The First Days of Who
May. 17th, 2015 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI mentioned a little while ago that I had managed to start watching the very first episodes of Doctor Who, and now, having seen several more of them, I seem to have formed a few opinions beyond just that it's kind of interesting to "begin at the beginning" and that it was easy enough to apply "historical perspective" and decide that, as with the generally best-received episodes of the original Star Trek, things seem to have started off with an honest effort by everyone involved.
It can be sort of interesting to see something evolve towards what everyone knows it to be on discovering it started off as something else. While I'd heard the Doctor in particular in the first days of William Hartnell playing him was quite different from the casually competent hero we all expect him to be in each new form, I was perhaps sort of surprised to think of what little I've heard about an American fantastic-science show or two also from the 1960s. I suppose I'm imagining things might have played up "will we ever get back to where we started?", which brought impressions of "The Time Tunnel" to mind, and more than that the Doctor just might have been someone mostly getting the actual protagonists into further trouble at each destination (if eventually managing to do the right thing in the first episodes themselves), which then had me wondering about "Lost In Space." With both of these series in mind, though, I was also imagining the possibility of this show having been cancelled with its "obvious" conclusion unreached after just a few years, one more period piece to fill out the history books.
I was also, though, thinking back to the show's fiftieth anniversary and the awareness I had managed through a chain of accidents to miss an entire series of it, perhaps weighted by the feeling Steven Moffat was wearing out his welcome among certain online fans as quickly as Russell T. Davies had seemed to. The special drama recreating the first years of production made for the anniversary, however, had left me imagining it might be interesting for the cast playing the original cast playing the original characters to just play the original characters in adventures with modern special effects. Knowing now that things other than "production values" were different back then, though, I can think that might not have been so easy to pull off; in any case, Peter Capaldi's beginning as the latest Doctor seems to have produced a bit more positivity in the corner or two I do look in, although there's always the thought interpretations don't begin to diverge between creators and fans until after a first season. Perhaps watching episodes five decades old means it's easier to shrug off the divergent opinions of others; there certainly isn't the feeling that everything hangs on how well each new instalment comes off.
There was also the small yet interesting detail that one seemingly "modern" touch about the show had been anticipated. Back when every past era or alien world was set up in a cramped studio, it was possible to set up a backdrop just outside the doors leading out of the TARDIS control room set. In the first episodes I saw at an early age, several Doctors later, I'd somehow been thinking the dark interior of the TARDIS exterior set up on location amounted to the entrance to a long corridor leading to the control room, and that in fact the ship was infinite in size inside, and those who weren't careful would get lost inside it. Linking the inside to the outside with modern compositing had seemed obvious enough when it happened and yet a change; now, it doesn't seem so different after all.
It can be sort of interesting to see something evolve towards what everyone knows it to be on discovering it started off as something else. While I'd heard the Doctor in particular in the first days of William Hartnell playing him was quite different from the casually competent hero we all expect him to be in each new form, I was perhaps sort of surprised to think of what little I've heard about an American fantastic-science show or two also from the 1960s. I suppose I'm imagining things might have played up "will we ever get back to where we started?", which brought impressions of "The Time Tunnel" to mind, and more than that the Doctor just might have been someone mostly getting the actual protagonists into further trouble at each destination (if eventually managing to do the right thing in the first episodes themselves), which then had me wondering about "Lost In Space." With both of these series in mind, though, I was also imagining the possibility of this show having been cancelled with its "obvious" conclusion unreached after just a few years, one more period piece to fill out the history books.
I was also, though, thinking back to the show's fiftieth anniversary and the awareness I had managed through a chain of accidents to miss an entire series of it, perhaps weighted by the feeling Steven Moffat was wearing out his welcome among certain online fans as quickly as Russell T. Davies had seemed to. The special drama recreating the first years of production made for the anniversary, however, had left me imagining it might be interesting for the cast playing the original cast playing the original characters to just play the original characters in adventures with modern special effects. Knowing now that things other than "production values" were different back then, though, I can think that might not have been so easy to pull off; in any case, Peter Capaldi's beginning as the latest Doctor seems to have produced a bit more positivity in the corner or two I do look in, although there's always the thought interpretations don't begin to diverge between creators and fans until after a first season. Perhaps watching episodes five decades old means it's easier to shrug off the divergent opinions of others; there certainly isn't the feeling that everything hangs on how well each new instalment comes off.
There was also the small yet interesting detail that one seemingly "modern" touch about the show had been anticipated. Back when every past era or alien world was set up in a cramped studio, it was possible to set up a backdrop just outside the doors leading out of the TARDIS control room set. In the first episodes I saw at an early age, several Doctors later, I'd somehow been thinking the dark interior of the TARDIS exterior set up on location amounted to the entrance to a long corridor leading to the control room, and that in fact the ship was infinite in size inside, and those who weren't careful would get lost inside it. Linking the inside to the outside with modern compositing had seemed obvious enough when it happened and yet a change; now, it doesn't seem so different after all.