Thanks to a ’70s-era purge, several classic Doctor Who episodes are mostly unavailable, but the BBC is bringing them back with animation!
Doctor Who is the franchise that keeps on giving. This time around, the show is using animation to revive two lost classic stories, according to The Mirror.
Two episodes starring the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) will be given the animated treatment: “The Evil of the Daleks” and “The Abominable Snowmen.” These episodes and others were mostly lost when the BBC purged its archive in the ’70s, so bringing them back like this is much appreciated. The network did much the same thing with the 1966 episode “The Power of the Daleks,” which also featured the Second Doctor:
And Doctor Who is using animation to tell new stories, too. The show released a lot of material during the early days of the pandemic, with one of my favorites being “The Secret of Novice Hame,” which featured David Tennant’s return as the Tenth Doctor:
But back to the missing episodes, Doctor Who writer Pete McTighe even came up with a canonical explanation for why they’re gone in his short story “Press Play,” which features Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor.
In the story, we see a hologram of the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan Foreman, who was last seen in 1983’s “The Five Doctors,” the show’s 20th anniversary episode. Susan explains that there are “gaps” in the TARDIS’ memory bank. “Some of the early ones might have gaps, sorry about that. You know what the TARDIS is like with integrating new systems.”
In any case, with no full copies of the original episodes, we are in BBC’s debt as they recreate them in animated form. This is exciting, especially for the newer generation of Doctor Who fans who may never have even heard of some of the earlier Doctors. I think this is such a clever way to engage Whovians new and old.
I’m looking forward to what these guys have planned next; it’s a great time to be a Whovian, isn’t it?
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h/t Digital Spy (revival), Digital Spy (McTighe)