As noted in my post above yours, the March 1 release date was never officially announced by BBC Home Entertainment, so they were never obligated to it. So this doesn't really qualify as being "postponed."
The Underwater Menace DVD pulled... again...
- Thread starter Candlelight
- Start date
I've heard Steve Roberts say that. They were ordered to only show the telesnaps in sequence, no cutting back and forth for a conversation, no zoom, no panning, etc. Just a sequential display of telesnaps. He did say he could provide all that for free but they were ordered not to. Stupid.
Mr Awe
Royalties, probably. While the work may be offered for free, they may still have to pay royalties for the media used. They just wanted to get this out as cheaply as possible, hence no theme tunes on the recon, or production subtitles, even though they were done. The featurette was already paid for, so that got in.
Roberts was equally as puzzled!
It's not a matter of 'content', I really don't like animations.
I prefer telesnaps any day !
The Underwater Menace became available on Barnes and Noble's website on Tuesday. I ordered it and received it today. Plan on watching it over the weekend.
I despise telesnaps. Especially when I have to pay for them.
Its one thing if its a group of fans who lovingly try to restore the story with whatever available means other than animation, its another for an insitution like the BBC basically giving up restoring the missing episodes via animation and provide telesnaps, not done by said fans, as the only means of telling the story? Thanks, but no thanks.
Honestly, I've now seen all the telesnap/photo reconstructions and (I think) all the animated reconstructions, and with the exception of "The Invasion" (and maybe "The Tenth Planet"), I actually kind of prefer the fan recons. Some of the animated recons are pretty ugly (especially "The Ice Warriors"), and I prefer getting to see actual photos and surviving clips directly from the source. At the very least, I wish the animations would incorporate the surviving clips directly rather than replacing them with animation.
Although you have a point about the DVD "Underwater Menace" recon not working as well as the fan version.
Oh, I am all for better animation, ala Invasion/Infinity Quest (same studio). They should've done all the recons, IMO. And generally speaking, I am just appalled by the BBC's sheer disdain towards the show. They so obviously don't care, so why should I buy a sub-par product of their lackluster effort?
THAT SAID... I kind agree that incorporating surviving clips in it would've been a good choice. Maybe not action scenes, though - Invasion's action sequences look beautiful, bigger-than-life (thus exceed the limited budget of the original) and fit the era well. But I would've prefered if The Tenth Planet, for instance, had the live-action regeneration of 1 to 2, rather than animated, even though I get why they did it that way.
Indeed. If they were to release those fan recons, with NO changes to them, but only upped resolution, I might, might have reconsidered buying it. But not like this, no.
At the end of the day, I want to see the show was meant to be. Maybe not animated, but not as a static image byplay. Its not a good storytelling device at all.
But the history student in me finds it preferable because it's from the original source. Well, for the most part. A lot of the recons rely on photomontage, and there are some substantial CGI sequences in a few of them.
It's also interesting to learn about the various different ways that fragments of footage survived. The main mechanisms seemed to be either excerpts in surviving Blue Peter episodes or Australian censor clips that were ironically preserved in government archives long after the episodes they were cut from got destroyed. Then there was that FX footage from "The Space Pirates" that survived by getting misfiled, and the bits of TARDIS footage from "The Web of Fear" episode 1 and "Fury from the Deep" that survive because they were reused in "The War Games" episode 10. And then there were the home movies that were made of the location filming on "The Smugglers" and the climactic FX sequence in "The Evil of the Daleks."
An extra feature then. But not a main course - would you have liked it if the 80th anniversary edition of Metropolis included stills of the deleted scenes of the narrative? I know I wouldn't have.
All of that would make for a fascinating documentary about what did survive of DW over the years. BUT, it totally takes away from the narrative and the focus of the story. Instead, you're thinking "gee, I wonder how that would've looked like if it existed" or "what the heck is this supposed to mean?"
Bottom line, it takes away from the experience. I mean, we're lucky enough that the soundtracks of those episodes survived. It seems insanely unfair that telesnaps, of all things, are the best choice of action for them, instead of actually having the BBC actively MAKE UP for the fact that they misplaced them and creating a suitable alternative. It'll never be the original, anyway, so it might as well go the extra mile.
Of course, that the BBC looks at this as an enterprise first instead of settling the dust for its longest-running TV show ever, shows how actively disdainful they are to the old days of Who, and how deeply seeded their contempt for the show still is. Its amazing, but this is yet another indication that they don't care about the show the way it ought to be: With respect.
BTW, I highly recommend SF Debris' documentary about the lost and found DW episodes. Its fascinating look at the overall history of that era and how it related to later on.
If that were all that survived of a given section of the film, then yes, of course I'd rather have those stills included than left out. They're part of history, they're as close as we can get to seeing the lost portions, so absolutely I want to see them.
Really, it's not like photo montage is somehow an illegitimate cinematic technique. A lot of productions have used it intentionally for various purposes -- usually in opening or end titles, but sometimes within the story. Heck, the entire short film La Jetee -- the inspiration for Twelve Monkeys -- was a series of narrated still photographs.
But if I'm seeing an animated reconstruction, I'm still thinking "I wonder how it really looked." If there are actual photos in existence, then I can get a partial answer to that question. An animation can give a clearer idea of what action was being performed in a non-dialogue scene, but if it's the animators' interpretation of the staging directions in the camera script, then it's still a step or two removed from the primary source.
For you. Not for me. For me, seeing actual photos from the production makes me feel closer to the real thing than seeing someone's animated reconstruction of how they think it might have looked. Sure, a really well-done animation can be more satisfying as a work of entertainment, which I guess is what you're saying, but most of the animations are not that well-done. If the animation is as bad as it is in "The Ice Warriors," then it actively detracts from the experience.
See, the thing is, fans are motivated purely by sentiment, but the people actually running the business have to be motivated by business concerns first. So fans often assume that TV executives are "contemptuous" of a show simply because they aren't as sentimental toward it as the fans are able be. But they can't be, because a job is a completely different thing from a hobby. It's not "contempt" just because they have real, professional responsibilities to weigh, responsibilities that transcend their personal feelings. And it's mean-spirited to accuse people of having nefarious motives just because they don't do their jobs the way you wish they did. Most people do the best they can, but sometimes they just can't share your priorities. If you were a BBC exec, you'd have responsibilities to all the company's interests, all its hundreds or thousands of shows, and Doctor Who would just be one of them. You'd have to weigh it against everything else. You'd only have so many resources and so much time and attention you could allocate to it without taking them away from other shows that also need resources and attention.
I love the classic show, but it's an old show, and its production values don't measure up by today's standards. It's a niche interest. So I know better than to expect it to get unlimited resources devoted to it. That's not an affront, it's just reality. We just can't expect everyone in the world to prioritize things according to our own personal preferences.
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