Inspirations - Invasion of the Dinosaurs

For people tuning into BBC 1 on Saturday 12th January 1974, this story was simply going to be called "Invasion" - or so they thought. The first episode decided to keep secret the fact that the invaders were dinosaurs. Only in the closing moments, as we went into the cliffhanger, would we see that there were prehistoric monsters in present day London. As such, the first episode has only "Invasion" as its title. This was the director's idea (Paddy Russell).
The writer, Malcolm Hulke, was not happy about this. He wanted the full title on screen from the start, so as to grab as many viewers as possible. In the week following the broadcast of Episode One, Hulke wrote to Terrance Dicks to complain about Russell's decision - leading to a falling out between the two close friends. Hulke pointed out that things had been spoiled anyway, by the Radio Times printing a sketch of a dinosaur to illustrate the episode that week.
As it was, Hulke would not write for the show again - though this can't be put fully down to the argument. The production team was changing, and Pertwee now announced that he was moving on as well. Not credited yet, Robert Holmes had now taken up the script editor role alongside Dicks, who was busy trying to get the forthcoming Peladon sequel to work.

The genesis of this story lay in a proposal for an adventure in which the Doctor and companion returned to the present day to find the Earth already invaded. The planet's new alien masters were based in a spaceship hovering above London, and the Brigadier was leading a resistance movement. The story was to mirror the appeasement movement of the late 1930's, when a number of high ranking people in the UK argued for making friends with Hitler in order to avoid a second world war. Not all of these individuals were Nazi sympathisers. Many just wanted peace at any cost, and were prepared to allow Hitler to annexe what he wanted in Europe to achieve this. There would have been a scene in which the UK Prime Minister would return from the alien ship brandishing a piece of paper with promises of peace - just as PM Neville Chamberlain had done on his return from a visit to Hitler at Munich.
Those opposed to appeasement knew that the Nazis were not to be trusted, and would push for more and more territory. The Doctor Who proposal went down this path, with the aliens only pretending peace when they were really planning to conquer the whole planet. They had a hatchery at the Tower of London, with huge monsters growing in eggs, ready to attack the city.
As it was, the piece of paper reference ("I have in my hand...") had already been used in The Green Death, when Dr Stevens claimed to have written confirmation of future prosperity for Llanfairfach and beyond.
Another story idea was a visit back to prehistoric times for the Doctor, after the production team had been emboldened by the success of the Drashigs in Carnival of Monsters.
These two ideas were fused to form the basis for "Timescoop", as Hulke's story was originally titled.

In many ways Invasion of the Dinosaurs acts as a sequel to The Green Death, picking up some of its themes and twisting them in new ways. It also acts as the middle section of a trilogy, which reaches its conclusion with Planet of the Spiders. This arc is especially true for the character of Captain Mike Yates. He had not been all that well served since his introduction back in Terror of the Autons. A proposed romance with Jo Grant never got off the ground, and the more established character of Sgt. Benton tended to be more prominent, and was very popular with the viewers. (Pertwee used to get a little jealous at the amount of fan mail John Levene received).
In The Green Death we see Yates go under cover at Global Chemicals, only to be brainwashed by super-computer BOSS into assassinating the Doctor, and pointing his gun at the Brigadier. He is "cured" by the strange blue sapphire which the Doctor has just brought back from Metebelis III. That's the blue crystal which the Doctor gives to Jo as a wedding present, and which she returns at the beginning of Spiders - so you can see how this arc is playing out. Whilst recovering from this brainwashing, Yates has gone off to sort out his head, and has fallen in with an ecological group who have a scheme they call Operation Golden Age. They have some powerful and influential members - including government ministers, senior army officers and peers of the realm, along with the odd track and field star. They also have a scientist - Whitaker (named after David, perhaps, the man who never gave Hulke that job back in 1963/4?). Whitaker has invented a machine that can lift people and other stuff out of time, but his main ambition is to roll the whole planet back time to a previous golden age - before industrialisation and its resulting pollution. A number of people have signed up to this scheme - believing they are going to be held in cryonic suspension and placed on a fleet of spaceships, which will take them to a new Earth-like planet. They're just snoozing in a dummy spaceship, built in a Cold War bunker under London. (A very big bunker, if the locations of its entrances are to be believed. It must have a number of tube lines running through the middle of it).

This is where Hulke twists themes from The Green Death. He was obviously not that fond of Prof Cliff Jones and his Wholeweal Community cronies. Had he not gone up the Amazon with Jo, Jones might have been a willing recruit for Operation Golden Age himself. Hulke's eco-warriors are not nice people (at least those leading them aren't - the spaceship inhabitants being idealistic dupes). Sir Charles Grover MP, General Finch and Prof Whitaker all want to see the Earth free from pollution, the population of an earlier era steered onto a different path, away from mass industry. They see nothing wrong with wiping out all human progress of the last few centuries. They aren't killing anyone in their view, as they would never have lived in the first place. All very reasonable, they think. Invasion of the Dinosaurs is, at heart, a "the ends don't justify the means" tale. Even that sensible Captain Yates falls for the plan, knowing that the Brigadier, Jo and Benton would never be born, and that this is something that the Doctor would never stand for.
The "golden age" is never actually specified. Many people assumed that, as Whitaker was lifting dinosaurs out of time, that this was when they planned to go. This does not make sense, as landing the equivalent of the Golgafrinchan B Ark in the middle of an epoch of savage monsters would mean that their survival chances would be very slim indeed. At least Mark would have been able to run (and jump) away from them for a bit.
The clue to their intended landing time might lie in the second episode, as the Doctor and Sarah encounter a peasant of King John's time. This might be a more likely candidate for the Golden Age, though it was a time of war, famine and pestilence. In the end it is only Grover and Whitaker who are sent back through time. If to prehistoric times, then there is no evidence that they stepped on any butterflies. More likely they were eaten by a T Rex. If they went back to the early 13th Century, then they either ended up dying from one of the many, many illnesses on offer, or were burnt / hanged as witches.

We should say something about the dinosaurs at this point. (Sorry, but we must). The production teams of the 1960's never considered doing anything like this. The closest would be the Visians - and they were made invisible. It was only with the arrival of CSO - Colour Separation Overlay (what the BBC called it), AKA Chromakey (what everyone else called it), AKA blue / yellow screen, AKA green-screen (as it is generally known nowadays) - that tackling giant monsters on a budget became possible.
Letts had overseen the inclusion of a dinosaur in his very first story as producer (The Silurians, also written by Hulke). With CSO in its infancy, only usable with colour TV, he had learned some harsh lessons. They had built a whole dinosaur suit, to be worn by one of the VFX men, then used CSO to make it look big. Letts then had a "Doh!" moment when he realised that he could have got the same effect from a much cheaper model or puppet.
The Drashigs, as mentioned, gave the team too high an expectation. They had worked, just about, as they had only been rod or hand puppets, with no legs. Believing anything was now possible, Letts sounded out a VFX expert, who assured him that realistic dinosaurs could be achieved. The man Letts went to was Cliff Culley, who was a respected VFX designer. The problem was two-fold. First, Culley was an expert in matte and optical work, as can be seen in a number of the Sean Connery Bond movies. He was not big on models and miniatures. This led to problem number two. He farmed the work out to a sub-contractor, who could not provide what Letts wanted for the money on offer.
Some of the dinosaurs are actually quite good - the Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Brontosaurus (as they were called then). That's because they are all seen fairly static, on model backgrounds. The real problem is the T Rex, and that just happens to be the creature which appears the most, getting half the cliffhangers. To animate the T Rex, it had its control wires up one of its legs - which meant that it was not mobile. It is also not terribly well modeled, yet it gets many lingering close-ups. The other problem with the T Rex is that it sometimes gets superimposed onto film sequences, which causes it to appear to float about the screen.

"Is that supposed to be a T Rex floating over the Royal Albert Hall, Doctor?"

For some reason, that first episode of this story was deleted, whereas the other five parts survived. The version on the VHS and the DVD release is in black & white (with a grainy, washed-out colourised option on the DVD). Two rumours have done the rounds about this. One is that, having the same name as an earlier Troughton story which had been deleted, Episode One was scrapped by mistake along with its Cyberman namesake. The other rumour is that Letts went out of his way to have the whole story scrapped, in anguish over the dinosaur puppets, but to his frustration they only got rid of part of it.

When The Time Warrior was released onto DVD, with optional new CGI elements, Letts was said to have been impressed, and said to the restoration team "So, what about those dinosaurs then?".

We didn't get CGI dinosaurs when the DVD eventually came out. Looking at the story, it would actually be very easy to replace them, so I hope this is considered for when Season 11 gets released on Blu-Ray. A lot of the dinosaur sequences do not have other characters in shot. The end of part one cliffhanger, where we see soldiers in the foreground, could simply be reshot, as they did with the new scenes for the Day of the Daleks special edition. Scenes where the Doctor, Brigadier etc are in the same shot as the dinosaurs could just be cut out, they are so few, or be redone with body doubles with their backs to camera. Even the jeep driving under the Brontosaurus sequence could be remounted. All perfectly manageable in my opinion.

Next time: it's Terry Nation's annual Dalek story, this time with added von Daniken shenanigans...