With little visual imagery available from this story, and only one striking character design - the Fish People - there is a certain sameness to the various releases for this story over the years.
The Underwater Menace was novelised by range editor Nigel Robinson and released in February 1988 in hardback, with the paperback version following that July.
The artist is Alister Pearson, and this was actually his first ever cover for the range. Thanks to the reprint programme of the 1990's, he would become the most prolific artist of the Doctor Who novelisations.
Here he has concentrated exclusively on the Fish People, making use of the handful of BBC publicity images taken during the Ealing filming.
The reason why the book number appears in a small white box on the cover is because there was a late change in release schedule, and this was brought forward to plug a gap and they've had to cover over the original numbering.
The television soundtrack was released in February 2005, with linking narration from Anneke Wills. For once, the usual green / blue colour scheme for this range is fitting for an undersea adventure. The Fish People once again feature prominently, with two of the photos used by Pearson for his book cover. There's a Troughton image from The Power of the Daleks, and the Ben and Polly picture derives from The War Machines, though they've photoshopped their clothing. Jamie has also been given a wetsuit. The Zaroff image derives from a telesnap of his infamous Episode 3 cliffhanger moment.
The orphan Episode 3 was released as part of the Lost In Time DVD set in 2004, having previously been available on VHS on the "Missing Years" tape which accompanied The Ice Warriors.
Once the second episode turned up in 2011, a DVD release was planned, which would have seen the two surviving episodes accompanied by animated Episodes 1 and 4. However, the animation company went out of business. With work already underway, including artwork and extras, it was decided to push ahead and release the episodes instead with the soundtrack / telesnaps covering the missing instalments.
This October 2015 release was unpopular with fans as the missing episodes really needed some narration or subtitles to explain what what was going on half the time. For instance, we have several minutes of the Doctor leaning over a rockpool with his back to us, with unrelated dialogue-free noises going on.
The cover art is by Lee Binding. The Region 1 version really benefits from being free of the constricting TARDIS roundel panel at the top:
The story was eventually animated in time for the 60th Anniversary in November 2023 (or early 2024 in the US).
For quite a while now they have not just been animating the missing episodes but offering the whole story in this form, both in colour and in monochrome, with the actual BBC episodes relegated to Extras status. The problem with this approach is that you cannot switch from animated to surviving episode to animated because they have taken such liberties with costume, make-up and set designs. The animation is a complete reimagining of the story, and simply fails to match existing footage. Not one of the Atlantean characters looks like the actor who played them, and the Fish People are particularly badly served by the animators. There's something really rather unnerving about the TV costumes, but here they have made them look like different tropical fish, wearing boring long robes. The infamous "Fishworker Ballet" is rendered unforgivably dull.
The steelbook cover for the animated release is odd, showing a submerged TARDIS - which doesn't feature in the story at all - and a big menacing face which is actually just the statue of Amdo from the temple. We see a claw creep into shot on the left, but we all know that the Fish People aren't remotely threatening - especially in their bland animated form.
Robinson's novelisation arrived as an audiobook in December 2021, with Anneke Wills as reader. Alister Pearson took the opportunity to completely rework his original book cover, retaining the pyramidal compositional shape but repainting the right-hand figure entirely and adding a background.
The narrated soundtrack was re-released in vinyl form in the Spring of 2020. These record releases tend to use imagery which has very little to do with the actual TV episodes, but in this case they have obviously looked at a publicity image for the face of the Fish Person, even if they've then gone and created a different body of their own.
The discs themselves had a colourful yellow / blue / green splatter pattern described as "Volcanic Eruption Vinyl".
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