Spoilers Power of the Daleks

[Christopher]

Well the absence of pointy-eared people and the fact that the episode was apparently set in 2020 implied that .

Honestly, I suspect that TOS's writers may have originally intended Spock's Vulcan to be the cis-Mercurian one. After all, Roddenberry suggested that Spock was "possibly half-Martian" in his original proposal, so he started out thinking of Spock as being from a Solar planet; and it wasn't until "Amok Time" that Vulcan was portrayed as being in its own distinct system (since the ship was described as being on course for Vulcan rather than for Sol System).

Though I am curious as to when people stopped thinking that there was a planet between the Sun & Mercury. I remember reading James Blish's adaptation of 'Tomorrow is Yesterday'. I believe his version was based on an early draft of the script and when Captain Christopher first meets Spock he mentions that Vulcan until Spock disabuses him about its existence.

Urbain LeVerrier proposed the existence of Vulcan in 1859 to explain some observed anomalies in Mercury's orbit, on the principle that some unknown planet was tugging on it gravitationally. But in 1915, Einstein's equations of General Relativity explained the discrepancies exactly as the result of spacetime warping under the Sun's gravity, so the existence of Vulcan was disproven. Still, the idea had caught on in pop culture, and so it lived on in science fiction for a few more decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)

 

[diankra]

The Dalek comic strips (often written by Whitaker) include a chart of Earth's solar system with Vulcan inside Mercury's orbit (it's in a story where Skaro goes on a wander through our system, Mondas-style).
Edit: seems likely that's in th opening story of the 1964 Dalek annual rather than the TV21 strips.

 

[Qonundrum]

I saw it the day it came out on DVD. Pretty much holds up as well as I expected it to - meaning immense. epically cool.

And the sad part is, the BBC doing animation for it pretty much shows the episodes are probably forever gone, the amount of time and money to animate is pretty large. Even if episodes on 16mm film were languishing somewhere, the elements would have turned the films into rotting gooey vinegar by now and not the nice edible type. It's remarkable that "Web of Fear" and "Enemy of the World" were salvageable, there was an article some time ago discussing tens of thousands of repairs needed for each story that took a ton of time to repatriate. Tears, dirt specks, holes in the film, how fragile the film strips are - even the most careful handling might not be enough... it's unfortunate for sure. With each passing year the possibility of problems only multiplies.