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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."
Just misplaced in time. They'll show up eventually.
They should take all the "lost" ones and put them on a dvd collection.
Get your 100 tacos ready!
(sorry, had to be said...)
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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...
Could the episode appearing just now, out of the blue, be part of their masterplan?
EXTERMINATION is near!
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.
they used to record over stuff all of the time.
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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."
is what we need to recover a the old episodes. Just zip out 30 to 40 light years record the old broadcasts and then bring it all back.
that or build a time machine.
I know I'm a young, but Doctor Who?
;)
There's no place like
Things started going badly south during the Colin Baker era and the Sylvester McCoy episodes were just awful. What a shame that just as they finally had the ability to create decent special effects the writing fell apart.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Man, I'm gonna have a field day with this thread.
m l
http://nitro9.earth.uni.edu/doctor/lost/lost.ht
Essentially, after the episodes were initially transmitted they were stored in a warehouse. As the early 70s approached the re-saleability of old black and white shows was decided to be essentially nil. So, the tapes and films were scheduled to be destroyed. Old cellulose is a bit of a fire hazard.
Many old shows like Z-Cars and Softly, Softly were destroyed as well.
They're being recovered VERY slowly these days, as all of the foreign stations that episodes were sold to have been searched, etc. The above URL explains a lot.
I, for one, welcome our rediscovered Dalek overlords.
clearly time travel will never exit because someone would go back in time and beat to death the bbc ppl who trashed all the old dr who episodes.
If you were channel surfing at all, let alone with a remote control, you are too young to remember Doctor Who.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I'm just feeling lucky that ALL(yes ALL) of the Tomb of the Cybermen episodes were restored. It seemed like the best story that was lost forever.
With the Dalek Master plan, there's only 9 more episodes to go before that's recovered. 5 and 10 are intact, but aren't very interesting since you're only getting a fraction of the story.
As for "The Moonbase", it was a horrible story. The special effects were very 1950s-esque right down to the Cybermen's saucer that looked like a dinner plate. Nowhere near as cool as the Invasion, where most of the episodes of that are intact.
C'mon people, start searching your basements for more DW episodes.
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
Another evening of dodgy old b/w film on the BBC soon folks..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
ust keep finding them lost epiusodes every couple months...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Depending on how long ago it was, there might not have been VCRs around.
-Bucky
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"
There is an updated version of that article available at http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Lot/8256/l andf.htm.
(and I say that as someone who finds even modern Hollywood blockbusters distractingly artifact-ridden on most DVD releases)
I think you need a smaller tv set.;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The BBC did not "junk" its episodes. It archived them very poorly, and a single wharehouse fire wiped out most of the missing 1st and 2nd Doctor episodes.
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.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
You're completely wrong. Actors' union contracts at the time the episodes were made specified only one repeat max, and that within 5 years of first broadcast. Also Dr Who was videotaped and later recorded onto film (what the US refers to as "kinescope" recordings) for overseas sale. The main BBC library only had a mandate to keep filmed shows until the late 1970s, and the film recordings mostly stayed with BBC Enterprises (the comercial arm of the BBC). When Enterprises needed space they junked a load of their films, thinking the BBC Film Library had them safe and that these were only their sales prints. Unfortunately, they were wrong...
Here
Doesn't mention this recent news, but is rather interesting as it explains what they do with such old recordings.
R Tape loading error, 0:1
One of the things that's always fascinated me about the Dalek future history is that we've already seen the final episode. We know what happens, some umpteen hundreds of thousands of years from now. All of the Pertwee, Baker (funny), Davidson, Baker (annoying), McCoy episodes are just filling in the gaps between now and then.
So, I don't know what operating system they're running (PepperShakerOS?), but whatever it is, there's a human emotions loadable module for it. And Troughton's Doctor saw what happened after they tried to "insmod human_emotions".
Likewise. I even managed to double-dork myself with the lame insmod joke.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999"
Several short clips from lost episodes have turned up as recently as 2003.
The original broadcast of Fury from the Deep was censored in New Zealand. Certain scenes (eg, "the weed creature attack" scene) were deemed to be too violent or explicit. Ironically for the censors, these censored clips are now all that is left of some episodes.
A selection of scenes from episode six of the 'lost' Troughton tale Fury from the Deep have been found.
link
THE DOCTOR WHO CLIPS LIST by Steve Phillips
link
You're both right and wrong. I was incorrect when I stated that 115 episodes were missing, but the number of lost episodes is still in the triple digits. The recovery of this one brought the number down to 108.
The thing is, many early episodes have been recovered. The bulk (though not all) of the first two seasons were returned in the early 1980s, and throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous episodes were discovered in the possession of private collectors, or other television stations, and so on. But after the recovery of all four episodes of The Tomb of the Cybermen in the early 1990s, the speed at which episodes were being returned slowed to a trickle, as most of the obvious channels had been exhausted. The only significant finds in the past couple of years have been an episode of The Crusade five years ago, and now this episode of Daleks' Master Plan.
The thing is, this was all perfectly normal. Every episode of the show (and, indeed, of most BBC programs at the time) were shot on video cassette. Because of the PAL formatting of the tapes, though, these masters were then transferred to film and handed over to another division of the BBC, BBC Enterprises, so that they could be more easily sold to foreign distributors. This was all well and good, except that BBC TV had a relatively small facility for storing tape masters, and routinely had to cycle out older tapes to make room for newer rooms, a process which accelerated in the early 1970s, when most BBC1 shows started switching from black and white to color broadcasts. When Doctor Who made the switch at the start of the 1970 season, BBC TV figured it would be highly unlikely that they would ever rebroadcast the old B&W episodes, and so basically junked the lot of them. With almost no exception, every single video cassette master of every episode of the show produced from its creation in 1963 through 1969 was erased. It was figured that if anyone wanted a copy of these episodes, they could go bug BBC Enterprises for the film transfers.
This left the film transfers being held for oversea sale. The problem here was that the nature of copyright law made it extremely difficult to sort out the rights issue after a couple of years. After this initial period had expired, it wasn't economically practical for BBC Enterprises to store all of the film, and so they were incinerated. BBC Enterprises, for its part, assumed that if anyone wanted copies of the episodes that badly, they could go bug BBC TV for the tape masters because, after all, they created them. This was, in general, a slower process than the video erasing, and took place throughout the 1970s.
There were a few exceptions here, though. BBC TV held onto a more or less random assortment of episodes as examples of BBC work of the time period, so some of these have survived. And, towards the tail end of BBC Enterprises's pyro-spree a number of individuals within the BBC finally figured out what was going on, as fan groups began to ask around at the BBC for copies of early episodes, and managed to put at stop to the practice. After 1978, a new BBC group, the Film and Videotape Library, was created to provide storage for BBC programs so that this sorry experience (which had affected a lot more than just DW episodes) would not be repeated. From abroad, distributors who had purchased episodes from BBC Enterprises had occassionally stored them, and obligingly returned to them to a very humbled BBC in the 1980s.
But this is all incomplete. Not every episode was sold to every foreign distributor, and not every foreign distributor kept every episode they had purchased. So, aside from the few private acquisitions squirelled away from the BBC by collectors, the only real remains of these lost episodes are the audio recordings made (illegally, no less) by fans back in the 1960s, a few short video snippets made on extremely primitive equipment, and the work of a photojournalist named John Cura who had been hired by BBC TV to snap a photographic record of the prod
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."