News And the Next Animated Reconstruction is...
- Thread starter N-121973
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The only one that should be remade is "The Celestial Toymaker", a story whose very title is racist, before you even get to any of the other stuff in the actual episodes.
Do it with David Bradley and NPH and release it just before Tennant's Specials air.
Do it with David Bradley and NPH and release it just before Tennant's Specials air.
"The Smugglers" and "The Underwater Menace". Odd choices (especially since historicals sell terribly) unless they're trying to get the Seasons completed before they release the blu-ray box sets.
How is the title racist?
I actually had to look this up. Among the many other definitions of 'celestial,' the word refers (when capitalized, as in the episode title) to 'A popular name for a native of China, the “Celestial Empire.”' That, plus the very Oriental outfit on a guy who was absolutely not Oriental (and, thankfully, not even pretending to be makeup-wise), and apparently Celestial is being seen in this context as a savage diss on China/The Chinese.
I think that's a reach, since the term dates from the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Empire
https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...tart=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3
By the time "The Celestial Toymaker" was written, the term had been out of widespread use for generations. It's conceivable the writers of the episode intended a double meaning, but it would've been a pretty obscure reference. And of course the main definition of "celestial" pertains to space or the heavens, so that could've been all they meant by it, with the Mandarin costume being a coincidence.
Also, even if it was intended as a reference to the Celestial Empire, that doesn't mean it was intended as "savage" or negative; if anything, it's a rather flattering reference to the Chinese, using 19th-century Chinese nationalists' own self-aggrandizing name for their kingdom, Tiāncháo, the Heavenly Dynasty. And since the Toymaker was an alien merely masquerading as a Mandarin, his villainy was probably not intended to reflect on the Chinese.
Yeah, I thought it was a reach myself, but it was the only way I could see the racist charge making any sense. It'd certainly be downright subtle compared to Li H'sen Chang over a decade later.
I've never come upon any indication that the "Celestial" part was meant to refer to anything other than his cosmic origin and powers. There's no mention of a Celestial Empire connection in the TARDIS Wiki article or the main Wikipedia article, and the novelization doesn't suggest any connection between his title and his "Mandarin" costume. I think he was just meant to be a whimsical godlike entity that liked games and roleplaying, so the Mandarin attire was just him playing dress-up. Much like the Doctor himself, who cosplayed as a human from Edwardian-era England.
I agree. For me, cartoons just aren't reality. (Not that filmed drama really is such.)
I'm thrilled to hear that there will be at least two more animations. Those are two unusual choices but hopefully that just means they're the planned start of a new batch that will complete the early seasons.
I don't want these episodes reshot using new actors. I want to experience the Hartnell and Troughton versions. The previous animations haven't all been perfect, but they usually capture the experience of watching a classic DW story. That's what I'm after. YMMV.
I also think that any reshooting would also involve a ton of rewriting. The old stories just don't translate well for modern audiences. We'd get something very different from the original.
I don't want these episodes reshot using new actors. I want to experience the Hartnell and Troughton versions. The previous animations haven't all been perfect, but they usually capture the experience of watching a classic DW story. That's what I'm after. YMMV.
I also think that any reshooting would also involve a ton of rewriting. The old stories just don't translate well for modern audiences. We'd get something very different from the original.
I doubt any of the producers in the seventies would have been interested in remaking old scripts, and by the eighties fandom was sufficiently advanced that they wouldn't have been happy. So instead we got sequels to 60s stories like Attack of the Cybermen, and the aborted Toymaker story in the original season 23.
Also worth noting that the old stories were being published as books throughout the seventies and eighties, so the kids would have noticed anyway!
What may have been more the BBC's line at the time was record radio versions of the stories. They did this a lot with sit coms (the missing Dad's Army episodes only survive in their radio adaptations) but I'm not sure if they would have felt it possible for such a visual show.
Well, naturally they weren't, since they didn't do it. I just think it's interesting to consider the question, what if they had? It's not unprecedented; it's something a number of series did back in the old days. So it's something they could conceivably have done if it had occurred to them, and if they had, it would've provided an interesting alternative way to see those erased stories. There probably wouldn't have been much interest in remaking the straight historicals, but I could see them remaking the more science-fictional ones.
Oh, they did do that with Doctor Who a couple of times. I still have the LP version of "Genesis of the Daleks," with Tom Baker's narration describing the visuals. They also adapted the final episode of "The Chase" that way, narrated by Dalek voice actor David Graham.
It's an interesting question, but I just don't think that would ever have occurred to them. The way TV worked back then, pretty much everything was deemed lost after a possible single repeat run (and very few Doctor Who stories were ever repeated on the BBC during the original series) as it would never be shown again. I can't see Barry Letts or Philip Hinchcliffe deciding to dust off a script for The Sensorites and give it another go instead of coming up with something new.
They're the original TV soundtracks rather than restaged for radio, but it was a similar idea. Obviously The Pescatons and Slipback were original audio dramas during the original run.
Agreed. And I think you nail it with the question of creating something new or a retread of an old script. You know which choice most creative types will make in that situation.
I suppose if they were really in a bind and desperately needed a script (which has happened during classic DW--see City of Death for one example), instead of an overnight writing marathon, they might resort to using an old script from before.
They obviously didn't do that. But it could've been an option in the right (or, I guess, wrong) circumstances.
Yeah that's it, by the late seventies when Tony Read and Douglas Adams were struggling, the Target books were in full force so there was probably a commercial rule (or an understanding at least) that the old stuff was off limits. The show was so radically different by that point anyway that it's difficult to imagine 1978 Tom Baker doing any Hartnell-type stories.
Ironically the one time where they really did remake stories was the sixties - The Moonbase is basically a remake of Tenth Planet (just a few months later!) and the second half of Daleks' Master Plan is essentially a retread of The Chase. You can make an argument that The Smugglers and The Highlanders have a bit in common too.
Ironically the one time where they really did remake stories was the sixties - The Moonbase is basically a remake of Tenth Planet (just a few months later!) and the second half of Daleks' Master Plan is essentially a retread of The Chase. You can make an argument that The Smugglers and The Highlanders have a bit in common too.
It's the other way around. The fact that old stories were considered lost forever was the exact reason that other productions did recycle them. The 1940s Adventures of Superman radio series remade old scripts multiple times, because it was a children's show (like Doctor Who) and its target audience was assumed to age out every few years, so that you could reuse an old story and it would be new to the current audience. (Its two most frequently remade stories, Superman's origin story and "The Stolen Costume," were both also adapted to the first season of the George Reeves series.) Comics publishers often did this for the same reason, either just reprinting stories exactly or making slight alterations to character names and faces. And it happened in American TV as late as the early 1970s. A 1973 Mannix episode guest starring William Shatner was a nearly word-for-word remake of a 1967 Mannix episode with Charles Drake in the equivalent role. The Bionic Woman episode "Fly Jaime" was rewritten from a Six Million Dollar Man script from a few years earlier.
The advantage of doing this, I presume (at least within a single series), is that it's probably cheaper to refilm a script you already paid for than to commission a whole new script. The writer probably gets royalties for the reuse, but that would be less than the cost of a whole new script. And in the days of live radio, it came down to saving time. They were in continuous production with hardly any breaks, and if the writing fell behind, they might need to recycle an old script to give them time to catch up writing new ones. Early Doctor Who was produced under a similar time crunch, although that was no longer as much the case by the Pertwee era and after.
Obviously two very clear examples of remaking sixties TV serials we've not mentioned yet are the two Dalek films!
I understand what you're saying, but it just wasn't common practice for the BBC to reuse old scripts as far as I know. I don't believe other long-running shows like Dixon of Dock Green or Z Cars remade old episodes.
Perhaps it may have been to do with contracts at the time.
I understand what you're saying, but it just wasn't common practice for the BBC to reuse old scripts as far as I know. I don't believe other long-running shows like Dixon of Dock Green or Z Cars remade old episodes.
Perhaps it may have been to do with contracts at the time.
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