The Art of... The Savages

The novelisation of The Savages was handled by its original author, Ian Stuart Black. The artist is David McAllister, and it was first published in 1986.

This features the TARDIS and an atmospheric portrait of Hartnell against a star-scape, alongside a blue-green tinted image of Jano. The source for the Hartnell portrait comes from the Radio Times photoshoot for The Three Doctors. We'll see more of this in some of the Troughton and Pertwee covers.

With no monsters and little unusual visual imagery from this story, it is difficult for an artist to come up with a striking image, so McAllister has gone for mood. This is one cover that probably never caught the eye of many non-fan readers.

Black elected to head each chapter with a quote from the relevant episodes.

The novel was reissued in November 1992, with a cover by Alister Pearson. This was one of the "half-finished" cartoon style covers. (That's cartoon as in the preparatory drawing for a renaissance painting). Instead of Jano we have a portrait of Chal accompanying the Doctor. Other than the portraits, the rest of the image is fairly generic.

The soundtrack was released in November 2002 with the usual photomontage cover. I bought a second hand copy of this, and found that it had narrator Peter Purves' (non-personalised) autograph on it.

Purves is back as the reader for the audiobook of the novelisation. This sticks with McAllister's original artwork, with a black background in keeping with the main image. It was released in February 2021.

As a missing story, with no VHS or DVD release (yet), the moviedb site has composed a rather nice photomontage of images from the story.