Quantum of Phallus posted:

DOCTOR WHO BUDGET 'TO TRIPLE' UNDER DISNEY+ DEAL

Astroman posted:

As an American growing up in the 80s and seeing DW inconsistently on various PBS runs, I would devour the Target novels as my only way to see (or resee) certain episodes. Some of them could really give you a totally different take if you'd never seen it before reading an episode.

apophenium posted:

e. Side note it's interesting to see so many posters from the AEW threads in here. Not a crossover I'd expect!

RandolphCarter posted:

William Regal as The Master.

Jerusalem posted:

Somebody can hopefully correct any details I have wrong, but I believe there were issues around overworking the cast and crew which Eccleston I believe tried to prevent by putting his foot down and refusing to normalize working beyond the maximum hours that are supposed to be allowed on set, thinking that without him they'd have no choice but to pull back. Instead, they just worked around that by scheduling Billie Piper's stuff for those extra hours of filming, and she was too new/inexperienced in acting to feel confident standing up against that type of thing. I believe Eccleston also wasn't overly happy with the way the production ran in general, he'd come in with different expectations from his experience of working with RTD on The Second Coming.

quote:

Beyond that though, in the last couple of years it's come out that Noel Clarke acts very inappropriately on set (not just on Doctor Who, but also on his own productions where he was the driving force behind some apparently very misogynistic behavior), and John Barrowman had a "hilarious" reputation for just taking his cock out and slapping it around on people's shoulders and near their faces.

Confusedslight posted:

I still don't know if you're doing a bit.

Narsham posted:

Post history shows inactivity since 2021 with a few short posts prior to that in threads titled AMA I’m a Time Traveler and Proof of Time Travel, mocking the OP of those threads, Tapes From the Future.

Recent history is two cryptic posts (one looks like a hash) followed by what we’re getting, which is Tapes From the Future right down to the same website with that name attached.

Tapes has been probated for “get help” reasons but not banned, so I don’t know why they’d be posting using another account. I don’t think there’s much we can do to assist.

Khanstant posted:

I just hope they don't try and make every episode a bigger and bigger escalating deal, I want some episodes where they fart around history and basically nothing happens, but in a chill way, not in the "a bunch of destructive stuff happened but also it's nothing and doesn't matter"

Rhyno posted:

Isn't that widely considered good because of the view while the Doctor is regenerating?

The_Doctor posted:

I assume the Tennant specials took some of the budget of a full 10 episode season + Xmas special

Rhyno posted:

i'm sorry are you implying that it isn't?

FilthyImp posted:

the Chibnall series?

It loving sucked!

JoylessJester posted:

If Who's going to do a civil rights episode it's going to be American-based, because that's safe ground that doesn't implicate Britain.

Astroman posted:

That was a powerful moment and one of the best social commentaries in the show. It was far better to show things how they were, then try to shoehorn in "but actshually there COULD have been a black soldier in Queen Victoria's time" or "we'll have a middle ages village look like modern London with all ethnicities so it looks like now for the viewers" instead of talking about how things really were at the time.

quote:

Can you imagine if they did Marco Polo now and had white people (not in yellowface, just actual white people) in ancient China and say "well there's lots of white people there in now in places like Hong Kong, so..."

Davros1 posted:

https://twitter.com/TheCyberdevil/status/1601982041771458560?s=20&t=-kCQvte7I1LfUA41mn82qg

Random Stranger posted:

I decided to watch some classic Who tonight and got it in my head to watch through Tom Baker's run again. But Robot sure is a weak way to kick off an amazing set of stories. I don't think it's my least favor Four serial, but it's close. At least now that I've cleared that hurdle, it's amazing story after amazing story for while.

MrL_JaKiri posted:

This week's random story was Invasion of the Dinosaurs which is probably the low point of special effects of that era - Robot looks like Star Wars in comparison. Pity, really, because there's a load of good stuff in the story. Too many cliffhangers are "someone being threatened by a dinosaur, with them not otherwise appearing in the episode" but that's a small crime compared to some (eg, the very next story has a cliffhanger - due to poorly timed scripts - where someone looks at a floor)

Random Stranger posted:

I did like the design of the robot's head and body. His spindly arms and clamps, on the other hand...

Lord Ludikrous posted:

My reading has slowed to a crawl over the last couple of weeks due to moving home but I have at least managed to resume and finishing reading The Invasion. Much like The Dalek Invasion of Earth it’s a almost a 1:1 adaption of the story, although the former is better than the latter in this stance and still does take some advantages the book medium offers. I should also point out that the author does a great job carrying over Kevin Stoney’s marvellous performance as Tobias Vaughn, and the character is as much a delight to read as he is to watch in the tv serial.

Outside of the usual minor differences there are a few noticeable changes from the serial.

• The book is much more violent than what we see on screen. We get a vivid description of the brains of the driver at the start being splattered all over the cab of his lorry. Those killed by cyberweaponry die agonising deaths as their flesh is almost melted off their bones. As a result Packer and Vaughn’s demise is quite horrendous compared to the TV serial.
  
• Packer’s more sadistic tendencies are amplified in the book, but Gregory has a very unsympathetic portrayal. In the TV serial he is something of a nervous browbeaten man who’s position isn’t much better than that of Professor Watkins. Indeed at one point he tries to protect the professor and is knocked to the floor and threatened by Vaughn for his trouble. Book Gregory is a greasy, seedy nasty little man who makes no such effort to defend the professor.
  
• While Packer meets the same fate as in the serial, Gregory is shot and killed by UNIT as they rescue Professor Watkins, as opposed to being executed by the Cybermen on the orders of Packer.
  
• Another significant deviation is the fate of General Rutlidge. After being summoned to Vaughn’s office he just sort of vanishes from the story in the TV serial. In the book he attempts to shoot Vaughn after witnessing the Cyber-Planner, but Vaughn exerts his mind control over the general and forces him to shoot himself instead.
  
• The Cybermen are shown in much greater numbers than on the show. There is a vast warehouse of activated Cybermen and Packer is ordering squadrons made up of dozens down into the sewers as opposed to the two we see on screen.
  

Overall I enjoyed the book, although it didn’t reach the heights of Doctor Who and the Cybermen, but I suspect that book is going to be dethroned in the near future.

Vinylshadow posted:

Isn't it usually "The Doctor stumbles into a Dalek plot" rather than "The Daleks actively seek out the Doctor"?

Although the latter has been happening a lot recently, even if it's usually a trap or they want the Doctor to defeat an enemy they cannot

Astroman posted:

Nigel Robinson posted:

Probably the manuscripts which needed the least editing were Ian Marter's. The Rescue, for instance, was left "unfinished" at the time of his death. But apart from my adding a couple of scenes here and there, and tidying up a few lines, there was very little work for me to do on his books. He did have a tendency to see how much he could get away with however: I cut an entire scene from the first chapter of The Rescue where he was more or less discussing the delights of fellatio, and I often had to tone down the blood and guts in some of his other novels (I also insisted he change the end of Harry Sullivan's War [originally called War of Nerves] to ensure that our hero survived).

Yannick_B posted:

I mean, that's true but they're making very popular shows on Disney +, so it's not like the ship has sunk either.

Trying to put out a Star Wars movie every year was a mistake because the movies are built in a way that's hard to make well every year (even the shows barely manage to be yearly) and they soured the well with Rise Of Skywalker (a film that I believe no one likes, but non-nerdy audience just sort of forgot about). But there are still popular cartoons and video games still coming out! The new Jedi Order sequel trailer was one of the most awaited things at the last Game Awards. The movies are in a slump, but Star Wars overall isn't really in trouble.

Big Mean Jerk posted:

Can we just have one thread on these forums where people don’t constantly insist on the supposedly inevitable death and ruining of [Star Wars/Marvel/insert IP here] at the hands of Disney with unfounded rumors and regurgitated clickbait?

Go spout that poo poo on twitter like everyone else.

howe_sam posted:

It's not too surprising they're providing notes, but the great thing about "network" notes when you're a Welsh giant highly respected tv producer is you can read them and say thanks but no thanks.

Dabir posted:

Sometimes, and this might be a reach but bear with me, the person making the creative suggestion might have a point, and RTD might agree with it. I'm willing to take him at his word that the first episode opening wasn't as fun as the others, and that wasn't intentional, and when he had that pointed out to him he enthusiastically made it more fun.

We'll see how this turns out when we get it, I guess.

Narsham posted:

From the interview: “ Russell: And that’s a good example of Disney notes. They sent us a note on episode one [of Ncuti’s first series] that said, “That opening isn’t as much fun as the other episodes.” It was a great note. So I’ve written a new opening –”

He said the note was “great,” and he said they changed the opening because it was a great note.

I’d say I don’t know how anyone goes from RTD telling a story about how Disney has been improving things on the series with their notes and concludes that Disney has taken the show hostage and RTD is sweating bullets over it, but I’ve spent enough time here to know precisely how that happens.

The BBC has always been in a position to ruin the show without any help from Disney, anyway. Nor does Disney own the show, unlike all those other properties it bought up. I’ll point out that Disney seems perfectly happy to let Feige run the MCU and their purchase actually cleared away some of the interference he was getting from Marvel. Given that it isn’t just RTD but that he has Julie Gardner to run interference with Disney and the BBC as needed, I’m reasonably confident Bad Wolf Productions can fend off any interference. It worked in 2005, 18 years ago…

Infinitum posted:

How much say did Colin have in choosing his costume back in the day?

Was LSD involved?

Coward posted:

Imagine if Saward had had to do Christmas episodes.

E: this is adding more horror to my Pip and Jane Baker: Showrunners alternate timeline.

Open Source Idiom posted:

Miles owns. He wasn't wrong about BF spelling doom for the novels, as sales plummeted during rhe Gary Russel BF era (though he did work for BF on several occasions). He's a fractious dude with mental health issues, but his writing is tight and interesting, and is probably still one of the most influential writers from that period, and he got on with a subset of writers within the range -- many ideas from the RTD and Moffat eras came from him originally. (Moffat's acknowledged the influence, I believe, while RTD has not -- but Miles was the actual guy behind the Time War).

I don't think Miles is edgy so much as a scab picker; a lot of his writing was an attempt to critique qnd address the racial / colonial aspects of Doctor Who. YMMV on how successful he was, but he and many of the writers who've worked with him have, unarguably, made the most sustained attempt to critique Who's entanglement in Whiteness. (Ironically, he hated both the PoC companions he wrote for, citing Roz as a fascist -- not wrong -- and Anji as a Tory -- ditto -- and so did his best to avoid them).

But yeah, a lot of the work written by him and inspired by his stuff was an attempt to grapple with cultural hegemony by durectly targeting Doctor Who continuity, on the logic that the series was inherently compromised thanks to the environment in which it was created (again, not wrong). In that sense, he's similar to Alan Moore, in that he had an anarchist's interests in addressing the formal conventions of the series he was so fascinated with, with an aim to reconstruct texts rather than just deconstruct then. For instance, a lot of his works imply that the Timelords adherence to continuity and the unchanging skein of history ("the web of time") is actually just propaganda. It's a way of cementing their colonisation of the universe, and all their bluster about protecting the universe from collapse is total bullshit destined to maintain their powerbase. It's Manifest Destiny on a universal scale.

Killing the Third Doctor in What Happened on Dust wasn't, IMO, edge for the sake of edge, but an attempt to talk about continuity, narrative, shared worlds, and the way societies create and disrupt history, etc. It was meant to spawn a bunch of really cool things -- a fourth Doctor adaptation of Planet of The Spiders based on Planet of the Apes (literally, "Beneath The Planet Of The Spiders").

He was also visionary, in his own way. This Town Will Never Let Us Go is all about how depressing algorithm generated storytelling is, snd his fear that Hollywood was going to become obsessed with fracnhises and remakes, and it came out in 2003.

Cool guy. A difficult person -- beyond also being a "difficult" person -- and a very angry writer, but also a strong leftist with a belief in challenging the system and standing up for what he believed it.

Edward Mass posted:

This isn’t Doctor Whose Line Is It Anyway, it’s a scripted show.

Narsham posted:

And now, it’s the whole team with the end of show Whodown.