Spent a chunk of the weekend watching old Doctor Who. Very old, as in a story from 1964 and one from 1967, survivors of the shockingly routine practice of destroying old TV shows that the BBC and other organizations used to follow. You’d think that the BBC, of any media concern, would have had some sense of history, but apparently not. Separately, I’ve read that the company was about to wipe the tapes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus when PBS showed an interest in them, and thus a crime against comedy was averted.
Anyway, I discovered that 50th anniversary Doctor Who specials are now in production, the earliest parts of which are available to us. Ann and I spent some time on Friday and Saturday watching them. Hearing about the earliest shows through the standard format of interviews-and-clips was fairly interesting, but even better, each special (so far) has included a full story featuring the particular Doctor under discussion. My interest in the series has been intermittent down the years, so I’d never seen any Doctors earlier than Tom Baker. Probably a lot of Americans and maybe even younger Brits can say that.
The two stories were “The Aztecs” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” First Doctor and Second Doctor, respectively. I can’t recommend watching them at one go, since they were created as serials. After a while the story arc gets tiresome – what, another complication preventing the heroes from getting back to the Tardis? Get on with it already. Spacing it out a bit would work better. But Ann insisted on watching all the way through.
Still, I found the shows entertaining. Doctor Who’s famed low-budget production values were on full display, especially when – as happened a few times during “The Aztecs,” – a character was called on to move a heavy stone door, and it’s clear that nothing more heavy than styrofoam or the like was involved. The story involved the Doctor and his companions showing up in pre-Columbian Tenochtitlan (presumably) and mixing it up high-caste Aztecs, all of whom look and sound precisely like British actors in costumes that could have done service in The Robot Vs. the Aztec Mummy. I had a hard time explaining to Ann exactly why I thought that funny.
As a story, “The Tomb of the Cybermen” seemed more cohesive and – put in context as children’s entertainment pre-Internet, pre-CGI – was probably pretty scary to many of its original audience. It involves the Doctor and his companions showing up on some desolate planet and unwisely helping to unearth a pod of Cybermen, who of course are long-running menaces bent on destroying humanity or conquering the Earth or whatever. Ann, of a more sophisticated (jaded?) generation, told me that one reason she liked the story was because the effects weren’t particularly good, thus making it less scary than the more recent iterations of Cybermen on the show.
My favorite bit was a supporting character who was supposed to be a spaceship captain. It was implied that he was an American, but he sounded like no American I’ve ever heard. I had to look this up: the actor was George Roubicek, born in Austria and saying lines written by British writers who seem to have had no ear at all for American idioms. Surprising, since even 50 years ago, weren’t a lot of American movies shown in the UK?
According to Wiki at least, Roubicek’s made much of his career doing dubbing work, and I say good for him (and he’s still alive) . He also had a small part in Star Wars. Like everyone else involved, he probably had no idea it would become the phenomenon it did. Probably the same could be said for Doctor Who.