Friday 22 December 2023

The Art of... The Daleks' Master Plan


The Daleks' Master Plan finally arrived in book form in the Autumn of 1989, written by John Peel. Split into two halves, the first was issued in September, with the second following in October.
Peel was well known in fandom and after moving to the US he had become involved in the scene there - becoming a good friend to Terry Nation. When it came to adapting his work, Nation allowed Peel to take it on - happy to know that it would be faithful to his original vision.
With Mission to the Unknown forming a single episode story, which acted as a prequel to the twelve-part epic, it was only natural that it would be absorbed into the bigger adventure when it came time to consider commercial releases.
Peel opted to use Mission to the Unknown as title for the first volume, with the closing section named as The Mutation of Time.
Mission to the Unknown, with a cover by Alister Pearson, has artwork very much derived from the episode of that name. From The Daleks' Master Plan we get images of Mavic Chen and his Spar 7-40 space yacht, but the various alien delegates are all the versions we saw in the prequel.
The Mutation of Time features the Red Dalek prominently on its cover - a creation of Peel's which had featured in his novelisation of The Chase. Its role is to command the Daleks' time machines. Pearson is once again the artist.


In the same way that Mission to the Unknown was incorporated into the novelisation of The Daleks' Master Plan, so it was included as the first disc of the story when it was released as a soundtrack CD in 2001. Again, the alien delegates who feature are taken from the prequel, and the Chen portrait is the same as that used on the first volume of the book. 
Mission was issued on its own as a single disc, using this cover, as a freebie with The Sun in 2013.
An MP3-CD version of the full story arrived in April 2003.


The novel was released in audiobook form in May and June 2010, read by Peter Purves and Jean Marsh, with Nick Briggs providing Dalek vocals. 
Re-releases came as part of a Dalek box-set, and also with the two stories combined into a single set.


Additionally, both instalments of the audiobook were re-released along with that for The Chase in a set known as Dalek Menace! in 2012, using imagery from all three books.


The soundtrack was released on 7 discs, in blue vinyl, in March 2019 - the cover featuring the Daleks with their pyroflame guns in the jungles of Kembel.


Finally, as a missing story never released on VHS or DVD, The Daleks' Master Plan was illustrated with a colourful photomontage image on the movie database (moviedb) website.
Orphan episodes 2, 5 and 10 were released on the Lost in Time DVD set in 2004.

No comments:

Post a Comment