For the purposes of this review I elected to make my first watch the B&W version, as I've always imagined this story in atmospheric monochrome since reading the Target novelisation in 1975. I also wanted to see the cleaned up version of the surviving second episode. I then watched the colourised version of this, just for comparison purposes. (I'll give the colour version of the whole thing a watch later on).
It is also the DVD version I bought, as I've never seen the point of 2D animation in HD, plus the stories will all be getting a Blu-ray release in the season box sets eventually anyway.
The Abominable Snowmen may well be the last missing story to be animated - at least for a while. Funding for these projects was coming from BBC America, and they have now withdrawn this support.
A quick potted history of the missing episode animations might be in order if this is to be the last.
The first episodes to be animated were the first and fourth of The Invasion, and very good they were too. The artwork was great and the direction didn't stray too far from the style established by Douglas Camfield. There are some shots that he would have died for, had he not had the budget and timescale constraints he had to face.
Direction and style matching surrounding existing episodes is something which the next release wholly failed to achieve. The surviving episodes of The Reign of Terror were ignored as the director adopted a visual style which clashed with what went either side of it. Far too many ridiculous close-ups and quick cutting - just look at how many shots make up the simple opening of a door at Jules' home. The director obviously thought they were Orson Welles, when they were in fact much closer to Mel Welles.
The Ice Warriors suffered from rather naïve artwork. The Ice Warriors themselves are very basically rendered and fail to impress. Some not too bad likenesses for the human cast, but overall a huge disappointment.
To date the releases were plugging gaps in otherwise complete stories (e.g. The Tenth Planet, The Moonbase - both very well done), but soon they moved on to delivering animations of stories that were missing in their entirety, save for the odd clip or telesnap images. The quality of artwork for these gained a consistency which was good. Not great, but good.
Likenesses can be fine, and backgrounds. Metal creatures like Daleks and Cybermen look great. One major issue is movement. It is always clunky and unrealistic. At the end of the day, these are poorly funded and rushed, relatively speaking.
We had some other gaffes, such as the stupidly long arms of the characters in Fury from the Deep - making Van Lutyens look like the Frankenstein Monster. There were some Easter Eggs, some of which worked (if simply left to the background) and some of which didn't (when they were too in your face).
I preferred the subtlety of the Weeping Angel candlesticks in The Evil of the Daleks to the stupid Master Wanted posters of both Fury and The Faceless Ones.
The latter story was another of the ones where episodes survived, and the animation respected this. The Macra Terror, on the other hand, took the opportunity of animation to deliver images that would never have seen light of day in a BBC TV studio in 1967. There are some who would have preferred a more faithful representation of the story.
We have already seen one Special Edition reworking of an animated story - Power of the Daleks - so the possibility of fixing some of the above faults might be there, if someone else comes forward with funding and they want to include these episodes in the Blu-ray Collection box sets. (Some sequences of Shada were updated for the Season 17 Collection).
One episode which really has to be scrapped and started again is The Web of Fear 3 - AKA The Abomination of the Snowmen. How anyone thought this worthy of commercial release is beyond comprehension.
And so on to The Abominable Snowmen.
The animation style is pretty much what we have become used to in recent years, giving most of the releases a sort of consistency. Unfortunately this has stretched - no pun intended - to the inordinately long arms of some of the characters. Surely basic human proportion was something the artists were supposed to be competent at?
The director has elected to depict characters of the correct ethnic origin for a monastery in Tibet in 1935. Obviously the original TV production used yellow-face, as was the custom of the day, and they didn't want to replicate this here. As much as I can understand why they did it, I feel that this is a bit of a slap in the face of the original cast members, however. Couldn't some middle ground have been found to honour the likes of Norman Jones, Charles Morgan or David Spenser? I would have used the likenesses of the main speaking characters as played by the actors, but ensured that the background characters were adjusted. Either this is a recreation of a lost story or it isn't.
Whilst I can picture Jones' and Spenser's dialogue coming from their avatars, the voice coming from Songsten just doesn't sound right at all.
The likeness of the animated Travers to Jack Watling isn't terribly good. He also appears to be about 7 feet tall.
For some reason they've made Padmasambhava look like one of those mummified Monks from Series 10. On TV he was simply a wrinkled old man wearing ornate robes, and here he's an emaciated figure with a lop-sided mouth, dressed in what looks like a torn night gown.
One problem for me is a very big problem, as it involves the titular monsters. I don't think they work very well at all in the animation. If you're going to change the human characters, why not do something to make the Yeti look more agile and aggressive? The original costumes had a hint of a face, but these ones have nothing - just a big dark patch.
The backgrounds are excellent - something which all the animations have generally succeeded at, even the disappointing The Ice Warriors.
To jump to the colour version for a moment, I wouldn't have opened up the sky on the monastery sets so much - not unless you were going to make it a grey, wintry sky. The bright blue sky really destroys the claustrophobic atmosphere.
(And just because the TARDIS console prop was green, doesn't mean it should be depicted that way. It is supposed to be white).
The extras are very good, as is often the case with the animations. As well as a making-of documentary, which manages to track down several people who were involved on either side of the camera on the story, there are two sets of 8mm home movie footage. We have seen a lot of director Gerald Blake's before on other releases, but new to me was the home movie footage from Frazer Hines, which included some nice shots of Patrick Troughton.
The doc is filmed at the Snowdonia location, featuring Frazer and Toby Hadoke, who are joined by Sylvia James (make-up). Amongst the interviewees are the last surviving Yeti performer, John Hogan, and Raymond Llewellyn (Sapan).
There is also a short piece of archive material featuring Mervyn Haisman, when he introduced the two surviving Yeti episodes on BSB's WHO 31 theme weekend. JNT is one of his interviewers.
I didn't get the Blu-ray, as mentioned, so haven't seen the upscaled Episode Two, but have heard that it looks great.
Lastly, a word about the sleeve design. If you opt for the grey TARDIS roundel banner version, the title overlaps the heads of the Yeti. What is particularly incompetent is the age classification symbol on the spine obscuring the title. Apparently some people are planning on demanding a replacement.
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