The feature film Dr. Who and the Daleks, an adaptation of the earliest Doctor Who television stories for the big screen, premieres in British theaters, starring Peter Cushing, Roy Castle, Jennie Linden, and Roberta Tovey. It is the first Doctor Who production of any kind to be filmed in color, but sits comfortably outside the rest of Doctor Who lore and does well enough at the box office for a sequel to be set into motion. 
Well-meaning (but slightly bumbling) bachelor Ian Chesterton arrives at the doorstep of his girlfriend, Barbara, where he also meets her younger sister Susan and their father, an enigmatic inventor who calls himself Doctor Who. While Barbara is eager to go see a movie with Ian, Doctor Who is eager to show her suitor his proudest creation: a time machine in the form of a Police Box, which he calls Tardis. A skeptical Ian accidentally activates the controls of the machine, and when he next opens the door, he’s astounded to find that Tardis has apparently arrived on another planet. Doctor Who, his daughters and Ian explore a nearby city, whose fantastic metallic design seems to be evidence of brilliant alien minds. At first they find no one in the city, but then they meet its inhabitants: armored metallic beings called Daleks. The Daleks introduce themselves as survivors of an atomic war, horribly mutated and forced to live in their metallic shells to survive; they also reveal that Doctor Who and the other time travelers are suffering from radiation poisoning. Susan, the youngest and healthiest of the four time travelers, is selected to “volunteer” for a mission to retrieve anti-radiation drugs from the Thals, the race of statuesque blond humanoids with whom the Daleks were once at war. While the remedy is given to the time travelers, the Daleks also keep a quantity for their own study, never having perfected a means to survive emerging from their life support machines. An invitation to discuss a truce with the Thals turns into a trap, and now Doctor Who and his fellow travelers must quickly decide which side has their sympathies, though witnessing the Daleks’ murderous tendencies first-hand makes it an easy decision. What may prove harder, however, is convincing the pacifistic Thals to save themselves by resuming their war with the Daleks.
written by Milton Subotsky
based on the television serial by Terry Nation
directed by Gordon Flemyng
music by Malcolm Lockyer / electronic music by Barry GrayCast: Peter Cushing (Doctor Who), Roy Castle (Ian), Jennie Linden (Barbara), Roberta Tovey (Susan), Yvonne Antrobus (Dyoni), John Bown (Antodus), Barrie Ingham (Alydon), Bruno Castagnoli (Dalek), Michael Coles (Ganatus), Michael Dillon (Dalek), Ken Garady (Thal), Martin Grace (Thal), Brian Hands (Dalek), Nicholas Head (Thal), Robert Jewell (Dalek), Jane Lamb (Thal), Kevin Manser (Dalek), Eric McKay (Dalek), Mark Petersen (Elyon), Michael Lennox (Thal), Len Saunders (Dalek), Gerald Taylor (Dalek), Virginia Tyler (Thal), Geoffrey Toone (Temmosus), Jack Waters (Thal), Bruce Wells (Thal), Garry Wyler (Thal), Sharon Young (Thal)
Review: Dr. Who And The Daleks is a “condensed books” version of The Daleks, with a rapid-fire helping of An Unearthly Child thrown in for good measure, but in some ways that brevity and condensing of material works wonders for this movie. At some point in the 1990s, the realization hit me that one could jump from the end of part one of An Unearthly Child straight into the beginning of The Daleks with little indication that the former story’s three episodes of cavemen had ever existed in between. So in that respect, and in the not-so-small matter of pacing, Dr. Who And The Daleks is a big improvement on the corresponding episodes of the original series.
Of course, there’s the small matter that it runs completely counter to what little backstory had been established in the original series thus far. Doctor Who is certainly not the Doctor; Doctor Who is a doddering human inventor with two granddaughters, as opposed to an enigmatic alien explorer with one. In a move that almost certainly wouldn’t happen today, the Doctor and the entire TARDIS crew were recast with names considered more bankable on the big screen. Just about the only things that didn’t change, aside from the broad strokes of the story, were the TARDIS’ police box exterior and the Daleks themselves (and even there, larger, more colorful Daleks were constructed for the movie, as opposed to the BBC’s Dalek casings, which might not have withstood big-screen scrutiny). There’s simply no way to retrofit this story into the series continuity proper.
But is that such a bad thing? By distancing itself from what little continuity there was to date, Dr. Who And The Daleks was a marvelously colorful, self-contained adventure with plenty of action, humor and a look that, for whatever ways the original series episodes may have been superior, the television version of Doctor Who simply couldn’t achieve. In particular, the Daleks are shot in a variety of ways that the BBC’s large studio cameras (which weren’t unlike Daleks themselves, at least in terms of sheer physical bulk and clumsiness) simply couldn’t photograph them. The new angles, especially those looking up at the Daleks from near the floor, work incredibly well in establishing them as a threat. (At the same time, for every visual step forward that the movie makes, there’s a step back – the movie’s producers somehow missed the small detail that the lights atop each Dalek’s head denoted which Dalek was speaking, and had the lights wired to blink like turn signals instead; the voice actors charged with providing the Daleks’ voices had to go back and re-record their dialogue in a decidedly un-Dalek-like robotic rhythm to match the footage that had already been shot with this flaw.)
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green