, and that was one of the ingredients of its success. When he boosted the budget, suddenly it was competing in a different league. He also brought in lots of gloomy deep thinking kind of scripts, lots of heavy pondering, without the slightest bit of humor.
I blame him for the show falling down. If it had stayed low budget and cheesy, it could have kept going for a long time. Once it got expensive, it had to have sterling ratings to match. It also ceased to be any kind of show for kids.
Infuriate left and right
The touble is that Dr Who was a serial. Finding one lost episode doesn't really help much if the other half dozen that surrounds it are also missing.
Of course if there was a serial with just one missing show - then this should be grounds for much rejoicing and the stamping of large quantities of overpriced DVD's. But with all those early episodes being missing, the odds are not good.
My mother tells me that I used to have to watch Dr Who from the safety of a large cardboard box T.A.R.D.I.S down behind the sofa so I could hide when the scarey bits came on. (That would have been the Hartnell episodes - not the later stuff - which was much more tongue in cheek)
www.sjbaker.org
Tomb of the Cybermen was good...
but imho Evil of the Daleks would be better! The couple of episodes that are still around are great - they're worth sitting through the Dalek Documentary videa for.
" I believe activities like learning another language can impair other skills, or at least while the information is being learned."
... oh... heck I think it was Sara Jane Smith were inside a brain. He made a comment about how the computer equivalent of a human brain would be the size of all of London. Then he went on to say a Time Lord's brain would be significantly larger as it is more complex. Then, he figured out which two neurons to touch together to make the brain do something he needed... Well you gotta admit, he must have one hell of a brain if he knows how to hot-wire a human brain on the neural level, heh.
I have anecdotal experience that supports that theory. I used to be real sharp in terms of grammar and spelling until I took the study of Spanish seriously. When my knowledge of Spanish expanded, my grammar and spelling skills suffered. I figure one of two things happened:
1.) Memory was overwritten.
2.) In order to easily switch between the two languages, my use of English was simplified.
Okay, this is way off-topic, but I can imagine that Doctor Who fans would generally find the inner workings of the brain rather interesting. I remember an old Tom Baker episode that... well my memory is a bit fuzzy (overwritten by Spanish?) where the Doc and
"Derp de derp."
This story was published in novelisation form around 1989, in two parts due to the length of the original story (12 episodes). This was basically done via scripts and the author's memory of the show, and no doubt a fair bit of research.
... that's just garbage. "The direction of Douglas Camfield combined with the scripting of Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner gelled in... a way that defied description," - now *that* I can agree with ;)
Anyway, based on the hype surrounding this supposed great epic lost story, I bought and read the two books that year as soon as possible. And it really isn't very good. An extremely thin plot padded by endless chapters of the Daleks chasing the Doctor through time and space, which had already been done by "The Chase" in the show the year before - and "The Chase" *itself* was mostly padding.
Honestly, the entire thing could be told in 2 or 3 episodes, and it still wouldn't be much to write home about. It's full of holes and is ultimately just lame.
It's nice that this was recovered for historical and completeness reasons I guess, but the article is trying to hype this story up as a lost classic and it just isn't. It's filler to reach the episode count for the season, using the ever-popular Daleks, pure and simple. There are some really good Doctor Who stories, and some are missing, but this isn't one of them in my opinion.
As for describing it as "an all-round masterpiece"
I think that I have died and gone to Sci-Fi heaven. Isn't time travel wonderfull.
that Doctor Who does not have its own Slashdot topic. What is up with that? :)
:)
26 seasons, wow, Tom Baker is my favorite Dr. Who actor. Favorite line "Harry Suluvan is an imbecile!" from when Harry tried to remove a bomb from Dr. Who's body that was rigged to explode if tampered with.
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Not on DVD, but a collective called Loose Cannon has been doing 'reconstructions' of the lost episodes using surviving soundtracks and 'telesnaps' (a chap called John Cura was contracted to take stills approx. every 30 seconds throughout the filming in the 60s and 70s and most of these still survive) plus, more recently some computer animation. The idea is that you buy the official BBC VHS of the surviving episodes of your story of choice (to keep it ethical) and then get someone on the Loose Cannon tape tree to dub you up the recon for the missing parts.
;)
It's a surprisingly satisfying solution. At least, it is if you're an obsessive fan
Ironically, they only finished up their recon of Daleks' Masterplan last week, so it'll be interesting to see how their take on Ep 2 compares with the original. (Eps 5 and 11 of the 12 were the only ones believed to have survived until yesterday).
So, we're now down to 108 missing episodes (in 1982, it was 136)... For more info, look here and here. For some info on lost UK TV in general, have a look at this page.
My web domain.
All of these 115 lost episodes were from the 1960s, before the advent of VCRs. It's possible someone could have hooked up an old fashioned camera and recorded the broadcasts manuaully, but it's not like this was something very many people bothered to do.
Although, interestingly, a number of people did do the best they could at the time. Specifically, they set up audio equipment to record to soundtrack to these episodes, and these sound-only recordings have survived to the present. The BBC, having obtained these soundtracks from the fans who recorded them, has been releasing them, with linking narration, on CD for several years now. Also, a mini-fan industry (not for profit, of course) has sprung up to "reconstruct" the episodes using these soundtracks and surviving clips and still images to give a (very) rough estimate of the original: a sort of semi-animated storybook format.
Interestingly, these fan-recorded audios tend to be of generally high quality, so much so that the so-called Reconstruction Team (the internal BBC group responsible for remastering and touching up these old DW broadcasts for video release) has occassionally used them to redub official BBC copies of extant episodes.
There are dozens of articles and books written on this sad chapter in the BBC's archival history, none of which shine well on them. Apparently, it was a classic case of miscommunication between branches of the company: the warehouses responsible for the wiping of most of these episodes simply assumed that some other branch of the BBC was archiving them, and never bothered to check and find out that no such branch actually existed. Go figure.
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