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Re-shooting the lost episodes...

The Laughing Vulcan

Admiral
Admiral
The BBC are shooting lost post-war sitcoms from the original scripts.

They're remaking episodes of Till Death Do Us Part, Steptoe and Son, and Hancock's Half Hour, although obviously recast.

Do you think this could work for classic Who's missing episodes? Recast quite obviously, but shoot in a similar style and format to the original episodes.
 
Animation's the way to go with that, I think. They had the formula just about right with The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase. But I think BBC's gonna hold off on doing anything else regarding the missing episodes for the time being, until Philip Morris officially finishes up his worldwide archaeology quest (yeah, it's still going on) and either coughs up any surviving episodes or throws up his hands and says "Sorry, there's nothing else out there."
 
I've said this before, but I'm surprised they didn't do this decades ago -- remake some of the lost First and Second Doctor episodes as adventures with the current Doctor. There were some older series that would remake their own past installments, on the assumption that the originals would never be seen again and the audience that had seen them the first time had aged out and moved on. For instance, the '40s Superman radio series remade several of its stories multiple times (and a few of them were then remade as first-season episodes of the '50s TV series -- for instance, the "Superman on Earth" premiere episode is almost verbatim the same script as the origin story that was done several times on radio, and "The Stolen Costume" is an adaptation of a half-hour radio episode that was itself a trimmed-down version of a longer serial storyline from years earlier). There's a late-season Mannix episode with William Shatner that's a remake of a Mannix episode from the first or second season. And there were some older comics, from Gold Key and other publishers, that would just reprint older stories, sometimes with the dialogue and character names changed, and pass them off as new stories.

So just imagine if they'd, say, redone "The Myth Makers" or "The Power of the Daleks" with Four, Sarah, and Harry, or "The Celestial Toymaker" or "The Moonbase" with Five, Adric, and Nyssa. Just imagine how that would blow the minds of modern, continuity-obsessed fans trying to make sense of it all. (The closest equivalent we have is the Eighth Doctor audio/Flash-animation version of Shada, or the Tenth Doctor adaptation of the Seventh Doctor novel Human Nature.)
 
I don't think it would be a dis service to redo lost episodes with current doctor Peter Capaldi.

At least we'd finally get them.
 
Nope. Animated, or recons via audio. Anything else, not worth of actual spending (though the Fan Recon guys deserve their fair share of praise).
 
I don't think it would be a dis service to redo lost episodes with current doctor Peter Capaldi.

At least we'd finally get them.

Would we, though? They'd have to be rewritten as a single 45-minute episode or a 2-parter, which would require a considerable restructuring and streamlining for stories that were originally 6 or 7 25-minute episodes with cliffhangers at the end of each one. Not to mention that they'd have to be rewritten to suit the expectations of a modern audience accustomed to big action, lightning-fast pacing, elaborate VFX, and plenty of comedy. The older, slow-paced, stagey, dialogue-driven serials just wouldn't fit the modern show, not without wholesale change, and then they'd hardly be the same stories.

Although I would be open to a modern remake of "Marco Polo" shot on location in China. Hey, maybe do a crossover with the Netflix series, with Lorenzo Richelmy as Marco and Benedict Wong as Kublai Khan. (Although that would be a step down in talent from Mark Eden's Marco.)
 
^ True. Done with modern pacing and sensibility, those would be like entirely new stories. Classic Who pacing was so slow most of the time.

I think filling in missing parts of stories with animation would be OK. As far as whole missing stories, IDK, novels or audios would be the best way to go I think.
 
I thought the fan reconstructions were mostly pretty well-done, although some had a lot less source imagery to work with than others. Heck, it's amazing enough that the audio tracks survive.
 
Audio was separate from video tapes?
Fan-recorded audio.

Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Fans were so into the show that they'd put their audio tape recorders' microphones up against the TV speakers and record the episodes to listen to later. The restorers were able to put out a call to the fan community and gather these homemade tapes, use some to fill in the gaps or noisy bits of the others, and digitally restore them to the point that they were clearly audible. It's a good thing the show had such loyal fans even early on. And it's lucky that the first few episodes weren't lost, because I doubt there would've been fans home-taping them right at the start of the series.
 
Marco Polo was only the fourth story and yet fans were already recording the audio. That's damn remarkable! That slightly makes up for the odds that out of 27 countries it was sent to, no video has been recovered (yet).
 
I wonder about that. We know at least one missing episode (Part 4 of The Web of Fear, the Brigadier's first appearance) still exists but was snapped up by a private collector. That even one of 27 different copies of Marco Polo didn't survive to the present day, even in partial form, I find almost impossible to believe. Somebody has it.
 
Marco Polo was only the fourth story and yet fans were already recording the audio. That's damn remarkable!

Looked at another way, "The Roof of the World" (episode 1 of "Marco Polo") was the 14th episode of the series. The show had been on the air for just under three months at that point. So not quite as remarkable, but still impressive.
 
Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Fans were so into the show that they'd put their audio tape recorders' microphones up against the TV speakers and record the episodes to listen to later. The restorers were able to put out a call to the fan community and gather these homemade tapes, use some to fill in the gaps or noisy bits of the others, and digitally restore them to the point that they were clearly audible. It's a good thing the show had such loyal fans even early on. And it's lucky that the first few episodes weren't lost, because I doubt there would've been fans home-taping them right at the start of the series.

Some fans were even more industrious. The more electrically inclined opened up their sets and wired their recorder directly to the speaker.
 
Some fans were even more industrious. The more electrically inclined opened up their sets and wired their recorder directly to the speaker.

What we really need is to discover that some fan was industrious enough to set up a film camera as a home telecine rig and film all the episodes right off the screen. And all those films have been sitting in their attic for decades just waiting for their heirs to go through their estate and discover them...
 
What we really need is to discover that some fan was industrious enough to set up a film camera as a home telecine rig and film all the episodes right off the screen. And all those films have been sitting in their attic for decades just waiting for their heirs to go through their estate and discover them...

That's one step away from hoping an ingenious and industrious fan invents a time machine. They probably already have. And instead of taping it, and altering the time line, they just go back and watch it live whenever in the mood.
 
Some of the missing episodes could be adapted to the current Doctor for the next season, as a special maybe. If you're talking about a straight up remake, finding actors who could conceivably portray the original cast, well it would be expensive but quite interesting to see!
 
What we really need is to discover that some fan was industrious enough to set up a film camera as a home telecine rig and film all the episodes right off the screen. And all those films have been sitting in their attic for decades just waiting for their heirs to go through their estate and discover them...
before discarding them as 'junk'...
 
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