Peladon, Mandragora DVD release date for Region 1

[23skidoo]

TV Shows on DVD just posted that the two Jon Pertwee Peladon stories - Curse of Peladon and Monster of Peladon, plus the Tom Baker story Masque of Mandragora, are scheduled for release to DVD in North America on May 4.

www.TVShowsOnDVD.com/newsitem.cfm?NewsID=13234

Looks like we're going to have to buy the two Peladon stories separately rather than in the Peladon Tales box set being issued in the UK (the extras are likely going to be the same). Mandragora, meanwhile, is of interest to fans of the Prisoner as part of it was filmed on location in Portmeirion, Wales, and the UK DVD release includes a featurette on the onetime Village which I assume will be on the Region 1 version, too.

Alex

 

[ClayinCA]

"The Masque of Mandragora" is one of my favorite Doctor Who stories ever (and it brings us one story closer to having my favorite season of the original series complete on DVD!), so I'm very excited about this.

As for the Peladon stories only being available separately, that doesn't bother me at all, as I'm broke and I'll be able to get them as I can afford them rather than shelling out all at once.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

"The Masque of Mandragora" is one of my favorite Doctor Who stories ever (and it brings us one story closer to having my favorite season of the original series complete on DVD!), so I'm very excited about this.

It's good to see someone else list season 14 as their favorite season. That being said, The Masque of Mandragora, while a wonderful story, is my second least favorite of the season. I don't think there isn't enough love out their for The Face of Evil.

 

[23skidoo]

As for the Peladon stories only being available separately, that doesn't bother me at all, as I'm broke and I'll be able to get them as I can afford them rather than shelling out all at once.

It doesn't bug me either. The extras are the same and they're coming out the same time. It's possible a box set might be cheaper than buying both, though. It's also kind of odd they're doing this because the last half-dozen or so UK box set releases (The Beginning, Bred for War, Beneath the Surface, E-Space Trilogy, etc) have also been issued over here, so why they'd split this one I don't know. No biggie, anyway.

Maybe now they finally worked out the kinks in releasing Remembrance of the Daleks (coming out in a few weeks after years of delay due to that damn Beatles song) we'll finally get a Region 1 version of the Davros box we were promised ages ago.

Alex

 

[ClayinCA]

"The Masque of Mandragora" is one of my favorite Doctor Who stories ever (and it brings us one story closer to having my favorite season of the original series complete on DVD!), so I'm very excited about this.

It's good to see someone else list season 14 as their favorite season. That being said, The Masque of Mandragora, while a wonderful story, is my second least favorite of the season. I don't think there isn't enough love out their for The Face of Evil.

Oh yeah, I think season 14 is as close to flawless as the original Doctor Who ever got. "Mandragora" may not be the best story of the season--that's probably either "Robots of Death" or "Talons of Weng-Chiang" for me--but it's still a great example of Tom and Sarah Jane at their best. And I agree, there's way too little love for "The Face of Evil." Fantastic story, that one, and it's a crime it's not on DVD yet. (Actually, now we've got "Mandragora," isn't "Face of Evil" the only story left from this season that's not yet available?)

 

[S. Gomez]

And I agree, there's way too little love for "The Face of Evil." Fantastic story, that one, and it's a crime it's not on DVD yet. (Actually, now we've got "Mandragora," isn't "Face of Evil" the only story left from this season that's not yet available?)

I just looked it up and it is.

I've picked up a bit of work which will let me get the funds to buy some Doctor Who DVDs. I keep getting torn between the choice of whether I move on in my "discovery" of the old series and actually start watching Peter Davison's Doctor, or take the chance to get some more Tom Baker on the shelf. I've already settled that one definite purchase is "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"; should I save some aside for the "New Beginnings" box set...? Choices, choices.

ETA: Oh yeah, and speaking of that season (or series), I just picked up "The Deadly Assassin" a couple of days ago and watched it this afternoon. I'm not sure how it holds up for me on a second viewing; it seemed to drag a little during the fight in the matrix.

 

[Mr. Sin]

New Beginnings is pretty good, but represents an era where WHO started to rely less on wit and fun and more on technobabble and continuity.

 

[23skidoo]

New Beginnings is pretty good, but represents an era where WHO started to rely less on wit and fun and more on technobabble and continuity.

Still, the three stories are self-contained. I disagree with the negative view towards continuity expressed here. The early years of the series were all about that -- in fact most of the early stories led one into the next, which is what JNT got back to when he took over in 1980-81.

I'm not sure why so negative about continuity. You can't push the reset button every week. And frankly Doctor Who needed to be reeled back. Things got really silly near the end of the Douglas Adams tenure -- you know you're in trouble when your villain starts cracking up into laughter on camera in his death scene. Just like James Bond needs to be reeled in from time to time, Doctor Who needed a period of serious stories. And the theme of entropy that underscores these three stories is striking. And is probably one of the reasons these stories have aged a lot better than, say, The Keys of Marinus which I just ripped apart in another thread.

Doctor Who went back to having fun soon enough with stuff like Black Orchid and (after the events of Earthshock) things got pretty fun again with Arc of Infinity and the like. The Kinda duology was quite good, too.

Alex

 

[Cutter John]

Three of my fav stories. Sweet!

And I agree with 23skidoo. After Adams left the show pretty much in shambles, I was dying to get back to more serious DW. So Tom's last series is near the top of my list. While to me Traken was just so-so, Logopolis and Castrovalva were some of the best Who ever. It turned the show back into an SF series, rather than 'The Wacky Adventures of tom Baker'. Though I'll admit I started getting bored with the stories about mid-way through Davisons first series.

 

[DWF]

The 14th season is my favorite as well and The Masque Of Mandragora was a great season opener. Norman Jones' voice was awesome and he was far more memorable in Mandragora than in The Silurians. And it also had a young Tim Pigott-Smith in it, it was great seeing him in V For Vendetta as well.

 

[Captain Pike]

Doctor Who went back to having fun soon enough with stuff like Black Orchid

Fun, like a root-canal..

and (after the events of Earthshock) things got pretty fun again with Arc of Infinity and the like. The Kinda duology was quite good, too.

Alex

Light hearted sure, but actual fun? Compared to the Williams era these titles are dire, imo.

 

[23skidoo]

Light hearted sure, but actual fun? Compared to the Williams era these titles are dire, imo.

Interestingly the Williams area has been criticized for being too dark and serious as well. And some of the stories I've cited are generally acclaimed as among the best Doctor Who of the classic series - Earthshock, etc. - as were many stories of the Williams era. Just look at the DWM "Mighty 200" poll.

I don't understand why people think Doctor Who should be a comedy. There's plenty of room for dead serious storytelling, and the fact Davison went more in that direction than, say, Colin Baker or early McCoy, was fine by me. And yes I did find those stories fun. All of Doctor Who is fun - it's a show about a guy wandering around in a police box, for heaven's sake.

But the show does occasionally go too far into the silly, whether it's the Fat Bastard ripoff in Love & Monsters or Sil eating his slugs in Vengeance on Varos (which is otherwise a brilliant and ahead of its time story) or the bad guy in Horns of Nimon giggling himself to oblivion. I was very impressed with how the Traken/Logopolis/Castrovalva trilogy not only made for some serious storytelling, but also brought - amazingly - a good dose of hard SF to Doctor Who which is something you rarely saw. Considering Logopolis is built around the premise of block transfer computation (which, apparently, isn't a bunch of random technobabble and could be seen as predicting today's virtual worlds) and entropy. And Castrovalva was inspired by an MC Escher painting.

Not that the rest of Baker's final season didn't have other moments of brilliance, like that vampire episode. I could have done without Adric (though that would mean Nyssa would have probably been the sacrificial lamb in Earthshock), and Romana's departure was too rushed (the novelisation handled it much better). But the changeover to John Nathan Turner's leadership was the right decision at the right time and while it can be argued he overstayed his welcome by several years (someone new should have been brought in for McCoy) for those first couple of years he oversaw some great Doctor Who.

Was it ha-ha funny all the time? No, and that was a good thing. You compare it to the Williams era, and I suggest that, at least for Baker's last year and Davison's first, JNT brought to show back to the era that gave us such classic as, well, Masque of Mandragora (how's that for getting the thread back on topic!)

Alex

 

[Cutter John]

I don't know, I guess maybe I like a bit of silliness or fantasy with my DW. I think the problem with those first few seasons after Baker left is that JNT tried to push the show too far in the other direction, and wound up making it too dry and humorless. I want the show to be serious, but at the same time, its the silly alien or wierd science that add spice to the proceedings. The only eps I really enjoyed out of Davisons era were Castrovalva, Black Orchid, Earthshock, Five Doctors, The Kings Demons. And strangely enough, all of season 21. I'm not sure what happened, but the show definately seemed to loosen up that year. A shame it was Davisons last.

 

[23skidoo]

I don't know, I guess maybe I like a bit of silliness or fantasy with my DW. I think the problem with those first few seasons after Baker left is that JNT tried to push the show too far in the other direction, and wound up making it too dry and humorless. I want the show to be serious, but at the same time, its the silly alien or wierd science that add spice to the proceedings. The only eps I really enjoyed out of Davisons era were Castrovalva, Black Orchid, Earthshock, Five Doctors, The Kings Demons. And strangely enough, all of season 21. I'm not sure what happened, but the show definately seemed to loosen up that year. A shame it was Davisons last.

Whenever a show makes a shift, it often seems as if it's gone too far in the other direction. Take, for example, the Bond film Moonraker with Jaws and spacemen shooting lasers; the next Bond film was For Your Eyes Only which, except for an unnecessarily silly pre-credits sequence, was a pretty humorless film with virtually no fantasy elements. Similarly go back to You Only Live Twice, which had the Volcano, and compare it to the next film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service which reeled things back quite a bit, including relegating Q to a cameo. Man from UNCLE did the same thing. It started as a relatively serious spy show, turned into a comedy for its third season, and came back as a rather dry and super-serious action show for its final year (though by then audiences had abandoned it, so the show failed -- it was very much the Heroes of its day).

I agree Davison was just getting warmed up by his third year. No offence against Colin Baker but I often wonder how a fourth Davison year might have turned out, even with the uneven stories that were given to Baker and change of format.

Alex