Episodes: Afterlife - The Yeti

Apart from a cameo appearance in The Five Doctors, when it wasn't even seen very clearly due to being filmed - often at distance - in a darkened cavern, the Yeti have never returned to Doctor Who - despite the Great Intelligence being brought back three times in the modern series.

As is well known, one idea for writing Jamie out of the series had been a third Yeti / Great Intelligence story provisionally titled "The Laird of McCrimmon". This would have seen the TARDIS visit 18th Century Scotland, arriving at Jamie's ancestral home. The castle would have been besieged by Yeti whilst the Intelligence possessed the locals - all apart from a girl named Fiona. The current laird was on his deathbed, and the Intelligence wanted to possess Jamie as he was next in line - thus giving it another remote power base from which to spread.

The story ended with the Intelligence expelled once again and Jamie staying on to take up his inheritance, presumably with Fiona by his side.

The dispute with Derrick Sherwin over cuts to The Dominators and the unauthorised marketing of the Quarks led to Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln ending their relationship with the series, and we never got our third proper Yeti appearance.

Unlike the Daleks, Cybermen and Quarks, who all managed to encounter the Second Doctor again in comic strip form, the Yeti never made the transition, despite their popularity - due to the same Quark issue which prevented "The Laird of McCrimmon" coming about. 

What we got instead of robot Yeti were the Ice Apes, which featured in TV Comic issues 881 - 884 in November 1968. A race of aliens bombed the Antarctic in 1970 as a show of strength, unwittingly revealing a race of giant Ice Apes which lived below the icesheet. The Doctor and Jamie had to fight both aliens and Apes, in a story called Ice Cap Terror. The final instalment was published on the series 4th anniversary.

It's not known if the Yeti, had they been used as intended, would have been under the control of the Intelligence - in the same way that the Quarks were presented as a fully autonomous villain in their comics strips.

The Yeti did feature in one Doctor Who Weekly comic strip - one of the ones at the back which didn't have the Doctor. This was "Yonder... The Yeti", and it appeared in issues 31 - 34. 

As mentioned, we did get to see a Yeti one more time in the series - menacing the Second Doctor and the Brigadier, in the Death Zone on Gallifrey, in The Five Doctors. This was purely a cameo, and viewers at the time could be forgiven for not knowing what they were looking at until the Doctor shouted "It's a Yeti!". The way the creature was filmed - a Mark II survivor from The Web of Fear - may have been due to the poor state of the costume. The script fails to acknowledge the fact that the Yeti are robots, controlled by the Great Intelligence. The Doctor chases it off using a firework, reacting like a wild animal.

One of my childhood memories was of great impatience felt waiting for Doctor Who to start. The guy reading the football results was, I'm sure, delivering them intentionally slowly to annoy us - but worse for me was Basil Brush...

Each episode of the puppet series ended with a story being related by the "Mr..." of the day, and Basil would interrupt constantly, dragging it out. As a child you don't think about programme running times etc - you just think that darned fox is delaying the start of your favourite programme. (You really had to be there). Things weren't quite so bad one Saturday evening in 1975, for a sketch which saw Basil and Mr Roy mountain climbing in the Himalayas featured the appearance of a Yeti. This was a bit of a hybrid, having the top half of a Mark II, but with the bottom half of the original version. The difference is noticeable from the colouring of the fur. The sketch can be found on The Mind Robber DVD.

There was one place in 1995 where you could see not only Yeti but the Great Intelligence, Professor Travers, Lethbridge-Stewart and Victoria Waterfield. As well as all these characters from The Web of Fear, we also had the return of Sarah Jane Smith - plus the first look at Kate, the Brigadier's daughter. It was written by someone who worked on Doctor Who - Marc Platt - and directed by someone who worked on Doctor Who - Christopher Barry.

The production was called Downtime, and it was an unofficial video release from Reeltime Pictures, designed to act as a direct sequel to the 1967/8 story, as well as letting us know what Victoria did after Fury From The Deep.

The story revolves around computer technology and the main setting is the New World University, run by Victoria and being used as the latest bridgehead for the Intelligence.

Victoria had gone to Det-sen Monastery in response to a dream, believing she might be reunited with her father. Instead, the Intelligence was behind this, still possessing the mind of Travers. 15 years later she's running the university, many of whose students have been brainwashed by the Intelligence through the internet. The entity needs something called the Locus to fulfil its scheme, which it believes to be in the hands of the Brigadier - but he has given it to daughter Kate, who lives on a narrow boat with his grandson and is estranged from him. Sarah Jane is brought in to track down the Brigadier by the university, unaware of its motives.

The Brigadier is aided by one of his old pupils from Brendon School, who eventually sacrifices himself to defeat the Intelligence. Travers dies after being freed of its influence.

As well as three Troughton stories, there are references to Evil of the Daleks (the death of Edward Waterfield on Skaro) and Mawdryn Undead (the Brig's helper). The Intelligence employs the world wide web nearly two decades before Steven Moffat used the idea.

As well as boasting performances from Debbie Watling, Nicholas Courtney, Lis Sladen and Jack Watling - all reprising their old roles - John Leeson, James Bree and Geoffrey Beevers feature in other roles. This Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is played by Beverley Cressman.

The Yeti in this resemble more the Mark II version, without the glowing eyes or ribbed midriff. They get a big action sequence on the university campus (recorded at the University of East Anglia).

The final scene sees Victoria standing isolated on a beach - mirroring her departure in Fury From The Deep.

The spin-off was novelised by Virgin in 1996 as part of its "Missing Adventures" range, using the same cover art as the VHS release - the Yeti looking more like Bigfoot.

The production was long out of print (both as novel and VHS) until November 2015 when Downtime was released on DVD in remastered form, and with a new making-of documentary.

Episodes - Afterlife: Mondasian Cybermen

For a great many years it looked as though the Cyberman design seen in The Tenth Planet would be their one and only on-screen appearance.

On their return, just a few months later, the Cybermen would be totally redesigned to look more robotic, mainly due to the problems experienced by the actors wearing the original cruder costumes.

They might have been absent from TV, but the Mondasian Cybermen did live on - initially in a quite unexpected place.

The whole point of comic strips is that you can create anything you want, so long as you have imagination and the skill to draw it. It seems good reference material also helps...

Patrick Troughton was already the Doctor, and the new version of the Cybermen seen on screen, when they made their first appearance in the Doctor Who comic strip in TV Comic. The visual material given to artist John Canning for "The Coming of the Cybermen" proved to derive entirely from their first story.

This first adventure saw the Doctor, with grandchildren John and Gillian, discover an abandoned spaceship on the planet Minot. This proved to belong to the Cybermen, a group of whom then turn up to retrieve it. The Doctor is trapped on board as it takes off, and he has to find a way to escape back to the planet.

At one point he specifically describes the Cybermen as his greatest enemies - this being the period in which the Daleks were still tied up in their own strip elsewhere.

Other adventures followed, in which the Cybermen attempted an attack on Earth using a burrowing mole-machine ("Cyber-Mole"). In other strips, the ever growing list of allergies which the Cybermen were susceptible to was foreshadowed by them being destroyed by flower pollen (a story called "Flower Power").

"Eskimo Joe" saw them in another snowy setting - and includes the surreal image of Cybermen on skis. "The Cyber Empire" had them enslaving humans and building a Cyber-Hovercraft, which the Doctor promptly stole. A Cyber-Controller is mentioned.

Throughout their series of adventures, the comic took the decision not to update the Cybermen at any point, even when the strip began to feature newer enemies such as the Quarks, and companion Jamie.

The Mondasian Cybermen had been popular with at least one of the classic Doctors. Peter Davison recalled:

"The Cybermen were always my favourite adversaries, dating back to when I watched them with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. I remembered they'd changed entirely since those days. They used to have a sort of sock over their heads, and a headlamp on their foreheads, and they talked in a very strange voice".

They would later become identified with another Doctor...

A few months before Davison took over the DWM comic strip, his predecessor encountered an abandoned Mondasian Cyberman in "Junkyard Demon". It was found in a scrapyard presided over by Flotsam and Jetsam. Reactivated it even tried to take over the TARDIS. In the end it ran out of power.

Big Finish revisited the Mondasians in the highly acclaimed "Spare Parts", which told an origins story for the Cybermen as the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrived on Mondas. This acted as an inspiration for elements of The Rise of the Cybermen / Age of Steel. 

The company also presented a Mondasian Cyberman in "The Silver Turk", featuring the Eighth Doctor and set in 19th Century Vienna. Like The Haunting of Villa Diodati, this sought to link Cybermen to the Frankenstein story via Mary Shelley's inclusion.

Artist Adrian Salmon also lent his talents to a strip which featured a Cyberman / Silurian / Sea Devil crossover, in Mondas' ancient times.

The first sighting of an original Cyberman in modern times came with the 50th Anniversary drama An Adventure in Space and Time. This dealt mainly with the earliest days of the show, but then had to move on to Hartnell's departure from the series, with recreations from The Tenth Planet. 

At one point we see an actor in Cyberman costume, smoking by the TARDIS prop. He is identified as "Reg" - so Reg Whitehead.

Mondasian Cybermen were finally back for real in The World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls, as a sort of farewell gift to their other big Doctor fan - Peter Capaldi. The Doctor and company encountered a new race of these Cybermen which evolved on a colony ship which originated on Mondas. It was made clear in this story that Cybermen can evolve anywhere that you find humanoids living in extreme circumstances, so the Mondasian design might well have been the ancestor of all later versions - other that the alternative universe Cybus ones.

This story then segued into Twice Upon A Time...

Capaldi's swansong incorporated the final moments of The Tenth Planet into an adventure in which the First and most recent Doctors compared notes on regeneration.

The episode opened with some recreations from 1966, and one of these included the Cybermen. Unfortunately this scene was deleted (no pun intended) but can be seen on the DVD / Blu-ray extras.

It should be noted that the new incarnation of the Mondasian Cybermen only pays homage to the originals. They are not exact copies by any means. The one in the 50th Anniversary drama was far more faithful to the original Sandra Reid versions than the Capaldi ones.

Episodes - Afterlife: Zeus 4 Spacesuits (Updated)

The spacesuits worn by Schultz and Williams of the Zeus 4 mission were not created for Doctor Who. They were existing outfits which had first seen screen time in the 1964 film The First Men in the Moon (below).

In this they are worn by the modern day astronauts who are supposed to be the first group to set foot on the Moon, before discovering evidence of an unknown earlier British expedition. Two colour schemes are seen - yellow and a very dark blue. The most distinctive feature of the suit is the white ribbed vest, upon which the astronauts' flags have been stitched.

There are no colour images from The Tenth Planet, but we can see that Williams is wearing a lighter suit than Schultz - so presumably the Australian is wearing the dark blue version to Earl Cameron's yellow one. Their sleeves are quite short - but the movie image shows that the suits were originally intended to be worn with long gauntlets.

The suits only appear at the beginning and end of the Ray Harryhausen movie, which was based on the story by H G Wells.

However - that wasn't the starting point...

Before they started cropping up on screen, the outfits were actual high-altitude flying suits, developed by Windak Ltd in 1962 (above). Following WWII, pilots were flying at ever greater altitudes and required pressurised suits. The visor was heated to prevent misting, and the closed automatically in the event of an emergency.

The suits reappear during the Troughton era, when they are seen to be worn by the crew of The Wheel in Space. We see them most clearly at the beginning of the surviving sixth episode, when they are worn by Jamie and Zoe. Again we can see the colour difference - with Frazer Hines wearing the dark suit and Wendy Padbury the yellow.

It's difficult to see as we don't get a very good look at it, but the yellow suit also appears to feature - minus the white vest - in Professor Eldred's space museum in The Seeds of Death.

The most famous appearance by the spacesuit by far, in that it would have been seen by many millions of people, was in the second of the Star Wars movies - The Empire Strikes Back.

Darth Vader assembles a group of mercenaries and bounty hunters to track down Luke, Leia, Han and company, best known of whom is Boba Fett. Alongside him, however, is a character named Bossk - a reptilian biped who is wearing the yellow version of the Zeus 4 spacesuit. Naturally enough there was an action figure release. Bossk also features briefly in Return of the Jedi, as well as The Clone Wars animated series.

Update:

Many thanks to eagle-eyed "Reykjavik" - see comments below - for letting me know of an earlier Star Wars appearance by the spacesuit. A humanoid character named BoShek (above) wears the dark version in the cantina sequence in 1977's Star Wars: The First One. He is seen speaking to Obi-Wan at the bar when they first arrive, prior to encountering Han. Played by Basil Tomlin, apparently the character hails from Corellia.

If anyone knows of any more appearances, do let me know.

Episodes - Afterlife: Beaus' Helmet

The character in the helmet with the breathing tube attachment, right of centre, is Beaus, played by Sam Mansary.

That helmet would return to the series in a variety of guises over the years - but before it featured in Doctor Who it could be seen in one of the Pathfinders serials.

The series began life as Target Luna, which co-starred Michael Craze (companion Ben Jackson) and was broadcast on ITV in April 1960. Other Doctor Who connections were Sydney Newman, who produced it, and Malcolm Hulke, who co-wrote it and the subsequent serials with Eric Paice.

It led to a trilogy comprising Pathfinders in Space (September 1960), Pathfinders to Mars (Dec 1960 - January 1961), and Pathfinders to Venus (March 1961).

The star was Gerald Flood, who voiced Kamelion (and appeared as 'King John' in The King's Demons), and George Coulouris (Arbitan in The Keys of Marinus) featured in the Mars and Venus serials as Harcourt Brown.

Newman's involvement leads us to view this series as very much a direct ancestor to Doctor Who. The stories feature characters similar to the first TARDIS team, with Harcourt Brown as the crotchety and at times untrustworthy older figure, with clean cut adult hero figures and younger characters as you "need a kid - to get into trouble".

Our distinctive helmet first appeared in Pathfinders to Mars (above).

When Beaus was next seen, his helmet had been given a makeover. It had lost its aerial-like attachment and been painted black, though the breathing attachment was still present. He first appears in this guise in The Day of Armageddon and, presumably, in later episodes for which we sadly have no visual record.

The helmet reappeared in Doctor Who, still with the aperture for the breathing tube, in two consecutive stories in 1973 - Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. In the first of these we saw it being worn by the Third Doctor on the two occasions when he embarked on hazardous space walks - firstly to escape captivity on the Master's stolen prison ship, and later to repair General Williams' craft as it approached the Ogron planet.

Having featured in the sixth and final instalment of Frontier in Space, it was seen again just one week later in the opening episode of Planet of the Daleks. With a quick paint job from silver to white, our helmet was being worn by the deceased Thal commander in his crashed spaceship on Spiridon.

Our last sighting in Doctor Who was in 1975, when four of the helmets featured in The Android Invasion, worn by the white-suited Mechanics. On this occasion, they were fitted with new darkened visors, to conceal their true robotic nature.

Episodes - Afterlife: Mechonoids

Like the Voord, and the Sensorites, and the Zarbi, the Mechonoids never made a return to the series - but did have an afterlife of sorts in other media.

As mentioned in our look at the episode The Planet of Decision, the original history of the robots as envisioned by Terry Nation differed greatly from that given to them by the time they reached the screen. In The Chase, they are simply mindless robot drones, carrying out pre-programmed functions which include preparing a living environment for colonists from Earth, collecting specimens of flora and fauna, and protecting their work from aggressors.

They have a language, but it is a machine code which uses only a handful of English words, accompanied by numbers. Without the key to that code, Steven Taylor and the TARDIS crew are unable to communicate with them.

Terry Nation's original idea was that they were built by a humanoid race hundreds of years ago and developed some sort of sentience. They rebelled against their master and destroyed them, creating their own robotic society as self-governing artificial lifeforms. It's this version of the Mechonoids which arrived in the Dalek comic strip in TV Century 21 in March 1966.

On screen, there is some evidence of that earlier history - perhaps elements of that earlier draft which have survived. We hear a Dalek claim to have identified the Mechonoids - referring to them as "Mechons" - and they know that this is the planet Mechanus. It is odd, also, that the planet should be named thus, when it is due to be colonised by human beings.

In the comic strip, the Mechonoids are called "Mechanoids" by the Daleks, who have records of them - including images - but don't seem to have actually encountered them. These robots have different colour schemes (the props were all metallic blue in The Chase), and the Emperor claims they have positronic brains (as someone will later say of the Daleks themselves).

The comic strip Mechonoids also speak English fairly fluently, and are powerful enough to have their own empire. 

They see the Daleks as a threat, and so determine to stop them encroaching on their space.

To this end they send a spacecraft, hidden within a space cloud, to spy on them as they build a new space station. They also employ a suspicion-ray, which causes one Dalek on the station to turn against its own kind. The Daleks discover their presence and destroy the craft - only for the Mechonoids to retaliate and destroy a Dalek saucer.

Later, an alien race of blue-skinned humanoids - Zerovians - fear a Dalek-Mechonoid war. This coincides with a rogue planet travelling through space, which has been deflected onto a collision course with Skaro. The Zerovians don't want their presence noticed by either side, so send an android - 2K - on a mission to avert the war. The Daleks decide to divert the planet to save Skaro - and to send it off in the direction of Mechanus to destroy the Mechonoids. 2K has to visit both the home of the Daleks and the home of the Mechonoids to save both - making it look to each race that it was their supposed enemy which acted to save them. Thus, tensions are lessened for now.

The comic strip was discontinued a few weeks after this story, but no doubt the Mechonoids would have returned as a recurring threat had it continued.

The Mechonoids were also marketed as a small, cheap, plastic toy. They were manufactured by a company called Cherilea (the name deriving from its founders' names - Cherrington and Leaver).

They were already producing a range of Dalek figures, notable for being multi-coloured. Their gimmick was that children could swap components around to create new colour combinations. These were called "Swappits". The Mechonoid figures (once again called "Mechanoids") followed the same pattern, coming in a variety of colours.

When it became clear that the Mechonoids were just one-hit wonders, and wouldn't be coming back to the TV series, Cherilea decided to rebrand them as "space pods", divorced from any Doctor Who connection:

According to the BBC novel War of the Daleks, the Movellans were built as servants by the Mechonoids. Another novel has Morbius transport some into the Death Zone on Gallifrey. (And people wonder why I don't cover the books on this blog...).

The robots also featured on audio, such as in Big Finish's Juggernauts:

This saw Davros give the Mechonoids organic components and renamed as "Juggernauts". These ones had also been abandoned due to a cancelled Earth colonisation.

More recently, the BBC attempted a multi-platform Doctor Who adventure with the overall title of "Time Lord Victorious". Part of this was a crudely animated series of short on-line episodes called Daleks!. There were five instalments, running to 13-15 minutes per episode.

The Mechonoids featured in this, now ruled - bizarrely, for a robot race - by a Queen (voiced by Anjli Mohindra of The Sarah Jane Adventures). The Daleks and Mechonoids were forced to co-operate against an extra-dimensional entity which threatened them both, though the Daleks quickly exploited then abandoned their allies.

Presumably the self-same reasons for the Mechonoids failing to make a return still apply - their bulkiness and limited narrative value - so we shouldn't hold our breath waiting to see them back in the series, unless in a cameo role. At least one fan-built prop exists that could be used (though it's painted silver rather than metallic blue).

Episodes - Afterlife: The Morok Freezing Machine

Pay close attention to the stories between May 1965 and January 1970, and you will spot a certain piece of technology turn up in a variety of settings. First seen - in Doctor Who - as the Morok Freezing Machine in the final instalment of The Space Museum, this large object consists of a glass dome on a drum-like base. Beneath the dome is a mound of assorted bits and pieces of electronic bric-a-brac, including circular clock-faces.

Designer Spencer Chapman and his colleagues created many bizarre futuristic props for the programme - but this wasn't one of them...

In the same year that the prop made its debut in Doctor Who, it had already featured in a low budget British science-fiction movie called The Curse of the Fly. This has been shown a couple of times recently on the Talking Pictures channel in the UK, and I spotted it immediately.

The film is an attempt to squeeze some extra box office mileage out of the US films The Fly (1958) and The Return of the Fly (1959), in the former of which a scientist (David Hedison) experiments with matter transmission. One test sees him accidentally transport a house fly along with his own good self - resulting in a fusion of man with fly's head and arm, and a fly with a man's head and arm. Vincent Price features as Hedison's brother, and he also appears in the sequel, in which Hedison's now grown-up son repeats his father's doomed experiment with identical results.

The Curse of the Fly, which stars Brian Donlevy - the original big screen Quatermass - and George Baker (Full Circle), has very little to do with the original films, beyond matter transmission experiments, and the fact that Donlevy and Baker are said to be related to the previous two scientists.

What it does have is the first screen appearance of the Morok Freezing Machine prop as part of the matter transmission laboratory set - in the foreground of the scene above. Film and TV companies could hire out pieces of equipment from specialist prop stores. Watch enough old movies and you start to recognise things like the Dalek Rel counter popping up all over the place.

The device soon appeared again in Doctor Who during Season 3 - featuring as a piece of equipment in the laboratory of scientist Daxtar. This was during the fourth instalment of The Daleks' Masterplan. Sadly, The Traitors no longer exists in the archives, nor are there any telesnaps, but we do have the above publicity image of William Hartnell and Peter Purves posing with the distinctive machine. The glass dome has been removed. It will come and go over the years.

The machine was back towards the end of the same season, when it featured as part of WOTAN's equipment in The War Machines. It can be seen with Professor Brett in the sequences set in the Covent Garden warehouse, filmed in the water tank at Ealing Film Studios. It's when he looks directly at this machine that the tramp finally realises that those present are dangerous, and he tries to run away.

The glass dome was still absent, but it was back for its next appearance - in Season 5's The Wheel in Space. Here it was playing the part of the space station's X-Ray laser control unit, which Jamie succeeds in sabotaging. Luckily the Doctor not only fixes it, but boosts its power with the TARDIS Time-Vector Generator to destroy the Cyberman invasion force.

Just two stories later - albeit at the other side of a summer-long season break - the machine had become a component of the TARDIS itself. It was seen in the ship's power room in the opening episode of The Mind Robber. Once again, the glass dome had been removed. We wouldn't see it in its complete form again in the series as it only had one further, dome-less, appearance to come.

Its one and only colour outing was as part of the UNIT laboratory equipment in Spearhead From Space, the very first Jon Pertwee serial. It was joined by a few other re-used props - two of which can be seen in the above image. The device on a green base on the right, in front of the Doctor, had earlier been seen in the Kroton spaceship and in The Seeds of Death whilst, in the background over the Doctor's left shoulder, stands a Cyberman spaceship from The Invasion. We'll look at Cybership recycling at a later date.

That makes six appearances for this distinctive piece of machinery in Doctor Who stories over five years, following a big screen debut. If anyone knows of any other sightings of the Morok Freezing Machine, in any other film or TV series, do please let me know.

Episodes - Afterlife: The Web Planet

Bill Strutton never made any secret of it. He hoped that the creatures from his Doctor Who story would generate money for him through merchandising - having seen the success enjoyed by fellow writer Terry Nation.

Unfortunately the various insect inhabitants of Vortis never returned to the TV screen, but the Zarbi and Menoptra (usually spelt as "Menoptera") did manage to have a life beyond The Web Planet.

Along with a Voord and a gnome-like Sensorite, the Zarbi and Menoptra featured on the front cover of the very first Dr Who Annual (issued September 1965).The background looked not unlike the surface of Vortis, whilst the inside frontispiece depicted an image of the Doctor in a much more Vortis-like environment, even wearing his Atmospheric Density Jacket from The Web Planet.

Within the pages of the annual was a text story entitled "The Lost Ones", which saw the Doctor captured by Menoptra, who think he is a member of a species who have been attacking them. The Doctor escapes and encounters a humanoid race - the Sons of the Sun - who are 8 feet tall, with bright red hair. They are members of a crashed expedition from Atlantis. Realising they are a violent race, the Doctor lures them into the middle of a battle between Zarbi and Menoptra, and the Atlanteans are killed when the native species of Vortis unite against them.

A second story in the annual was "The Lair of the Zarbi Supremo" (image top). This sees the Doctor return to Vortis and come across a spaceship from Earth. He also finds robot Zarbi, with dead Menoptra inside them. The "Zarbi Supremo" is a giant version of the species, enslaving the Menoptra in its plan to invade Earth. Some crewmen from the Earth ship shoot the Supremo dead after the Doctor frees them from its hypnotic control. 

This story seems to have been inspired as much by The Dalek Invasion of Earth as by The Web Planet, as Vortis has been moved through space to the vicinity of Jupiter, after the Supremo built massive engines into the planet.

"The Lair of the Zarbi Supremo" wasn't the first return visit to Vortis, however. The Web Planet was just coming to an end when Dr Who and his grandchildren John and Gillian landed on the planet. This was in the TV Comic strip "Doctor Who on the Web Planet", which ran from 22nd March to 26th April, 1965.

This time the Zarbi were under another alien influence - the Skirkons - who were using them to overpower the Menoptra and force them to mine a substance called Galvinium X. The Skirkons, who were led by Zarka, were small bipedal creatures with big eyes and beaky noses. They employed fake flying Zarbi as weapons. The Skirkons were defeated when their stockpile of Galvinium X was detonated by one of their captured flying Zarbi, blowing them up.

There was a further comic visit to Vortis, this time by the Fourth Doctor accompanied by Sarah in "The Naked Flame". This appeared in the 1995 DWM Yearbook. The threat came from a rogue Menoptra named Versus.

The vast majority of Doctor Who merchandise available in 1965 was Dalek shaped. The BBC maintained a very poor record for exploiting their own product until well into the 1980's - mainly because they saw such crass commercialism as being something beneath them, the sort of thing ITV did. Apart from TV Comic and the annual, the Doctor himself and the TARDIS were poorly marketed.

One item which would have pleased Strutton was a set of plastic badges from a company called Plastoid. They created a range of badges based on Gerry Anderson productions, as well as some Doctor Who items. As well as large and small Dalek badges, they produced one depicting a Menoptra, and another of a Zarbi with a Larvae Gun (which they termed a Venom Gun).

Zarbi and Menoptra also featured on a set of Doctor Who transfers, alongside Daleks, Voord and Mechonoids...

...and there was an extremely brief adventure involving the Doctor and his companions on Vortis available with the Doctor Who Give-A-Show projector. This was basically a rerun of the TV story. A Zarbi even made it onto the box.

When Virgin Books began to produce past Doctor stories - their "Missing Adventures" range - it was perhaps inevitable that one of the best remembered Hartnell stories might form the basis for a sequel. It wasn't the First Doctor who featured in Twilight of the Gods however. The 26th book of the range, published in 1996, this saw the Second Doctor arrive on a lush forested world with Jamie and Victoria. It is only when they encounter Menoptra that the Doctor realises that they are on a much altered Vortis.

It transpired that the planet had been created as an experiment by gaseous super-beings known as the Gods of Light. Like in "The Lair of the Zarbi Supremo", the planet had an engine at its core. One of the Gods fought and sacrificed itself to defeat the Animus, with Jamie's help, and the planet was left for the Menoptra as the rest of the Gods withdrew.

The Web Planet is one of the most visual stories of the monochrome era - so naturally Big Finish thought it worthy of being the basis for an audio... Return to the Web Planet saw the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa visit Vortis, and was initially a subscribers' release only. The cover is inspired by the Chris Achilleos Target book covers. BF shoved a few Doctor / Nyssa solo stories in between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity - even though the latter is clearly set immediately after the former, as Nyssa is still going on about the Cybermen damaging the TARDIS.

When it came to the 50th Anniversary drama An Adventure in Space and Time, The Web Planet was one of the stories selected for recreation - thanks to its distinctive imagery.