Meaning: from Shakespeare’s poetry and Francesca Murphy’s deep and rich theological work to…Dr. Who.
I just thought I ought to let everybody know that IF you’re a fan of the later incarnations of the show—for instance, the Tom Baker period—and IF you have a Netflix subscription, and IF you notice there the three disk set that includes the first episodes and IF you think it would be a lot of fun to see what happens at the very beginning of the longest-running science fiction tv show in the world: don’t bother.
These shows are truly awful. I didn’t even find them fun-awful, but just plain awful. Of course the props and effects are terrible, but that’s to be expected, and often part of the fun. But almost everything is bad here. The plots range from sloppy to incoherent. The dialog is dreadful. The characters are dull. The Doctor himself is a completely unappealing and uninteresting character, hostile and apparently not especially bright. Even the acting is shaky, with William Hartnell, who plays the Doctor, blowing his lines regularly. This will give you a good idea (though the person who put the video together apparently disagrees with me):
I was at first inclined to chalk all this up to the fact that it was 1963 and things were more primitive then, but then I remembered that The Twilight Zone, which was frequently brilliant, began in 1959. Ok, American tv producers probably had a lot more money to work with, but the Brits should have been as good or better at writing and acting.
On top of everything else, the disks are mispackaged or mismanufactured or something, because the first episode, which is the only one I really wanted to see, is apparently on disk 3. Which we haven’t gotten yet.. I would only recommend these to someone who’s enough of a fan to want to listen to various people involved in the production reminisce about it.
I’ve learned two things that have interested me: (1) the wonderful theme music, which reminds me of early Pink Floyd and which I’d always taken as a late ’60s thing done with a synthesizer, was there from the beginning, written by a composer hired for the job and realized in a BBC lab with various electronics. And (2): the sound made by the Tardis when it takes off and lands, and which has also been there from the beginning, was originally the sound of something scraped along (not across, I think) a string in a piano, and further messed with electronically. I always wondered why it was such an unpleasant sound. It’s supposed to suggest the ripping of the fabric of space and time.
Also, the Daleks were introduced very early and have changed hardly at all.
Why am I wasting our time on this? The number of people who read this blog and are interested in Dr. Who is probably between 0 and 5, inclusive.
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