There will soon be more animated reconstructed episodes of Doctor Who. Originally played by William Hartnell, the Doctor first appeared in 1963, and the show has been an international success ever since. Those early episodes reveal key aspects of the Doctor’s nature, including his relationship with his granddaughter, Gallifrey, and even the planet Earth. Unfortunately, many of those episodes were lost to time after the BBC deleted them in a routine effort to save space. Some recordings have been found over the years, but many serials have only been saved through reconstruction.
As the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary approaches, it has already been announced that there are more animated reconstructions on the way. Executive producer of the “The Underwater Menace” reconstruction, Paul Hembury, spoke at a screening to reveal that they will continue developing new episodes. While DVD and Blu-ray funding continues to be an issue, the producers are taking the reconstructions episode-by-episode. Check out his quote below, via RadioTimes.com:
“As long as there’s an audience out there who want to see them, then we will endeavour to continue. The DVD and Blu-ray market isn’t getting any bigger and it was a significant contributor to the financing that we used to make these, so it’s really incumbent upon us to say, ‘OK, if we’re going to be seeing less revenue from that source, we need to be able to replace it’ – and more, because our budgets have gone up pretty significantly. So we just need to be able to make it balance out… We don’t have a five, 10-year plan to work through. We do them one at a time. In all truth, I don’t know whether we’ll ever get to a situation where we’ve done every one. [But] there is something coming.”
The Remaining Purged Doctor Who Episodes
The missing 97 Doctor Who episodes have been a dark shadow hanging over the show for decades. Some episodes and serials have been found through archived fan recordings, but there are still many First, Second, and Third Doctor adventures that were completely or partially erased. The entire “Marco Polo”, “The Myth Makers”, “The Massacre”, and “Fury From The Deep” serials are completely gone, leaving a mysterious element of the show’s history.
These reconstructions offer the opportunity for younger viewers to watch these episodes for the first time. “Marco Polo” is one example of a group of episodes that have been completely reconstructed through animation. Many other serials have enjoyed animated reconstructions of specific episodes. That can be a jarring change for anyone watching the serials, but it allows for the “Galaxy 4”, “The Tenth Planet”, and “The Web of Fear” to be viewed in full. It is something that would otherwise be near-completely impossible.
Reconstructions of these missing episodes are just another element that sets Doctor Who apart from other shows. The dedicated fanbase has worked for decades to rediscover or else reproduce the early missing episodes. It is partly the reason that respect for the classic episodes continues to serve as the foundation for the modern version of the show. The early Doctor Who episodes live on, and they are slowly but surely being restored.
