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The new Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour 90-minute edit has a new twist in the new regeneration scene that didn't exist in the original.
Posted in: BBC, Nickelodeon, TV | Tagged: david tennant, doctor who, patrick troughton
Doctor Who: The War Games Colourised Cut's Surprise Regeneration Scene
The new Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour 90-minute edit has a new twist in the new regeneration scene that didn't exist in the original.
Doctor Who: The War Games, the Second Doctor's (Patrick Troughton) final adventure, and the final story to be filmed in black and white has been colourised and edited down from its original four-hour runtime to a faster-paced 90-minute cut for new fans to discover. The Doctor, Jamie (Frazier Hines), and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) have to fight The War Chief (Philip Madoc), a renegade Time Lord bent on conquering the universe by abducting armies from across time and brainwashing into fighting endless war games with live rounds. The original serial ran for ten weeks and totaled four hours in runtime. The biggest surprise was a brand new regeneration scene where the Doctor transformed into the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee). "How?" You might ask since they never filmed a regeneration scene with Pertwee back in 1969. He hadn't even been cast yet. Well, tonight, we got the answer when Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour was broadcast on BBC Four in the UK.
Here's a useful supercut of the original black-and-white version of Doctor Who: The War Games if you don't want to catch up with the story by sitting through over four hours:
But First, The Re-Edited "New Faces" Scene…
At the end of "The War Games," the Time Lords declared the Doctor would be exiled to Earth, but first, he would be forced to regenerate into a new form so that he would start again. The original 1969 serial had them show The Doctor a series of random pictures of uncharismatic men (and one that looked like a drawing of Karl Marx). The Doctor kicked up a fuss mainly to delay the inevitable. The colourised version re-edited that scene to replace the random men with pictures of the Doctor's future selves from the modern era of the series, namely Peter Capaldi, David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker, and Matt Smith! All this without changing any of the original dialogue or script.
Where Did the New Regeneration Scene Come From?
Russell T. Davies' new credo for Doctor Who is "There's always a twist at the end!" Well, "The War Games in Colour" has a twist as well, which is that the new regeneration scene was there all along. It was created by a fan group of FX artists called The Confession Dial, aka Jacob Booth, who released their clip a year ago on their YouTube Channel. They're not the only fan group creating FX scenes from the series – the scene has been thriving for years. This is the first time a fan group's entire created scene has been used for an official BBC release of Doctor Who. Years before, a fan's title sequence inspired the BBC to redesign the Twelfth Doctor's (Peter Capaldi) new title sequence because it was genuinely innovative.
The final scene is pretty much as shown above but tightened with some editing and additional FX.
Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour: A Must-Watch for New Fans
The biggest easter egg of the new edit is the inclusion of shots of the future Doctors as well as subtle story retcons such as including Murray Gold's theme for John Simm's version of The Master to imply that The War Chief was an early incarnation of The Master. The inclusion of the New Doctors has interesting implications for the story as it suggests the Time Lords knew who the Doctor was going to become in the future and possibly that the Time War was coming. That means they tried to defy time by attempting and failing to prevent it. Russell T. Davies and Phil Collinson have turned this new version of Doctor Who: The War Games into a must-watch for fans of the modern era. Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour is only broadcast and streamed in the UK, but it will be released on physical media in 2025.
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