Celebrating 3 to 5 glorious years of stupid apes
Sleep still hasn’t claimed me yet, despite the Nyquil (and no, I haven’t been fighting the sleep either – I think I need another swig of that icky green stuff.)
I was recently re-reading a bit of the outstanding, essential-to-any-Doctor-Who-fan’s-bookshelf volume Regeneration, by Philip Segal and Gary Russell, which is basically the book on the making of the 1996 movie. Love it or hate it, the ’96 movie is such an important part of the mythology, and sometimes I think the reason it gets such a bum rap is because it’s only available on the other side of the Atlantic on DVD. (I kid you not when I say that this movie, and the promise circa 2001 of imminent Blake’s 7 DVD sets, were why I purchased a multi-region DVD player.) I know folks who are all about the new series and think the movie was crap, which I just can’t fathom – the ’96 movie dictated so much of the pace and style of the new series that you’d think they were made nine months apart rather than nine years.
To read Russell and Segal’s book is to get a better understanding for how far off-format the project that eventually became the Paul McGann movie could’ve strayed. Excerpts from abandoned scripts and series bibles are plentiful, and the mind boggles are how close the whole thing came to being a reboot of the entire mythology with no room for the 26 years of the original series (though there would’ve been plenty of reasons why that wouldn’t have been a bad move when trying to launch a series in the States). Every time I read this book, I find something new that I hadn’t noticed before, one of which I’ve included a scan of here because it’s just deliciously ironic. (Obviously, it’s from a stage of the proceedings before Paul McGann was decided on as the eighth Doctor.) One wonders if Mr. Eccleston would’ve been more amenable, at a younger age, to the concept of the Doctor as being somewhat foppish. Or what kind of Doctor that Hugh Laurie would’ve been (wait, let me rephrase that… 😆 ).
I’ve recently rewatched some of Eccleston’s episodes and gained a better liking for him; I think by ingesting the last half of his season as the Doctor, I burned out a bit on his portrayal, but now that we’ve had Tennant in place for a year, I think the intention was always that Eccleston would only be there for a year, and that the character would be necessarily lightened up after another actor took over. Like everyone before him, Eccleston was the right actor, with the right take on the character, at the right time, with almost more of a straight through-line from the seventh Doctor to the ninth.
If you haven’t read this book, I strongly, strongly recommend it – it really is right up there with the Howe/Stammers/Walker books on the making of the series, and at no point do either of its authors wind up as apologists for the ’96 movie. (Despite the fact that it’s Segal’s baby, he’s actually surprisingly harsh on it, and on himself, in places.) You can check it out here, and if you’ve got a region-free DVD player, might as well get the DVD here, because God only knows if it’ll ever see the light of day on DVD on this continent unless you import it. You don’t need to see it to understand the new series, if you’re new to the whole mythology, and yet it’s so interesting to see how a whole different team in a different decade tried to re-introduce the audience to the show.
Apologies for the Doctor Who ramblings and sales pitch; I just thought that excerpt was worth sharing. More green stuff for me now. Night night.… Read more
