Inspirations - The Movie

 

As an attempt to relaunch Doctor Who for a audience already familiar with the programme, but also to set up a new series for those who had never seen it, or knew very much about it, Doctor Who - The Movie had a difficult line to walk.

You could almost split these two audiences by nationality, with the US viewers more likely to be the newbies, and the UK viewers being the ones who already knew what the series was all about.

As well as a lot of info-dumping to get them up to speed, the US audience were offered gun battles, hospital drama and car chases (or rather ambulance / motorbike chases, fulfilling the same function). A romance between lead male and female performers would also be expected from a US drama.

(Conventional) gun battles, car chases and romance between Doctor and Companion were very much not what UK viewers expected - but not to say they didn't want these thing.

The people most against these aspects of the film were the fans. The general public either thought that the series had these things anyway, or their inclusion if new was because the series had to change and move forward, into more populist areas. When the series had "died" in 1989, it was poorly regarded - cheap and juvenile and badly made. Once off the air, it had been classified as "cult" and stuck in a particular non-popular niche.

The film as broadcast owes a lot to earlier stories, but it nearly went down another, reboot, route. A draft had the Doctor leaving Gallifrey to look for his missing father - a Time Lord named Ulysses - despatched by his grandfather, Rassilon.

Some old stories might have been remade, such as The Web Planet, and historical stories would have made a comeback, with a trip to the American Civil War a possible second story.

Luckily none of this came to pass. What we did get starts with the Doctor as he was when the series ended in 1989 - Sylvester McCoy. A certain section of the production didn't want him to feature. Not the US people who probably hadn't a clue who he was, but the BBC. They simply didn't want this shiny new version of the series to be tainted with memories of what had been regarded as an embarrassing failure back in 1989.

The producer wanted this film to be a clear follow on from Season 26, however, and not something which could be shunted aside like the Peter Cushing Dalek movies.

Having McCoy regenerate into the new guy provided continuity, but also hopefully explained the whole regeneration thing to a new audience, as well as allowing viewers to get to know the Eighth Doctor right from his start.

As it was, having this a regeneration story proved to be a huge mistake, as it just confused the newbies, and cut down McGann's screen time (thus reducing his chance to make an even bigger impact). McCoy was given a really bad ending for his incarnation, getting killed through stupidity rather than from some heroic act.

The scenes of the regeneration are played against a morgue attendant watching the 1931 Universal film of Frankenstein. 

The Doctor suffers from post- regeneration trauma, as he has done in most of the debuts of Doctors throughout the classic era, though this process started to get worse as the series progressed. Troughton's Doctor got over it quite quickly, apart from a tendency to speak of himself in the third person. Pertwee and Tom Baker were pretty much up and about after the first episode. Davison, however, took most of his first story to recover, and likewise with Colin Baker (though some would argue it took a whole season for him to get over it). McCoy had also suffered from amnesia for most of his first story.

The TARDIS has a Jules Verne feel to it, with wood and brass aplenty, which is reminiscent of the console room from Season 14.

The Seal of Rassilon is everywhere. This first appeared as a Vogan symbol in Revenge of the Cybermen before the designer used it again for The Deadly Assassin, though there it was supposed to be the Prydonian Seal specifically. Presumably the carved wooden heads of a bearded man are supposed to be images of Rassilon, which at least match our only glimpse of him up till this point, in The Five Doctors. The Eye of Harmony, which The Deadly Assassin claims was on Gallifrey, under the Panopticon, is now held within the TARDIS for some reason. 

Skaro exists, despite having been destroyed in Remembrance of the Daleks, and noone mentions how this could be. No sign of Davros. Mind you, there's no sign of the Daleks either, as they are simply heard but not seen.

The Master has a little beard, but it isn't Anthony Ainley.

The new theme music is nearly all the middle eight section of the old one, and the new logo is actually an old logo - the Pertwee era one.

All in all, the production team looked to regeneration stories, and to the Time Lord stories from The Deadly Assassin to The Five Doctors. The Master was brought in as the main adversary probably because he looks human, like the Doctor, and so would be palatable to newer viewers, rather than weird robotic creatures or bug-eyed monsters.

Of course, a lot of new continuity was attempted, with the Doctor's first mention of his father, and that whole business about being half human, which has simply been brushed under the carpet since, and is even less likely since Series 12's revelations.

Next time: another reboot - but one which actually worked this time...