Ok cats and kittens.
Here's the blog about Lily, Anthony and Sharlene's Doctor Who Marathon.
The cool feature is that we're keeping a running rank of the serials as we go. What that means is for every successive serial we watch we're going to try and rank it against all those cumulatively watched to that point. For example, after
An Unearthly Child it's obviously No.1. Watch
The Daleks/Dead Planet/Mutants (whatever you may wish to call it) then you have two to compare. And so on right up to
Twice Upon a Time....
(
UPDATE 23 October 2018 Series 11 has started so...er,
Rosa. Update 1-1-19
Resolution!!!!)
(Update 15 February 2020 Series 12 has ended s... er
The Timeless Children )
We'll be watching *every* episode even the missing ones. We have fibre internet here so, in 2018, finding and watching animated recons is fairly straightforward. There are several different efforts and we'll add impressions and comments on these less familiar episodes as we come to them.
For the less well informed, Doctor Who started in 1963 as 25 minute B&W episodes, once a week. Because of the patchy history of television none of the early episodes are available as they were originally made due to tape wiping, lost telecines and bad luck/bad management.
Up until the end of the 1960's Doctor Who there were 253 episodes made, a little over 40 in each of 6 yearly series. At one time nearly all the early episodes were lost. But luck, careful curation, brilliant restoration work, the efforts of animators mean that today in 2018 there are 97 missing. Of those there are 15 episodes restored by professional animation. All the others are restored by amateur animators often with several styles to choose from. Some of these are astoundingly good work, others are merely adequate. Then there are still photo 'recons'. These consist of slideshows of still pictures with accompanying soundtrack.
Mostly the first two years are intact.
- Year 1 has just 9 missing episodes out of 42.
- Year 2 has just 2 missing episodes out of 39.
Year 3 and 4 are the worst.
- Year 3 has 28 missing out of 45 episodes.
- Year 4 has 33 missing out of 43 episodes.
Year 5 and 6 are relatively better off.
- Year 5 has 18 missing out of 40.
- Year 6 has 7 missing out of 44.
(see the Missing Episode Analysis post here )
These days all existing episodes are available on dvd in restored interpolated field versions (there are a couple of exceptions) with good sound and mostly completed cut sections. Expertly restored amateur recorded soundtracks exist for every episode.
Our only rule is no more than two 'recon' eps in any session.
After 1970 is absurdly easy in comparison to that!!
About 1 month in and it's going well. We're into the last serial of series 1 and we have not contemplated giving in at any time.
The blog will have a rank table page with a link at the bottom of every post.
ABM Fr 1-Jun
Watched Mon 30-Apr and the next few days.