Alden Bates' Weblog

Online today - TSV 57!

After the news of the recovery of missing episode The Lion in TSV 56, the next issue contained the full story of its recovery, as well as the more off-beat experiences of Neil Lambess in his new regular column The Life and Times of Neil Lambess.

The other major item was the printing of Pilots of the Deep. Parts 1 and 2 had been printed in TSV 12 and 14 back in 1989 before the original artist, Mark Roach, had lost interest. Ten years later, David Ronayne and Peter Adamson collaborated on a conclusion and it was printed (along with the first two parts) in TSV 57. There was even a behind the strip article about the creation of Pilots of the Deep. I wonder if Mark Roach has seen it. :)

Also in this issue, Pex anticipates The Juggernauts, and he and the Karkus team up to fight a giant headless chicken. Yes!

Next time, Beyond the Sofa!

Previously: Resurrection of the Daleks
See also: the write-up by Jamas

Back in Y2K or so, Jim Mortimore wrote a Doctor Who novel called Campaign. At the time, BBC books were publishing Doctor Who books from a wider range of people, so he submitted it to them. It was rejected. Campaign, you see, didn't so much push the limits of the genre as kick the limits over and then run away giggling. It's a veritable mind-bender of a story.

At the time, the author chose to self-publish the novel, and the other day, it went up on the NZDWFC site as an eBook. It's available primarily as a PDF file (although there's also the option to email the author regarding a hard copy) and not in HTML format like the other eBooks, mainly because it would be really difficult to do.

The crux is, the book is now available to an audience I suspect is wider than that which it would have had had it actually have been published back in 2000. :)

Read Campaign here.

In addition to reviewing the episodes, I'm going to run a "Battle of the Seasons", wherein I rate analogue stories from each season by some arbitrary factor. Story most-matching the factor in question gets 4 points, second gets 3 points, etc. It should be self explanatory as we go. Onward! (Spoiler warnings now in effect!)

Continue reading "Doctor Who Series 4 (Part 1)"

From this year's Great Carterton Wheelbarrow Race (Wairarapa Times Age coverage):

Continue reading "A Dalek pushing a Wheelbarrow"

So, back when Target was novelising Doctor Who stories, they ran into a bit of a snag with several of them. In the cases of Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks, they were unable to come to an arrangement which writer Eric Saward and the estate of Terry Nation were all happy with. Nature abhors a vacuum (and so do fans), thus in January 2000 the NZDWFC published an unofficial novelisation of Resurrection of the Daleks along with reprints of the four previous unofficial novelisations. Time marches on, and now Resurrection of the Daleks is available to read online in both spiffy HTML and PDF formats.

As usual, there are a number of cool extras such as author's notes and an article on the history of the novelisation. As mentioned previously, I've still been getting emails asking if we're going to put the rest of the novelisations up, and I expect to continue to get them until the last one goes up. Perhaps I should put up a "coming soon" notice on the City of Death page (but then I'll probably just get "How soon?" emails).

See also: the write-up by Paul
Previously: TSV 56

James Marsters, I suspect, is trying to do a tour of the major SF franchises. So far he's been in Smallville, Torchwood (which is as near as spit to Doctor Who) and ISTR he has a non-speaking appearance as Tarkin in Episode III. Watch out for him in the new Star Trek movie! So, now Torchwood series 2 is over, I give you the ultra-short episode guide...

Continue reading "Torchwood Series 2 (spoilers)"

Dr Who Tardis on sale on eBay

"A TROWBRIDGE Christian who renounced the evil of Dr Who in favour of his religion is selling his collection on internet auction website eBay."

And so we start on the last year of the 90s with issue 56 - the major item this issue was the Bottom Ten, another Doctor Who Magazine inspired article. Writers examined the ten stories which came lowest in the DWM mega-poll. I'm going to take a look at the stories myself further down this post. TSV 56 also contains not only the first installment of a new Erato comic Pex, but one of my favourite episodes of The Karkus (and the first Christmas episode, despite the issue coming out in January).

The big news this issue was the news about a missing episode, The Lion, turning up in Bruce Grenville's film collection. Paul Scoones wrote about this in the editorial, and Neil Lambess wrote up his first impressions in Indiana Who and the Lost Crusade. The full story is already online in TSV 57.

My favourite piece of artwork is Alistair Hughes' picture of the Destroyer from Battlefield. He also did the State of Decay picture on the back cover, for which we have a colour version as a bonus! Tom Baker looks a little familiar there... :) Also there is Peter Adamson's Mel and Pex artwork for the Bottom Ten entry on Paradise Towers.

See also: write-ups by Paul and Jamas.
Previously: TSV 55

Continue reading "TSV 56"

If you do an image search on Google for Doctor Who title sequence, you'll see that I've managed to sneak a screenshot of the USS Voyager into fourth position. Screenshot with the image enhanced so you can see it better:

Yes, I'm proud of my sneaking Trek into a Doctor Who search query.

Man, I really slacked off last month - 5 posts total, making it my slowest month since June 2006. Anyway, I'm having an unusually productive Sunday - I've caught up on most of my backload of DVDs, so I'm listening to The Blessing Tree and messing with things. Next task: work out why I can no longer edit templates in Movable Type.

TSV 55 went online a few days ago, completing the set of 1998 issues. Two items were already up, though I've fancied up Notes from a Who Island a bit; More on the other item later! The current NZDWFC site scheme is beginning to bug me - the font is too small, the margins too narrow, and things could do with tidying up in general. However that's a job which is going to take Some Time, so I'm not sure when it'll be done. I have a vague idea for a new site scheme, which I'll be testing out on this blog, so stay tuned. Anyway, back to the issue!

Jon's Contextual Continuity article on the New Adventures (I'd love to see one for the new series!) is sure to be a useful resource. I was surprised to see myself thanked at the top, though I can't remember what, if anything, I contributed to the article! His Doctor's Dilemma column tackles a question about Seven Keys to Doomsday, but only explains how the UK version fits into continuity - what about the NZ performance? There's also a question about the TV movie console room; After last year's Children in Need sketch, it's apparent that the Doctor simply changed the desktop theme to "Steampunk".

Tenure without Trial was the other article which was already up. This was Peter's idea, inspired by an article Doctor Who Magazine had done detailing a fictional reality where Doctor Who wasn't cancelled after season 26. In our fictional history, the 1986 hiatus never took place, and Colin Baker continued as the Doctor for another three years, with the seasons being filled out with stories which were under consideration for production at the time, Slipback, a couple of the Trial of a Time Lord stories, and even Time and the Rani retitled and re-envisaged as a three-parter with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant. I suspect our optimism may have been a little over the top at times, but it's difficult to say what Doctor Who might have become had things been different. Tenure is illustrated by Peter, of course, including a piece featuring the sixth Doctor and Mel which I'm bound as a Mel fan to mention.

The highlight of TSV 55 for me was Peter Adamson's comic strip Chrysalis, set on Vortis and featuring the eighth Doctor, which looks just as good online as it did in the printed issue. Fantastic artwork!

Next time on "What's Online": The worst Doctor Who stories ever!

See also: write-ups by Paul and Jamas.
Previously: TSV 54

As Google has the data for 2007 up, we can now look at the Google Trends graph for Doctor Who last year:

Comparing it with 2006's graph, it looks like there's a fairly consistant pattern emerging - queries roughly double once the show starts playing, spiking when the finale is aired, then in December there's another spike when the obligatory Christmas special airs.

Stacking all three years together, we can see that queries increased over 2006, though the difference between the Last of the Time Lords and Doomsday spikes is not as pronounced as the difference between Doomsday and The Parting of the Ways. I expect this trend will continue over 2008, though it will be interesting to see what effect decreasing output to 3 specials will have in 2009.

Continue reading "Doctor Who + Google Trends III"

TSV 54 is online! 54 was done as a double issue with TSV 53, hence the lack of regular features such as the editorial.

The major article this time is Andrew Pixley's article By Any Other Name, exploring 60s BBC documentation to discover exactly what the names for the first twenty or so Doctor Who stories are. Back then, like now, each episode was individually named, and it wasn't until later in William Hartnell's era that stories were given an overall name onscreen. Thus the first Doctor Who story is known variously as "An Unearthly Child", "The Tribe of Gum", or "100,000 BC" with the title used in any particular reference book depending largely on when it was written and who it was written by.

Unfortunately it looks like they couldn't really decide on a title at the time, at least for most of the stories, so I tend to stick with the traditional titles as applied to the official BBC video and DVD releases. I'm therefore sticking to "An Unearthly Child" for Serial A. :)

There's also another comic strip, titled Whispers and featuring the fifth Doctor and Turlough. And an opinion piece by David Lawrence titled Why Paul McGann is the Best Doctor, though I'd be willing to bet that he's revised his opinion since the new series began...

I had two articles in TSV 54: Confessions of a Melaphile, and a collaboration with Peter Adamson and Jon Preddle: An Addition to the Discontinuity Guide: Slipback, both of which have been online for some time as part of the Mel Bush page and DiscContinuity Guide, respectively.

See also: write-ups by Paul and Jamas.
Previously: TSV 53

I help out in a technical capacity with a Doctor Who fanfiction archive where recently the moderators made a number of changes to the site policies. Some of the authors didn't like the changes, thus proving you can't please everyone all of the time, but I honestly think that the changes (I had little to do with them myself) have had a positive impact on the site.

Then there are the authors who tried to flagrantly break the rules, got abusive to moderators, and set up LiveJournals named "fighting_spoon" in order to complain about how unfair it was that they got banned. You can read about them in this fandom_wank post.

Which is why I try to avoid running anything.

A thread on the NZDWFC boards reminded me that there were a bunch of Doctor Who references in the Apogee game Boppin'. Check it out:

Continue reading "Boppin' Doctor Who screengrabs"

From the current TV Guide:

Merry Christmas. :)