30th anniversary of The Five Doctors
chuffnobbler
Posts: 10,771 Forum Member
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I can still remember the THRILL of The Five Doctors, thirty years ago tonight!
Yeti in caves. Liz fading and screaming. "The car's in dock so I've got to go by bus". The black scrolls. Turlough, Susan and the bomb. The Terrible Zodin. The blaring music used for the Dark Tower. The Raston Robot. "Easy as pi". The terrible, shifting eyes of the imprisoned and tortured Time Lords in the Tomb. Several Tardii all taking off from inside each other.
I have always loved this story and I always will. As an adult, there are so many additional treats to be gleaned from it, but as an innocent eight year old, those are the bits that I can see in my mind's eye.
Bliss.
Happy 30th everyone!
Yeti in caves. Liz fading and screaming. "The car's in dock so I've got to go by bus". The black scrolls. Turlough, Susan and the bomb. The Terrible Zodin. The blaring music used for the Dark Tower. The Raston Robot. "Easy as pi". The terrible, shifting eyes of the imprisoned and tortured Time Lords in the Tomb. Several Tardii all taking off from inside each other.
I have always loved this story and I always will. As an adult, there are so many additional treats to be gleaned from it, but as an innocent eight year old, those are the bits that I can see in my mind's eye.
Bliss.
Happy 30th everyone!
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...except Tom who let me down when I was 6, but at least he's redeemed himself by stepping up this time round.
Because they didn't care as much about it in those days, but at least it meant it got a Friday night showing (within Children in Need). Think it may have been shown on the 23rd in America and I certainly know that the Target book came out befor the show was broadcast here.
Lovely programme The Five Doctors, pushed all the right buttons in those days. Lots of lovely moments. Pity Tom Baker wasn't in it but we got to see bits of Shada which were new in those days.
Lots of lovely moments rather than a cohesive plot (something some people are now saying about Day of the Doctor) but I didn't mind back in the day and I don't mind now. Loved it.
Okay, it's never gonna be a classic story in the proper sense of the word but it was what it was for it's time and it celebrated the show's history properly and had several story lines which dovetailed nicely into one another.
I do remember being disappointed at the lack of Daleks and by Tom Baker's non-appearance. Didn't know anything about Shada at the time so thought that footage was perhaps from a proper 4th Doctor story as I hadn't seen any Classic Who Videos back then.
Nice tribute to Hartnell at the beginning, great to see that clip used again in last Thursday's drama. Richard Hurndall did okay as the First Doctor and Troughton blew away his advancing years and put in a solid performance as the Second Doctor.
Great fun all round. Is for me is how an anniversary should be celebrated.
I would have just turned 10 about 2 weeks before it aired.
A Facebook friend of mine asked on Saturday night whether she should let her 5 year old watch the 50th - after telling her about my memories she did do - and he loved it too. Result.
I remember getting the Target book the day before it was broadcast and I'd got through the first few chapters before my Dad took it off me and said I ought to watch the TV show first so that I'd enjoy it better - and he was right!
Does anyone know if there is a particular reason why the Cybermen feature so much more than the Daleks?
Peter Davison said that Terry Nation was still being a bit iffy about the rights during his time in the show so perhaps that explains it. Or maybe it was just because the Cybermen had gone down so well in Earthshock and they already knew that they were bringing the Daleks back next season by then anyway.
Still being a diva about it though, not wanting to wear the costume etc
it probably had something to do with rights and royalties. Terry Nation had the rights to the daleks and it was probably just less hassle to concentrate on the cybermen at the time.
Tom Baker wasn't in it much either. His position was something akin to that of Christopher Eccleston's in 2013!
In the Midland region, we had an opt out.
Technically he wasn't in it at all, they used unaired footage from Shada.
I remember the photoshoot they did with the wax work Tom Baker….:D
And they still had to pay Tom for using his likeness
Anyway I thought it was unaired footage from the five(ish) Doctors?
I always assumed — without any evidence, I should add — it's because the Cybermen spend most of their time outdoors and then get zapped as soon as they go indoors. Daleks can't do muddy terrain.
I had always assumed that, too.
The Dalek sequence is fantastic, and the Cybermen get plenty to do. It allbalances rather nicely.
I love The Five Doctors. Richard Hurndall and the pineapple ... glorious. The Day of the Doctor would have been improved no-end by having John Hurt chobble on some fruit.
But it's terrific fun, from start to finish. The story, such as it is, works very well. Terrance Dicks did a brilliant job in keeping it light, keeping the plot moving at a cracking pace, and keeping it pretty simple. Moffat could learn a thing or too from Dicks about clarity of storytelling.
As a boy I wished there'd been a bit more with all the Doctors, but I realise now that from a dramatic point of view it would have been incredibly clunky, so Terrance was absolutely right to keep the various Doctors in small groups or pairs for most of the story.
Interesting that Davison virtually ignores Susan, certainly no grandfatherly affection of any kind. And the Brigadier doesn't seem to recognise Turlough either, despite being his maths teacher just a few months earlier! But again I think Terrance was spot on in not letting the story get bogged down with too many nit-pickingly small continuity points. That's our job!
I see where you're going with that comment but you couldn't really have had the 20th Anniversary without something of Hartnell in there somewhere. As with last Saturday's Episode, you couldn't leave any one particular Doctor out even in clip form.
I think it would have been disrespectful not to have had that clip. Not only that but Hurndall did actually say in interviews he tried not to split his interpretation between his own personality and Hartnell's so I don't think the clip undermined his performance that much.
I do agree about Doc 5 and Susan though, thought he would have been delighted to see her even if he did look younger than she did!
I quite agree daveyboy, it was brilliant to have that clip, and I really wouldn't have it any other way, but from a practical point of view I still don't think it did Hurndall any favours!
I can see why JNT felt he had to recast the role though. With Tom Baker missing and no Hartnell, it was a bit dodgy calling it The Five Doctors!
I've always believed that if Tom had been involved then the first Doctor would have been the one stuck in the Time Eddy. Then the essential recast wouldn't have been so obvious.
But I can't find any evidence of this now - so perhaps I'm wrong...
Had Season 20 proceeded as planned it would have ended in March 1983 with a four part story called Warhead, which would have been a surprise return for the Daleks to emulate the surprise return of the Cybermen the previous year in Earthshock. This was planned to be the final DW story before The Five Doctors in November that year.
As it turned out, a strike at the BBC meant that those four episodes were dropped from Season 20 (and were made, largely unchanged bar a different Davros actor, as Resurrection of the Daleks for Season 21) but you can see why at the planning stages of the Five Doctors they must have assumed that viewers might have thought that featuring Daleks heavily in the anniversary special might be overkill.