The peanut gallery is already declaring this a huge lore change.
LOL
I don't think it's huge, but... also note that season "6B" was described by fans to explain some continuity issues and was officially accepted by the BBC?
Yup. Back in the '80s when PBS showed the syndication edits where each serial was combined into a single movie-length installment, "The War Games" was the only one so long it had to be split into two parts. Which was something of a relief, since my PBS station showed them at 10 PM Saturday nights, so I had to stay up really late when they did a 6- or 7-parter.
My PBS station, airing this at 10pm on Saturday, broke this up between parts as well. It's reminiscent of old 1940s movies where, halfway in or so, they had a big 'INTERMISSION' sign appear on the screen so people could get water and treats to ingest or expel.
Classic Who really was meant to be watched in multiple installments, at which point all of the talk of "this is long and padding and boring" evaporates faster than a shotglass of scotch on the surface of the sun because now everyone wants to sit through it all in one setting and not to actually enjoy it for what it is. I also remember early VHS releases that were cut down and friends and I argued the same thing - why cut the story down? (All this getting worse once missing episodes were brought up at the events, as that's arguably worse than a missing scene.) Apparently now it's the hip thing to want it all whittled down to as little as they can manage? Kinda funny, fans back then vs what fans seem to want now.
I don't agree. I think "The War Games" is very well-paced and never feels padded, because every couple of episodes, the story expands and shifts focus, so it isn't just the same thing over and over. I'd hate to see it hacked to pieces, even more than I hate the idea of colorizing something that was made in black-and-white.
^^this
It has a variety of locations and makes really good use of them all. Especially when considering, thanks to season production troubles, that the writers had to complete one episode in something like three days, "The War Games" is a genuine tantamount. There's only one plot point to nitpick (Zoe doesn't remember Villa despite seeing him in a photo earlier in the episode and her main notable trait is photographic/eidetic memory), and even then it's not a terrible one as Zoe has so many other scenes that show her in a great light. Given how fast the episodes had to be written, they had no real time to make edits and had to roll with it...
The coloring looks fantastic. The editing will probably remove a lot of the sprinkles of time zone background information, and based on the modern regeneration effect, I expect the new music to be overloaded with choral wailing. Which is funny because the story, in 1969, without the music, managed to sell the huge nature of the Time Lords without it. Again, for how rapidly the story was churned out, they wrote it really well.
