Old Doctor Who - Part 4

[Norton Canes]

Really, they just need to do a huge dramatic build-up to

Spoiler alert

"No! Not the mind probe!"

[close]

followed by looks of embarrassed silence.

[daf]

A spoof episode of Naked Attraction featuring the Ergon, Martin Clunes, Ibbotson, the Garm, Leee John and Kamelion

Hosted by Captain Jack!

[Deanjam]

Roy Scammell has died. He did stunt and acting work on Doctor Who as well as many other things including Bond and Alien.

[Replies From View]

Looks as embarrassingly cringeworthy as I remember. So brash and gaudy.

Blanket white studio lighting made everything look so cheap.  I wonder if any fans have tried re-grading JNT's Who as an experiment.  I suspect there's only so much you can do, though.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Sad news just in from a good friend on Facebook of the passing of Damaris Hayman - at the admittedly good age of 91. Miss Olive Hawthorne in 'The Daemons', appeared in The Young Ones and Filthy Rich & Catflap, and a pretty fascinating acting career behind her.

[Norton Canes]

Avaunt, all ye elementals
Avaunt, all ye powers of adversity
Be still, and return to thy resting
Be at peace in thy sleeping

[purlieu]

Doctor Who and the Shoulder Pads Original Sin by Andy Lane


That, there, is The Doctor being arrested by Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester, his new companions. I enjoyed them a lot, and kind of wish I hadn't known they would be companions going forward, as the final chapter would have been a nice surprise. They're a fairly standard pair of police officers Adjudicators from 30th century Earth, Chris a naive newbie whose idealism helps him see things the more cynical veteran Roz manages to miss. Almost Holmes-esque in dynamic, they provided a lot of humour and fun throughout this book, and I'm looking forward to more adventures with them in the future.

A few pages into Original Sin I was ready to chalk it up as another dystopian future story that I would find mildly diverting but ultimately too bleak, military-oriented and Sawardian to get any real joy from. Thankfully, this couldn't have been further from the truth. Yes, it's dystopian: Earth, at the peak of its empire, is obnoxiously racist and xenophobic, considering all alien life to be scum, especially those whose planets have been absorbed into the Empire and have been forced to relocate to Earth and work cleaning toilets or busking; the media is pushing constant jingoism into homes; corporations are overwhelmingly powerful. Yes, there's a police and military presence throughout, not only through Cwej and Forrester, but the presence of Provost-Major Beltempest, a largely horrible character who reluctantly helps our heroes, despite seeming to hold up his racism to the end. But the story itself has a constant spring in its step: the aforementioned Holmes-esque new companions, The Doctor's wonderful style of playing off everybody who comes up against him - he's in cheeky grin and glint in his eye mode here, thankfully, falling somewhere between Tom and Pat - Benny being warm and funny as usual, and just the general pace of the writing, which balances action, back story, plot, character, humour and exposition brilliantly. Ok, there's way too much fanwank - more than a dozen past stories are briefly referenced, and just as many stories we've never seen and races we've never heard of - but the writing is always light and fun, and it never feels like a chore to trudge through, unlike a number of recent books.

The guest characters are fairly well drawn: the Hith are a nicely realised alien species, with unique characteristics and some genuinely sympathetic individuals, Beltempest is well-rounded enough to be worth coming along for the ride, especially his and The Doctor's uncomfortable relationship; only Zebulon Pryce - a Hannibal Lector type who turns up to give some exposition on icaron radiation and throw about some half-hearted philosophy - feels underwritten. The Doctor and Benny are on fine form, with little trace of angst, working well together for the first half of the book, and separate later on. There are numerous villains in the story, although it ultimately turns out that the man pulling all the strings is none other than Tobias Vaughan. I'm not quite sure what I make of this: he's not the sort of character I can imagine coming back, but he's handled pretty well.

The book ends with the start of the collapse of the Earth Empire, which is nice.

So yeah, enjoyed that a lot.

[Catalogue Trousers]

I think that Beltempest is a lot more grey-shaded than 'largely horrible' would indicate, but I agree with you otherwise. This is a damn fine mystery/adventure, and I enjoyed the hell out of it when I read it.

[Poison To The Mind]

I enjoyed them a lot, and kind of wish I hadn't known they would be companions going forward, as the final chapter would have been a nice surprise.

samesies

[purlieu]

I think that Beltempest is a lot more grey-shaded than 'largely horrible' would indicate, but I agree with you otherwise.

Yes, possibly. I think I just struggled to get past the clear xenophobia.

Two chapters into Sky Pirates! and I have no idea what the hell is going on.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

I recall from reading it many years ago that Sky Pirates! picks up once the actual plot emerges a few chapters in but yes, the opening is utterly bewildering at first

I hate to bang out some old cliché along the lines of "It's like Discworld...on acid!!!" but that is pretty much what it feels like. A Pratchett-esque comical fantasy universe pushed to utterly demented extremes.

I don't think Dave Stone ever quite hit that peak of insanity again, sadly much of his subsequent work has felt like diminishing returns from what I've seen. It doesn't help that he has used variations of the Sloths multiple times which doesn't help the feeling of being a bit of a one trick pony.

There's also an odd and depressing sequel to it set in the Bernice Summerfield spin-off series, "Oblivion", but I wouldn't recommend looking it up yet as it has a couple of massive spoilers for upcoming NAs.

[purlieu]

Just had a page which references both 'Time Wars' and a 'reality bomb'. It's just a shame RTD didn't go the whole hog and include Altairian XIV Bogwoppets into his series.

[Gurke and Hare]

The Season 24 set's been delayed by another week, just had an email from Amazon.

[Replies From View]

The Season 24 set's been delayed by another week, just had an email from Amazon.

Well at least soon they will have something to film season 24 on.  Better late than never.

[Bad Ambassador]

Good news: The Web of Fear Blu-ray is out on 16 August.
Bad news: The animation is absolute shit. https://youtu.be/RoCSHEI3Nmw

[The Giggling Bean]

Good news: The Web of Fear Blu-ray is out on 16 August.
Bad news: The animation is absolute shit. https://youtu.be/RoCSHEI3Nmw

Quoted for truth. I honestly can't believe anyone thought that animation was passable, it looks like an early 2000s cut scene from the PS2. I always double dip on the DVD and Steelbook to support the animations but I'm only getting the Steelbook this time round and only for OCD completist reasons...in no way is this an endorsement of that terrible animation.

I know we can pick faults in the previous 2D stuff but at least it was consistent. I had hoped that it was just the trailer they'd done in this style, really disappointed to see just how bad its going to look as a full episode. This will be the exception where the recon remains the default episode 3 for me.

I'm genuinely hoping that this is a one off. I'm a big advocate for animating the missing episodes but I'm not on board at all with this style.

[mjwilson]

Speaking of animations, I picked it up the Power of the Daleks special edition - I hadn't been planning on buying it but it was a few pounds off. Not bad so far, looks a bit better than I remember the old one (although I'm too lazy to do an actual comparison).

[daf]

Loved this comment under that video : "You've had this animated haven't you? Don't like it"

Was this made with some sort of motion capture technology? I'm picturing Toby Hadoke capering about in one of Andy Serkis' old green-spot leotards!

[Catalogue Trousers]

And Nicholas Briggs doing the same. But respectfully.

[daf]

By the looks of it they just drew Victoria's face on a balloon and wagged that about a bit - job done!

[JamesTC]

It isn't ideal but it'll do the job. On the bright side, it seems they have a new telenap recon too.

[Norton Canes]

telenap

Are they doing The Web Planet?

[olliebean]

Interesting choice to rotoscope Thunderbirds puppets.

[purlieu]

Good God.

[Norton Canes]

All the animated recons are rubbish. Genuinely don't think this is any worse, just different.

[frajer]

Best by far was Cosgrove Hall's The Invasion. Genuinely striking and stylish I thought.

[JamesTC]

I thought The Moonbase was the best one.

[The Giggling Bean]

In fairness to them the budgets aren't great and I think they've done great work on Macra, Faceless and Fury (a few dodgy bits here and there). The thing is the 2D characters move in the style of 2D characters. There's an uncanny valley quality to this animation...not suggesting it's anywhere near decent enough to mistake it for human. In fact Daf got it spot on when he wrote...

"By the looks of it they just drew Victoria's face on a balloon and wagged that about a bit - job done!"

There's certain shots that do look like faces on balloons. The limbs also have a wierd floating balloon quality to them.

It's annoying that they've chosen to change animation styles on this when, by and large, the existing 2D style was well received for the others. It's a pisser as well as, unless the ep turns up, this crap will be the only official visual representation of Web 3.

[purlieu]

Yeah, the 2D ones are a little bit Web Flash Animation in places, but they're very simple and do the job well. This looks like it's trying too hard and ending up looking weirdly out of date in the process.

[Norton Canes]

Coincidentally I watched the first three episodes of the Reign Of Terror for the first time ever the other night. Absolutely fantastic (or should that be fantastique?), can't believe it's taken me so long to get round to them. Read through the transcripts of episodes four and five today (did I mention how much I dislike animated recons?) and all ready to watch the final instalment tonight. Then, the only extant episodes of classic era Who I haven't seen will be Planet Of Giants.