The Tenth Planet episode four to be animated for DVD release

THE TENTH PLANET – the Doctor Who story that marked the close of the William Hartnell era – is to have its missing fourth episode animated for DVD release, BBC Worldwide has confirmed.

Broadcast in October 1966, The Tenth Planet was the first story to feature iconic foes the Cybermen, the first to introduce the concept of regeneration and the last to feature the First Doctor as the series’s lead. The final installment of the story, episode four, has been missing from the BBC Archives since the mid-1970s and is possible the most sought-after of the lost Doctor Who episodes because of its historical importance to the show.

The missing episode four will be animated by Australia-based Planet 55 Studios, which used its patent Thetamation process to recreate the lost episodes 4 and 5 of Hartnell adventure The Reign of Terror for its DVD release last month.

Doctor Who range producer Dan Hall said: “It’s a real thrill to be bringing such an iconic Doctor Who episode back to life. Without the events established in The Tenth Planet episode 4, there would be no Doctor Who as we know it!”

The Tenth Planet DVD is set to be released in late 2013 and is expected to also include a reconstruction of the missing episode using existing telesnaps which featured on the VHS release in 2000.

A selection of stills from the new animation work-in-progress can be seen via a gallery on BBC Worldwide’s official Doctor Who 50th Anniversary website.

There is also a showreel available to watch on the Planet 55 website featuring a scene of the First Doctor stalked in the snow, inspired by The Tenth Planet.

Advertisement

COLLECTOR TAKES THE MISSING MICKEY: WEEKLY ROUND-UP

PRESENTING some stories of interest from the past week . . .

• Herefordshire firm’s lost Mickey Mouse prototype film auctioned: A lost Disney cartoon featuring what is thought to be the prototype Mickey Mouse character has been sold in the US for $25,000 (£16,000).
• Missing Doctor Who episodes discovered: Doctor Who fans are getting a fresh opportunity to travel back in time with the discovery of two missing episodes from the long-running BBC series. Also check out this piece about the recoveries over at the Radio Times.
• Alexander Graham Bell recordings played from 1880s: Alexander Graham Bell foresaw many things, including that people could someday talk over a telephone. Yet the inventor certainly never could have anticipated that his audio-recording experiments in a Washington, D.C., lab could be recovered 130 years later and played for a gathering of scientists, curators and journalists. You can hear some of the revived recordings here.
• Vinyl treasure found on Wake Island: In a tale straight from an adventure book, contractors here recently stumbled upon a vinyl record collection with an estimated value between $90,000 and $250,000.
• BFI to present restored rare Hitchcock films with new scores: As part of London 2012 festival, composers including Nitin Sawhney will work on new scores for early Hitchcock films.

Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes

A NEW book examining how episodes of Doctor Who came to go missing, and then turn up again, is released this September.

Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes is written by Doctor Who Restoration Team member Richard Molesworth and published by Telos Publishing.

You can find out more about the book, including a brief interview with the author, over in the Out Now section.

Here’s the official blurb:

In the 1960s, the BBC screened 253 episodes of its cult science fiction show Doctor Who, starring William Hartnell and then Patrick Troughton as the time travelling Doctor. Yet by 1975, the Corporation had wiped the master tapes of every single one of these episodes. Of the 124 Doctor Who episodes starring Jon Pertwee shown between 1970 and 1974, the BBC destroyed over half of the original transmission tapes within two years of their original broadcast.

In the years that followed, the BBC, along with dedicated fans of the series, began the arduous task of trying to track down copies of as many missing Doctor Who episodes as possible. The search covered BBC sales vaults, foreign television stations, overseas archives, and numerous networks of private film collectors, until the tally of missing programmes was reduced to just 108 episodes.

For the first time, this book looks in detail at how the episodes came to be missing in the first place, and examines how material subsequently came to be returned to the BBC. Along the way, those people involved in the recovery of lost slices of Doctor Who’s past tell their stories in candid detail, many for the very first time.

No more rumours, no more misinformation, no more fan gossip. The truth about Doctor Who’s missing episodes can now be told in full!

• Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes, by Richard Molesworth, is out September 2010, priced £15.99 (+p&p). You can order a copy from Telos Publishing.

The Reign Of Error

A WORDPRESS neighbour of wipednews.com has helped restore the correct audio to a brief clip from one of the missing episodes of Doctor Who.

Blogger Rumpio came to realize the fragment of grainy b&w footage – part of a 15-minute silent 8mm film reel of off-screen footage shot by a Who fan in Australia in the 1960s – was incorrectly synced with an off-air audio recording while working on a reconstruction of the two missing episodes (four and five, of six) of Season One’s The Reign of Terror.

It was assumed that in the brief clip – from “The Tyrant of France” (tx 29/8/64) – companion Ian Chesterton mentions a character called Jules Renan. That is the way it appears on 2|entertain DVD Lost in Time, which also includes the rest of the 8mm clips capturing precious seconds from missing William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episodes, coupled to their respective soundtracks.

Unfortunately, it’s not an exact science. The problem with the 8mm clips is summed up well by Steve Phillips over at The Docto Who Clips List website:

“Most of the clips on this reel are in the form of very short “reaction” shots and are thus difficult to tie down to exact places in their source episodes. Hence, descriptions for these clips are presented on an “educated guess” basis (arrived at by studying research materials such as scripts, audios and telesnaps) and should not be taken as gospel!”

Rumpio, however, has managed to pinpoint the exact placing of the clip using “limited lipreading skills” to work out Ian was, in fact, saying something that sounded like “cheese”.

I’ll leave the rest of the explaining up to Rumpio himself over at Rumpio’s Blog, but he’s shared his resynced version on YouTube, which you can enjoy below.

Photos From The Celestial Toymaker Discovered

The current issue of Doctor Who Magazine (issue 408) features some never-before-seen photos from missing ’60s story The Celestial Toymaker.

For the latest issue, the long-running magazine’s regular ‘The Fact Of Fiction’ feature looks at the classic William Hartnell adventure –  broadcast in four parts from April 2nd – 23, 1966, and starring a young Michael Gough as the eponymous villain.

It includes revealing set-photos and publicity pictures from the serial taken from negatives located in the BBC’s Photo Library a few months ago by regular DWM contributor Derek Handley.

The new images are important as only episode four, ‘The Final Test’, still resides in the BBC archives, though soundtracks to all episodes exist and have been released by the BBC as part of their Radio Collection series. You can buy it here.

Doctor Who Magazine #408 (cover date 27 May, 2009) is available now, priced £3.99.