What might have been, but shouldn't have

[mmcirvin]

The 1965 Amicus movie Dr. Who and the Daleks was a curiosity I'd wanted to see for some time: a big-screen, if very low-budget, Doctor Who adaptation done before most of the series mythology was well-established. It turns out to be a pretty awful movie, but interesting in context.

The oddest thing about it from a Doctor Who perspective is the alternate backstory: the Doctor here is a scatterbrained Englishman named Dr. Who, played by the great Peter Cushing with a pretty good vocal William Hartnell impression, but without any of the Hartnell Doctor's cranky volatility. He's a nice guy. Susan and Barbara are both his grandchildren, and the TARDIS is his own invention, with a junky interior that looks like the aftermath of a tornado hitting a junior-high-school science laboratory. Barbara is a complete doofus, and Ian is an even bigger doofus and klutz who sets the TARDIS on its way by accident; without so much as a special effect it instantly transports them to the cardboardy planet Skaro, where they all have a truncated but still tedious version of the first Dalek adventure, with the Daleks trying to exterminate the Thals, who look like refugees from the campiest Star Trek episode ever.

There are, at least, lots of Daleks, though in their actual deeds they are as feeble and stupid as they always are. The Doctor himself is clearly considered a secondary attraction to the Daleks, which for some reason absolutely inflamed the British imagination in the early Sixties; and as many things as possible are painted eye-popping, garish, supersaturated colors, because color was the movie's other big draw.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and the theme music isn't any version of the familiar Doctor Who theme, but, rather, this piece of lounge jazz that sounds like it belongs in a movie about a martini-sipping secret agent.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

The Doctor himself is clearly considered a secondary attraction to the Daleks, which for some reason absolutely inflamed the British imagination in the early Sixties;

The nominal answer to the question of the British fascination with Daleks (and Trifids, for that matter) is nuclear paranoia. I've read a bit about the trends in science fiction from the turn of the century to the 50s or 60s in America, and the author or two I've read plot a parallel course between America's hopes for nuclear power, followed, postwar, by its fears, to the themes of utopias and dystopias in SF. However, I wouldn't dream of lecturing you, a resident of the atomic push-button World of Tomorrow, on the topic of atom-powered utopia.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I actually think it goes a little deeper than that. In America you had the nuclear paranoia post-World War II, and alien invasion stories and radioactive mutant stories became big. That's the origin story for the Daleks too—they're radioactive mutants left behind after a nuclear war—but the roots are older. If you look at all closely, Terry Nation's first Dalek story is clearly H. G. Wells' The Time Machine with the serial numbers filed off, and the Daleks themselves, while they play the role of the Morlocks, are physically smaller versions of Wells' Martians from The War of the Worlds, monstrous blobby head-critters who walked around in mechanical tripod-bots.

I've talked about this before... Basically I think that sometime in the Victorian age the British developed a particular fascination with apocalypse stories and space monsters that has never left them. I don't know why this is; possibly it was a nervous reaction to having an unruly globe-straddling empire riven by perennial war. I'd say it came from Wells, but I think it predated him; George Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking" from 1871 is a major precursor (it has no space monsters but is a speculative tale of the apocalyptic war that breaks the British Empire). Jess Blevins' Fantastic Victoriana site has descriptions of gobs of the stuff.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And, coincidentally, one of the quarries that constantly played the role of alien planets on Doctor Who belonged to the Dorking Greystone Lime Co.