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How influential was the TV movie?
lady_xanax
Posts: 5,662 Forum Member
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Do you think that it influenced the reboot in anyway, or helped viewers to acclimatise to bigger budget Doctor Who? Or is it something that theoretically you could scratch out of the show's history and it wouldn't make any difference? Do you think that the audio adventures fill in enough gaps about the Eighth Doctor to make him fully 'count'?
('count' being in people's personal opinions, not a dispute on canonicity)
('count' being in people's personal opinions, not a dispute on canonicity)
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So he never considered doing the same and having the 8th Doctor regenerate into the 9th at the start of NuWho.
If he had liked the idea we may have seen McGann regenerate into Eccleston back in 2005 (and thus putting John Hurt out of a job in 2013).
Agreed. Maybe they thought that if McGann didn't go down well, people might watch for McCoy. Still, I thought that part was dragged out. Also they took the cheapskate option of having him travel to New Year's Eve 1999 (three years into the future- wow!) and yet being on the cusp of the millenium actually makes no difference to the plot. I suppose it provides a countdown to potential apocalypse (that only seems to affect America) but still...
I think this is definitely true. Making the Doctor a romantic hero widened the mainstream appeal and distanced it from just being a show for sci-fi fans.
It did plant some seeds (obviously not the half-human one) that meant that even if it didn't directly inspire the reboot, seeing the movie showed untapped potential- such as the idea that the Doctor could form romantic attachments and that companions could fancy him. I think it also showed that creating more 'cinematic' episodes was the way forward.
He's also portrayed more as being like a human with alien qualities.
Imagine if they did, half-human doctor and all that other stuff would not have been canon it would be cement, non-erasable marker pen on Who lore
EDIT: was McGann the first (and only) Doctor to begin his episode by narrating it (ie when he is explaining the story of the Master and basically setting up McCoy's scene.?
Baker does narration at the start of The Deadly Assassin. He's travelling alone to Gallifrey for that one, so I guess it was impossible to weave in the necessary exposition.
But for some reason Fox got cold feet as the co-production partner and decided not to take up the option of a follow up series. And the BBC could still not go it alone production wise back then as there would still have been major problems budget wise that the BBC would not commit to at the time.
But it does beg the question since there was a number of co-production partners interested before Fox, why therefore did no other co-producers become involved and take up the option of a full series?. Did Fox become "difficult" and retained\refused to give up there option for a series for a rival US network to take up even though it soon became clear they (Fox) were not going to co-produce a series?. Or perhaps the BBC blocked it by realising it had become to American a series based on the TV movie and they had given up to much rights and production control wise just to get the TV movie made?. And so realized it would be to difficult to work with any American co-producer at that time based on the amount of production control that they were demanding?.
It would have been like the BBC getting involved in a remake of Star Trek as a co-producer but making it a more British feel of a series and wanting more production rights and control than the rights owners ever being happy with. As I also recall 1 of the producers for the TV movie having later said and admitted that they regretted Fox having had the level of control and say over the TV movie story\production wise and that the BBC had given in to much to the American producers demands on what they wanted it to be like. I wonder what the BBC's original idea for the TV movie therefore was if it was changed from the original ideas much?.
But for me it certainly helped to bridge things all the same.
Yep, I'd say fairly influential.
Didn't Lee discover the TARDIS for himself before Grace did? He even did the usual walk round the TARDIS as one would
I thought McGann's intro (particular the choice of him to do it as the New Doctor was highly appropriate. It's a tantalising tease as to what's to come. Who is this Master and who is this Doctor. The Doctor in his narration mentions he is coming to the end of his seventh life, implying that there is a new guy coming soon.
Why not have regeneration at the start?
Yes but it was shown first with #7 on the inside then walking outside - the audience should have first seen it the other way around.
He was also working class.
I thought there was, at first, a deliberate attempt to move away from the kind of Doctor Who that was distilled in the TVM.
Ecclestons' line about most planets having a North was and still is epic
But the TVM failed to make an impression in the US, and since
most of the money was coming from there, no McGann series.
Still, I think people took notice of the TVM's good UK
ratings, and the BBC probably thought, "Maybe someday,
we might make another shot at remaking Doctor Who".
But without it, Night of the Doctor wouldn't have been so exciting eh?
I remember being really disappointed at the time that Dr Who didn't continue..
Oops!
It didn't help that at the time, Eric Roberts would
have been the biggest "name" in the TVM, and he's playing the villain. McGann would have been best-known to US viewers of
the time for the 1993 "Three Musketeers" and "Alien 3", but Roberts would have been the guy Middle America would have recognised.
I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.
I think McGann is on record as having wanted to play it in a leather jacket and a shaved head — but they put him in the Edwardian stuff and gave him that wig.
As much as I love McGann he is well off the mark here. The long hair worked well and was different to what had gone before. Likewise the Edwardian outfit was perfect when you compare it to 7ths, 6ths and even 5ths, it harked back to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd era.
To be fair, he doesn't regenerate til about twenty minutes in and they needed to have enough time to make us care about the new Doctor.
Really, he should have regenerated right at the beginning I think, seeing as McCoy's Doctor doesn't do much in the film.
I agree with this, though I think it was just a wider moving away from the old BBC RP and also a bit of a gimmick to distance it from the Classic series.
The TVM movie just took their ideas of 'Britishness' and just made the most 'British' version they could think of.
To me the comment sounds more like a tongue-in-cheek joke rather than genuinely wanting to play it like that. Also maybe he was a bit bored of playing the beautiful dashing romantic hero, though it works really well in this film because it adds a more populist mainstream version of the time traveller (and still a plausible one).
I think his point was to not have the regeneration at all.
Personally, I'm sort of glad (as a fan) that we did see the regeneration at the start, but I appreciate that it probably wasn't the best idea in the world to entice new viewers.
I don't like the TV Movie all that much. It isn't terrible, but it isn't great either and the Master was truly awful. McGann was the highlight of the film and it's a real shame we didn't get to see much more of him (fantastic performance in Night of the Doctor aside). I'm really glad that when the show was successfully rebooted in 2005, the writers opted to keep McGann's Doctor as the Eighth Doctor and to accept the TV Movie as canon (Half-human rubbish excepted, of course ;-) ) until finally in 2013 Moffat brought him back on screen as the Doctor to have a fitting regeneration (even if it was only for 7 minutes).
I would be so so happy if we could see more of McGann's Doctor, running from the Time War at all costs, portrayed in Night of the Doctor.