Power of the Daleks DVD & BluRay!

[cosmichobo]

G'day,

Just for those who don't get Doctor Who news anywhere else...

On 7 September the BBC announced that a full animated reconstruction of the Second Doctor's first adventure, POWER OF THE DALEKS, was going to be made available for digital download via their online store on the show's 50th anniversary - 5 Nov 2016. It will then air on BBC America on 12 Nov 2016, and receive a Region 2 DVD release on 21 Nov 2016 (with Region 1 likely to follow). Judging by the trailer, the recon/anime is b&w and widescreen:

This is MASSIVE news in the Classic Who world, as previously the BBC have always stated that it is not economical to animate more than 2 episodes per story. In this case, all 6 are missing, thus all 6 have now been animated. Further, their choice for stories to do this to equates to the Holy Grail of stories for many WHO fans, featuring Pat Troughton's first steps into the role of the Doctor following William Hartnell's departure.

My own personal scoop (possibly!), is that this story is also going to be available on BluRay in both b&w and COLOUR some time in 2017! This information comes from a local distributor, so may be incorrect, but is possibly a big cat-out-of-the-bag. I presume to warrant a BluRay version, the animation has been created in HD quality, and thus will be compressed to fit on the intial DVD releases. BluRay would then allow the HD version to be released in an uncompressed format, with both the black & white, and colour versions available.

Traditional fans may bemoan the decision to release the story in widescreen, when it was originally shot in 4:3 ratio. The move to release a recon in colour as such will likely ruffle even more feathers, but frankly I think it is a great move to attract a modern audience. If they had opted for colour previously, on animated episodes that were filling gaps in semi-complete stories, then it would have looked totally out of place, but in this instance, choosing to offer a colour version I think is a great move.

Fingers crossed this isn't the first and last story to get this treatment, with plenty of other entirely or mostly missing stories, such as:

First Doctor:
Marco Polo (entirely missing)
Galaxy 4 (3/4 missing)
The Myth Makers (entirely missing)
The Daleks Masterplan (and prelude episode, Mission to the Unknown) (10/13 missing)
The Massacre (entirely missing)
The Celestial Toymaker (3/4 missing)
The Savages (entirely missing)
The Smugglers (entirely missing)

Second Doctor:
The Power of the Daleks
The Highlanders (entirely missing)
The Macra Terror (entirely missing)
The Faceless Ones (4/6 missing)
The Evil of the Daleks (6/7 missing)
The Abominable Snowmen (5/6 missing)
Fury from the Deep (entirely missing)
The Wheel In Space (4/6 missing)
The Space Pirates (5/6 missing)

That's 17 titles that could happily use this treatment...

Cheers

cosmic

[rushy]

How can they do it in colour? Are there colour pictures of the story intact, so they know what it looks like?

[cosmichobo]

In general there is very limited colour information captured from the b&w era of WHO. Marco Polo would be the best story to attempt a colourisation (anime, or if they had the real prints), because for some reason or other a photographer was on set for nearly the entire production with a colour camera taking stills. If you look for recons of this story, there's a colour version made using those prints.

Other than that, you have to be careful online, because there are a lot of colour photos "out there" for Hartnell/Troughton era, but a lot of them have been coloured by fans/etc, and were originally b&w only.

Other than that, a few stories have some 8mm colour film footage taken on location by the actors/crew, that at least show you what colours things were...

The other major factor though, is that Hartnell/Troughton's stories were filmed using black and white film - they were only ever intended to be black and white. As such, the production crew actually used often ill-fitting colours to achieve better b&w footage. Hence for instance, the TARDIS console being a light shade of green - that apparently makes it appear ultra white on camera. As such, even if you had colour photos from every episode, that doesn't meant those colours were intended to be seen.

tardis3.jpg

[cosmichobo]

Colour....!

[rushy]

The hype is real.

[cosmichobo]

Or, "I was right"...