Doctor Who - Planet of Giants was written by Terrance Dicks from Louis Marks' scripts. The artist is Alister Pearson, and it was first published in January 1990.
As with all the publicity material for this story, the giant insects are emphasised. Here, we concentrate on the giant fly. The issue with this is that at no point in the story are the TARDIS travellers ever really threatened by any of these creatures. The fly lands in front of Barbara, then promptly swoops off and dies. All the insects from the first instalment are already dead when found.
The Doctor is seen to be wearing his cloak, which is apposite for Hartnell's costume in this story.
Dicks takes his cue from the original four episode version and so reinstates some deleted scenes.
This was the last Hartnell story to be novelised.
The story arrived on VHS in January 2002. This was when the tapes were including part of the cover image on the spine, and using the logo as seen in the 1996 TV movie. Unlike the novelisation, and the later DVD cover, this ignores the giant insects and instead concentrates on the cat which provides the cliff-hanger to the first episode. Of the main characters they elect to depict Smithers - despite Forester being the principal villain, and Alan Tilvern being such a recognisable actor from many British films and TV series of the 1950's and 60's.
A nice touch is the TARDIS having it doors open in flight, which is repeated on its own on the back cover in case you didn't notice it on the front.
When this story was released on DVD in August 2012 I recall complaining about the cover in my review. I thought that it totally misrepresented the episodes themselves and might prove annoying to the non-fan purchaser, who would be disappointed that no such scene features. The Doctor and Susan are clearly meant to be under attack by giant ants according to this image, so it is misleading.
The cover, by Lee Binding, is a composite of an image of the Doctor and Susan in the sink, plus a screen-grab of the TARDIS between paving stones, with a pair of generic ant pictures which don't derive from the episodes.
The US version is clearly far superior. Generally I have been able to comment positively on the extended image of the Region 1 covers, and in this case the TARDIS and the worm are almost entirely obscured on the Region 2 version.
As usual, the audiobook has the same cover as the novelisation. Carole Ann Ford gets to read her penultimate story. It was released in May 2017.
As the first story of the second season, Planet of Giants features in the forthcoming Blu-ray box set The Collection Season 2. It has a disc to itself, printed with a photograph of Ian and Susan encountering the giant ant from the opening episode. The overall box artwork is by Lee Binding, who had given us that misleading DVD artwork. It's due for release at the beginning of December 2022.
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