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Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Review, TV | Tagged: bbc, Carole Ann Ford, doctor who, Mark Ayres, russell t davies, The Daleks in Colour, william hartnell
Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour Review: Imperfect, Fun '60s Curiosity
Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour is a faster, shorter edit of the original story "The Daleks" that's vibrant & more dynamic but still flawed.
Article Summary
- BBC's Doctor Who remasters The Daleks, now in colour and condensed to 75 minutes.
- Original seven-part serial trimmed to improve dynamics and pacing for modern viewers.
- New dialogue by Davies fills in the gaps to keep the storyline moving.
- "The Daleks in Colour" offers a fun take on Doctor Who history for fans - with some flaws.
One of the interesting offshoots of the 60th Anniversary and the expansion of Doctor Who is Russell T. Davies' new plan to remaster and colourise old stories from the 1960s so that kids and younger fans can discover the show's original stories. "The Daleks" is the serial that introduced the Daleks for the first time. The bigger deal isn't the colourisation. That's just a Trojan Horse. It's that the serial was cut down to a 75-minute single episode, down from the original seven 25-minute episodes that's the real draw.
It's fascinating to watch this early version of Doctor Who when they were still figuring out what the characters were. The Doctor (William Hartnell) in his second story was still a massive selfish dick who put everyone in danger because he just wanted to explore a dead city. In the earliest version, the Daleks were quite limited: they were trapped in the city because they could only move around with their magnetic bases on its metal floors. They even had a non-lethal setting on their guns. Their genocidal desire to exterminate the now-peaceful Thals is a takeoff of the Morlocks vs. the Eloi from H.G. Wells' story The Time Machine. New material written by Russell T. Davies was dialogue by the Daleks for more precision in defining what they were up to and filling any plot gaps in the shorter, faster cut. Alas, there were no new scenes shot with an older Susan with Carole Ann Ford reappearing.
Davies had it drummed into him from early in his career that kids these days refuse to watch black and white movies or television because it feels old and antiquated, which kids consider their mortal enemy. I would argue that it's really the glacially slow pacing of old BBC television dramas. The original version of "The Daleks" spent, for example, an entire half-hour featuring the characters trying to cross a dangerous quarry, all the while struggling and complaining about how hard it is to cross that dangerous quarry! It's one thing in the early Sixties where there literally wasn't anything else to watch on British television at the time, but nobody today would sit through that for anything other than academic purposes. The recut colourised version deals with that sequence in a few minutes. The good news is the new edit just zips by, spending just enough time with every scene without them running far too long after the main drama of the scene is already over. With colours, the costumes, and the more dynamic score by Mark Ayres, "The Daleks in Colour" has the faster pacing of a 1960s episode of Star Trek. There's greater tension and urgency to the drama, and the stakes feel higher. The cast's performances are sharper and more dynamic because the slow or dead moments were edited out, and more nuance has been drawn out in the Doctor and the companions' relationships. Some of the jump cuts are a bit too abrupt. The abrupt flashbacks to the same earlier plot point to keep the story clear were unnecessary because that earlier scene was very recent in the short runtime, and the second half rushed through the race-against-time climax perhaps a bit too quickly.
The technical side of the remaster isn't perfect, though. They kept the blurry, unstable picture quality of early Sixties videotape without digitally sharpening the image like the remasters of the original Star Trek episodes. As a result, the picture looks blurry and worse the larger the screen you watch it on. At least they cleaned up a lot of the visual noise that arose from the inherent instability of old videotape. Would this version entice new viewers and kids to watch? Hard to say as the flaws of low-budget studio production values and the stiffer acting style from the 1960s might still be a turn-off. However, if you're in the mood for vintage Doctor Who, it's a fun watch – just not a "must" watch. The beauty of modern Doctor Who is you can pick it up from almost any point and still understand the story. "The Daleks in Colour" is still a history lesson, a curio, if a fun one.
Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour is now streaming (in the UK only) on BBC iPlayer, and will be out on Blu-Ray and DVD in the UK and US early next year.
Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour
7.5/10
The original 7-part serial cut down to a single 75-minute story and colourised version of Doctor Who's first Dalek story is faster, almost too fast, but is fun and more dynamic when it works. However, it's not perfect with technical flaws of old 1960s videotape still giving the picture a grimy, out-of-focus look. While fun to watch, it's hard to know if kids or a younger audience would still want to watch it because the flaws of a low-budget 1960s production might be a turn-off for modern viewers.
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