It was a comedy Christmas special. Not bad, but very different.
The Dalek Masterplan's first two episodes found!! by an eclectic collector!!
I think it's not actually known exactly when it was junked. DMP was offered for sale for some years after it aired (no-one bought it) but FoS was never included as part of the package. It was always offered as an 11 episode story.
The recovered episodes are cutting copies which means they were most likely suppressed as they would have been made very shortly after or during production. I don't think the BBC moved over to stored until 1967.
It's a curio. There's certainly worse, by dint of the fact that there's loads that don't try anything new and are boring. It sounds very confusing as an audio. Hartnell was really good at comedy, so I'd love to see it.
if I recall correctly lots went in summer 67 once Enterprises had made improved prints. Evil went as soon as it's single repeat option was exercised in 68. The remaining Troughton mostly went in autumn 69, once it was clear they wouldn't be reshown before January 1970. (Some vts were around in 75).
Thanks for the explanation!
Happy to help. Nice to see another Warhammer person around too (posted while working on Blood Bowl Tomb Kings). :-)
Odd that they include episodes 1 & 3 on YouTube but not episode 2, which also survives.
It's ironic that YouTube flags Kevin Stoney's brown/yellowface makeup as "discriminatory content," since the intention at the time was to be progressive by suggesting that the humanity of the year 4000 was more racially integrated and intermixed -- although that is undermined somewhat by having the only ethnically mixed character in the story be the traitorous villain, as well as by the then-accepted practice of putting "ethnic" makeup on a white actor. But baby steps, baby steps. What seems progressive to one generation (e.g. Star Trek's miniskirts) often seems regressive to a later one, but that's a good sign that progress has been made.
Anyway, interesting to see them, and to catch some details we probably didn't know about before. Not a bad story initially, though the prison-planet interlude seems kind of pointless, aside from being an excuse to kill off Katarina. Terry Nation seemed to like the trope of prison planets where criminals were just abandoned to fend for themselves, as he'd revisit it in Blake's 7, also in the third episode.
Some classic Hartnellisms, too. "The Daleks will stop at anything to prevent us!" Oh, that will make it easy!
Meanwhile, it's interesting to get through three Dalek episodes in which the word "exterminate" is not used even once -- although I checked the transcript, and it is used frequently starting in episode 4. It's not a difference between Nation's and Spooner's writing, since Nation wrote episodes 4-5 where it is used.
It's ironic that YouTube flags Kevin Stoney's brown/yellowface makeup as "discriminatory content," since the intention at the time was to be progressive by suggesting that the humanity of the year 4000 was more racially integrated and intermixed -- although that is undermined somewhat by having the only ethnically mixed character in the story be the traitorous villain, as well as by the then-accepted practice of putting "ethnic" makeup on a white actor. But baby steps, baby steps. What seems progressive to one generation (e.g. Star Trek's miniskirts) often seems regressive to a later one, but that's a good sign that progress has been made.
Anyway, interesting to see them, and to catch some details we probably didn't know about before. Not a bad story initially, though the prison-planet interlude seems kind of pointless, aside from being an excuse to kill off Katarina. Terry Nation seemed to like the trope of prison planets where criminals were just abandoned to fend for themselves, as he'd revisit it in Blake's 7, also in the third episode.
Some classic Hartnellisms, too. "The Daleks will stop at anything to prevent us!" Oh, that will make it easy!
Meanwhile, it's interesting to get through three Dalek episodes in which the word "exterminate" is not used even once -- although I checked the transcript, and it is used frequently starting in episode 4. It's not a difference between Nation's and Spooner's writing, since Nation wrote episodes 4-5 where it is used.
Can't view here. Used to use Opera but now you have to pay to unlock that vpn feature...
I've listened to the narrated CD set of "Master Plan" at least three times that I can recall, and I never really grasped just how adorably cute Adrienne Hill was. There's a part of me that wishes some later Doctor will swoop in with their TARDIS and pluck Katarina from the void before she suffocates and give her the life she was denied.
I'm shocked they'd put this up for free so soon after they found it. I would have expected BBC to do a big DVD/Blu-Ray release to make some money off the new episodes before we saw them on Youtube.
That's a much better Time Lord Victorious, right there!
(interestingly, she does pop up via River Song in the Eighth Doctor Adventures line at some point, and fairly recently they did a First/Second Doctor multi-Doctor story with her involved)
If too many episodes are missing, they don't bother animating them.
I do have the Target novelizations. The story spans two books. I wish these were available as eBooks since my dead tree version is pretty old. MMPBs don't use the best the materials.
I did track down the second episode, so I'm going to watch the first three and then read the novels once I finish up my current reads.
Josh Snares on youtube made some reconstructions with very basic animation of the missing episodes years ago. So far I've watched the existing first 3 eps, his recon for ep 4, and the existing ep 5. Now I'm going to start his ep 6 recon.
Many years ago, the last time I tried watching DMP, I think i got to ep 7 and just quit lol.
I found the Loose Canon episode 4, so I'll watch through episode 5 this weekend.