....?!?!?!
How do you see that?
The 50th had a lot of great releases. Not just the
theatrical release of "The Day of the Doctor," but we also got the surprise release of "The Night of the Doctor" that nearly broke fandom with excitement.
We got the extraordinary production of
An Adventure in Space and Time, which was both a thoughtful and touching revisiting of how it all started.
We got my personal favorite (right along with "The Night of the Doctor"),
The Five Doctor(ish) Doctors Reboot, which is such a sweet and fun love letter to the fans, and fans have been clamoring and hoping for a sequel! Alas it doesn't seem likely it'll happen for the 60th but who knows what surprises are in store yet?
And that's before you even get to the countless novels, comics, and other tie-ins (like
Destiny of the Doctors) PLUS everything Big Finish did (and not just
The Light at the End which I loved but I know others didn't).
There were so many of them that I even ran a
poll about them and I still managed to forget some things that happened.
So I don't see how you could possibly come away with that feeling.
Oh I liked the fiftieth.
But ‘93 that logo was in all sorts of places.
There was a book every month from the virgin range, there was the repeat season… Pertwee was on daytime TV left right and centre.
Contests to win Daleks, what have you. Newspapers were covering the cancellation of Dark Dimension.
There was a radio documentary, and I think we may have got Ghosts of N-Space that year.
There were VHS releases, audio releases, a radio times cover.
DWMs special edition homaging the tenth anniversary Radio Times special was in newsagents everywhere. I think their ‘yearbook’ (basically a DW annual to replace the old world annual) kicked off that year.
I can’t remember if the MOMI exhibit started that year, or if it was already in situ.
Thirty years in the Tardis was on TV too — basically, for that year and particularly the later months, there was a high public profile for a show *that wasn’t even on the air anymore with new episodes* and by the standards of the day (and sort of… mentally adjusting for inflation) it was just saturated.
When the fiftieth came around it didn’t seem much bigger than it already had been at that time. No bigger than say the regen into Smith a few years earlier. Arguably less — the newspapers were giving out posters for the regen I recall. I don’t even remember if there *was* a proper special logo at the time. (40 had one, but not as much fanfare) Who was big because Who was big, rather than any kind of anniversary *bump* like we saw at ten, twenty, and particularly — as I said is my opinion — thirty. (25 got a small bump, stuff like the Dapol toy sets, a couple of mags) We had ‘adventure in space and time’ and some Bitsesize style documentary, but nothing as developed as 30 years in the Tardis.
The other things — concerts etc — were almost just like the existing levels of Whos media presence at the time.
I think that’s what I am talking about, the sort of ‘baseline’ presence of Who was so large, that the anniversary barely moved the needle, compared to previous anniversaries.
This year… well, we have the logo (which, like the thirty, sees us go back to Pertwee) and some new stuff (the choice of collection box set is cool too) but so far it’s main *bump* is that it’s trying to return to a media/pop culture presence that has eroded under Chibnall. It’s not as big as thirty or twenty — past doctors are not being wheeled out for photo calls, or doing the rounds on national TV — but it’s got some meat to it. Looks like the Fortnite thing has been delayed though, which is rather unfortunate.