I'd say there is a good bet that Sontarans kept their appearance intact(though now shrunk down) mostly for the humor factor of being these action-figurey purple and small potato-heads juxtaposed against their curt and aggressive attitude. The Daleks kept theirs because they're Daleks and they're an actual icon of the show. Ice Warriors were a bad design to begin with and their redesign somehow looks worse, I assume again for some sort of irony when the suit comes off. The Draconians could benefit from a lot of polish but nothing about the design is necessarily 'bad', just unrefined and badly executed.
The Draconians in Benny Summerfield were hilarious because the writing focussed on the indentured sexism vs. aghast post Feminism. Benny kept really getting up in their grill every time they scientifically proved that women were naturally inferior to men. I love Benny more when she raises her voice.
Maybe it is: Draconian that has been mummified or dessicated in some way An Osirian (not Sutekh) a la Pyramids of Mars Most likely something new.
Whereas I think the Ice Warriors were a very strong design that wasn't changed much because it didn't need to be.
This is the new Spoonhead isn't it? http://i677.photobucket.com/albums/vv134/pandaphil/1a_zpsc2347677.jpg
No, the Spoonheads are robots with heads that are actually shaped like spoons. http://thetardispage.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-look-at-spoonheads-from-doctor-who-s7.html
I'm not sure. Next to the Motorcycle Mirror, on the righthand side of the bike, there is a shard that has a critter that looks something like a Gas Pump with a giant Ice Cream Scooper coming up out of it (Looks somewhat like the Information Kiosks in the Library (One of them wore Donna's fac at one point). My guess would be that it is a robot called a Spoonhead. ETA: Christopher Ninja'ed me. Yea, what he said (@Christopher Thanks for the confirmation and the new pic)
I thought the spoonheads were going to be some kind Cardassian forehead alien. In the glass shard the head looks like a flashbulb to me.
Yea, the shard on the lower left hand side of the screen, does appear to have the tiniest bit of a spoon indentation showng on it's forehead, so, I thought about that at first too, but, looking at the blown up picture, you can totally see the spoon shaped head on the robot next to the mirror on the right hand side of pic.
The Sontarans were probably based on the look of shorter Russian cosmonauts, with the sphere shaped Vostok/Voskhod As for the Daleks--take a look at Sputnik 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Спутник-3.jpg http://www.zarya.info/Diaries/Sputnik/Sputnik3.php I think the helmet of Judge Dread may have been influenced by the ice warrior captains
Sorry to resurrect an aging thread, but there's a trailer for next week's episode that suggests they they've totally !!!!!!!!!ed up the Ice Warrior voices. :-( Suddenly my enthusiasm for the return of my favourite monsters has slumped. :-(
To be fair, there hasn't be a lot of Ice Warriors stories full stop! There was "The Ice Warriors" and "The Seeds of Death" in the Troughton era, and the two Pealedon or something stories from the Pertwee era which to my knowledge were not even about the Ice Warriors (I've only seen the seeds of death BTW). I hope they actually do a good episode this time.
^What I particularly liked about the Peladon stories is that they made the Ice Warriors into good guys -- showed that they weren't a uniformly evil race of monsters but were just a nation of beings who could be enemies in some contexts and allies in others. That ambiguity, and the sense of nobility it lent them, made the Ice Warriors one of my favorite DW aliens, and I hope it's reflected in the new episode.