Saturday 3 May 2014

Know Your Daleks No.2


The Troughton Years
The Daleks only made two appearances in the Troughton era, before their creator tried to hawk them around American TV networks - fortunately without success. Despite this, there are some notable variations on show - significant enough to be revisited in the 2005 series.
The Daleks which appear in Troughton's very first story - Power of the Daleks - are all uniformly of the silver / blue sphere variety, as last seen in the later Hartnell stories.
Three of them are seen without a gun unit for part of the story. Gun-less Daleks are a rarity - we won't see another until 1975. It is interesting to note that when they adopted those flame guns on Kembel, they replaced the sucker arms rather than their energy weapons.
The only utility arm variation we see is the net-like scoop which the Daleks use to transfer the genetic mutations into their shells.


This is the first story to make use of the Louis Marx toy Daleks (in the conveyor belt scenes). The proportions are noticeably different from the real thing.


Onto The Evil of the Daleks, and we see a couple of new additions to the Dalek ranks.
Most significant is the introduction of the Emperor. It is a huge immobile Dalek, without any weapon or utility arm. It is black and white in colour, though two of the spheres - roughly where the gun / arm should be - are yellow. A number of cables link the Emperor to, presumably, the Dalek data-banks.


Whilst the majority of the Daleks on view are of the silver / blue sphere variety, there is another variation with the Emperor's special inner retinue. These bodyguards have a black dome.
There are more Louis Marx toys on show in the climactic battle scenes.


Our last sighting of a Dalek in the black & white era of the programme is the one seen on the thought channel during the Doctor's trial by the Time Lords. It marks the final outing for the standard silver / blue sphere model (until the Doctor visits the Dalek Asylum, that is).
Up to now, variations in rank could only be achieved by painting all, or part, of the Dalek black. With the move into colour with the advent of the Pertwee era, we will see a much wider range of chromatic variation...

2 comments:

  1. I'm enjoying these wee Dalek history articles Gerry, well done m8.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad you're enjoying them. Pertwee era later in the week.

      Delete