Doctor Who Reanimated!

Doctor Who is one of the longest-running Scifi TV series in history. The British show started out in the 60ies and kept going until the late eighties (so ran for more than 20 consecutive years), then got picked up for a US-co-produced TV movie (that failed abysmally), and was revived last year as a successful British TV show that's heading for its third season and is getting a spin-off series as well, and has just aired its first season in the US and Canada.

Sometime after the 60ies, someone apparently wanted to save some money and took the tapes some of the earlier episodes had been recorded on and wiped them (I'd guess for re-use - videotape was very expensive back then). Thus, there are certain episodes that are missing to fans who want to see the original show. Some have been recovered because someone took home a tape, original material and edit decision lists were still available etc. But some are completely lost, and for some only the soundtrack survived the decades.

For a while, some of these sound-only episodes have been re-edited and sold as audio drama, but now the BBC is doing an unbelievably simple yet smart thing to bring back the multi-part episodes where some parts survived and the soundtrack to others is available: They're doing the missing parts as animated movies! So, you'll hear and see Patrick Troughton again, you can follow the story, and it'll be reasonably homogeneous.

Here's the official scoop.

Reader Comments: (RSS Feed)

Jeff Haynes writes: No, The reason why lost episodes are recovered is because the BBC made 16 mill film prints from the video, for over sea distribution. Theses are what are recovered.

Uli Kusterer replies: ★ @Jeff: Both, actually. Shortly before writing this post I read an article on how someone had kept some of the tape copies he got. But you're right, of course, a lot are film prints from overseas.

Or E-Mail Uli privately.