I mentioned at the end of serial A that story names are controversial for this period of the show and said I'd go into more detail here. Now it comes to it, though, I'm not inspired; but I guess I'd better say a little.
For stories up to and including serial Z - The Gunfighters - there was no overall on-screen story title. This didn't matter at all at the time, of course, but when people started looking at the history of the program they wanted some way of referring to stories as a whole. Many production names were unknown, and in 1973 the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special decided to refer to each serial by the name of its first episode. Sometimes these were appropriate and stuck, sometimes not.
This story is a particularly awkward case. The Dead Planet doesn't really do it justice, The Survivors and Beyond the Sun were abandoned early, and the name under which it was commissioned - The Mutants - was reused for a 1972 Jon Pertwee story and is therefore confusing. It wasn't until 1980 that a new contender arrived: The Daleks. This came from the movie and book adaptations and had no historical link to the story, but was certainly fitting. Some sources such as Doctor Who Magazine stick to the original name, but most use The Daleks.
Again I've covered pretty much everything I want to say about the story in the individual episode entries, so instead I'll talk about a new phenomenon - the one that led to that 1980 name:
An Expanding Universe, Part 1: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks!
Since I started writing this blog I've bought two books, two audio plays and a back-issue of a magazine dedicated to the program, all of which feature William Hartnell's Doctor. I've also ordered some more books from the library and downloaded a free audio short story read by William Russell. If I wanted there's any number of reference works I could consult (and for the next serial I will be referring to another issue of Doctor Who Magazine, which has a "Fact of Fiction" feature giving some of the background details).
We take all this for granted now, but back in 1963 it was just a TV program. The popularity of the Daleks opened up the possibility of more and just about the earliest spin-off product, published less than a year after the show began, was David Whitaker's novelisation of the second story: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. I'm not going to review it because I've not read it - in fact I've only read three of the novelisations in total, and with a limited budget I'm going to focus on the original novels - but it was part of a trickle that became a flood in 1965 (if you'll forgive the cliché). I'm just focusing on stories for this blog, but there are now about 175 of the blighters set in the First Doctor's timeline (only 29 of which were on TV); far more than I'll ever be able to experience, let alone review. And that doesn't include stories about the Daleks from this era that don't feature the Doctor.
Some of the stories are quite odd. Take, for example, Playtime (from Doctor Who Magazine, 1992). I choose this because (a) I've read it, and (b) it's set at the same time as the very first episode of the TV series. In it a young girl called Sarah Jane Smith visits a certain junkyard, playing games and dreaming of adventure. That's it. The whole point of the story is to enjoy the connections with two eras of the program (though she did meet the First Doctor eventually, in yet another era). I enjoyed it, in a "short diversion" sort of way, but it's not something that would have made sense to viewers in the 60s or 70s. In 1964 that level of cross-referencing is far in the future; but with The Daleks, the change from "TV program" to "franchise" has already begun.
Rating:
My opinion of this story has changed significantly watching it episode-by-episode, so I'm going to give my original rating and also take an average of the episode scores so I can compare the two. You can guess the result:
Single Sitting: 3.5/10.
Episodic: 6/10.
DWM Mighty 200: 80.51%, 37th.
2010 Gallifrey Base Non-Dynamic Rankings: 7.82, 50th out of 211.
I still rate it lower than most people; I wonder if that's because I'm not taking into account its historical significance and most of them are? Or that anything with Daleks in will be popular? Then again, it could simply be that my tastes are different when it comes to this story (and, as we shall see, serial C).
Next Time:
Another side step, as we move into glorious technicolor (and 1965) for Dr Who and the Daleks!
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