Odd n' ends across the Who spectrum

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Permalink Reply by Baff on December 7, 2008 at 10:51pm

Snuff is tobacco, which originated in America, so it certainly didn't exist in England at that time. He wasn't actually a monk though, so presumably he brought it with him.

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Permalink Reply by goodboy_stay on December 8, 2008 at 6:59am

Ah. Thank you sir. If not snuff, what could it have been? I presume some sort of drug. Oh, and apologies. I hadn't finished the story arc and had not realized he was not actually a monk. Jumping the gun, I am.

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Permalink Reply by Baff on December 8, 2008 at 9:27am

Sorry, didn't mean to spoil the story. It will all be clear once you see another episode or 2.

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Permalink Reply by goodboy_stay on December 8, 2008 at 10:04am

Yes, yes. Just finished and WHAT AN ENDING!! Classic "leave bad guy stranded" scenario. Very fulfilling to say the least. No reason to be sorry though, i still had no idea he was also a time lord.

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Permalink Reply by Baff on December 8, 2008 at 11:12am

The monk appears again in "The Daleks' Master Plan" and he's not too happy with the Doctor. It isn't on DVD yet (if ever, lot of missing episodes, though they do have the audio). Episodes 2, 5 & 10 (of 12) appear on the Hartnell Lost in Time disc though.

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Permalink Reply by goodboy_stay on December 8, 2008 at 11:47am

Wow, Baff. You are a wealth of Who knowledge, friend. Glad to have joined the group. As an avid Doctor Who fan myself, i am so far hip-deep into a plethora of new releases and will be busy watching for quite some time. : ) As for the monk, or time lord monk, ha, the character did not register, as i had seen Lost in Time some time ago. Now I am onto Destiny of the Daleks ready to drink my fill of the great Davros. I have sent you a friend request as i would be so honored.

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Permalink Reply by Catnap on January 25, 2009 at 7:31am

Hello. Off topic, but I remember seeing some reconstruction project. They used existing video combined with audio or narrated scripts to "complete" missing episode. Do you ever see something like that coming to DVD to "complete" the series.

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Permalink Reply by Baff on January 25, 2009 at 12:44pm

Quite a bit in the early episodes. The BBC piece them together from every scrap they can find, such as:

Audio recordings that kids made on their home tape recorders.
Clips that were cut out by the Australian government for being too violent for their children.
Home video taken on the set.
Still photos taken on the set.
Low quality color video tape laid over high quality b&w film.
Etc., etc.

They clean it up as well as they can and put it all together. Sometimes episodes you can hardly tell there was ever a problem, and other episodes are basically slideshows and audio with occasional video clips. Audio exists for all but 1 episode. Video is missing on about 70 episodes I think.

There were also a few episodes that were professionally animated to match the existing audio.

There are also VHS tapes that were made early on by people other than the BBC as reconstruction efforts. They are of various quality. One reconstruction group animated the mouths/eyes in still photos from the set to match existing audio. Rather comic at times, but far better than nothing.

If you are really, really interested in it, I could look through my library and suggest a couple dvds you could rent from Netflix that come with extras where they show the process they went through to reconstruct the episodes.

I watch almost every extra on every Dr. Who dvd, plus listen to commentary tracks. That is odd since I rarely watch extras on dvds except for occasional gag reels and such. The BBC does a great job of making most of them very interesting.

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Permalink Reply by Catnap on February 11, 2009 at 5:19pm

That would be excellent. I saw a reconstruct DVD a friend had of The Romans I believe. Very good. I enjoy old radio shows so audio only doesn't bother me. Anything particularly with Patrick Troughton. I've seen so few of him.

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Permalink Reply by Baff on February 24, 2009 at 5:20pm

Finally got some time to take a look at my Troughton discs. There are 2 dvds at Netflix that have extras that talk about reconstruction.

Disc 2 of Lost in Time: The Patrick Troughton Years has "The Missing Years" documentary with a lot of info.

Disc 1 of The Invasion has an extra that explains what was involved in making the animated reconstructions.

There haven't been many Troughton series released on dvd yet.

Permalink Reply by Baff on February 24, 2009 at 6:13pm

I went ahead and took a look through the Hartnell discs too.

Disc 2 of Doctor Who: The Beginning has some great extras about the origins of Doctor Who and its music. Little or nothing about reconstruction though.

Doctor Who: The Aztecs has an 8 minute extra showing a bunch of before and after clips of various cleaned up episodes over the years.

Doctor Who: The Time Meddler has a 5 minute extra about the restoration of a couple scenes.

When Planet of the Daleks (3rd doctor) comes out later this year, it should have some interesting restoration extras on it. You can read about it here.