"The Wilderness Years": memories, discussions, videos and opinions.

[Timewalker]

I do get annoyed at how NuWho takes the attitude of "It doesn't matter if its stupid or makes no sense, because its Doctor Who!" so often nowadays. Not that there isn't stupid and goofy stuff in Classic Who, but the show in general seemed to take the events happening much more seriously when the situation called for it, even green bubble wrap could be deadly and you'd take it seriously.

Exactly. NuWho became egregiously dumbed-down and I got into an argument with someone on my gaming forum who likes Who. I mentioned how stupid I thought the story about the Moon-as-an-egg was, and he said, "A friend of mine wrote that!" and I said, "Sorry, but your friend wrote a stupid script that makes no sense whatsoever."

Note that I was speaking negatively about this person's friend, not the person on the forum, who is a very intelligent individual (has a doctorate in theology, loves Doctor Who, and we're both Dragonlance fans). He was still offended on his friend's behalf, and I wondered how he couldn't tell that it was an awful script.

Classic Who did tackle some serious issues, such as drug trafficking and addiction, genocide, and many more. It didn't (usually) have the attitude of "It's kids' science fiction, it doesn't HAVE to make sense!" that so many nuWho stories appeared to have. There were plenty of times during the first two Capaldi seasons that I wondered if the showrunner had forgotten that he had scientifically-literate adults among his viewers, and not just 8-year-old children (most of whom could also likely have seen through the nonsense).

 

[diankra]

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention a few projects that had nothing to do with Reeltime or BBV, some of which were actually produced by the BBC itself.

There was, of course, "Doctor Who: The Movie" starring Paul McGann, the first attempt at ending the wilderness years.

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There was the much reviled Dimensions in Time, a short done for charity and the 30th anniversary.

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I'm not as hard on this one as some people are. It wasn't meant to be a serious attempt at Doctor Who, it was meant to raise money for children and it was reportedly very successful at that.

There was the hilarious Comic Relief special, "The Curse of the Fatal Death" ...

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... and the original attempt at continuing Doctor Who with a Ninth Doctor, "Scream of the Shalka".

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IIRC some who wrote Zygon weren't happy with the final version.

 

[diankra]

Yep. Just as Star Trek, for me, is TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager, Doctor Who is 1963-1996, Hartnell through McGann.

The rest is just reboot/spinoff stuff that mostly doesn't appeal to me, though I will admit that I like Tennant and Capaldi as actors. The writing got progressively worse as the seasons (and Doctors) went on. I don't like Smith at all.

I'm old enough that TNG is new stuff. Recall a pub conversation where we all confidently said it would be a massive failure (Trek fans would hate anything without Kirk and Spock, anyone else would hate Trek. So we thought).

 

[Timewalker]

I'm old enough that TNG is new stuff. Recall a pub conversation where we all confidently said it would be a massive failure (Trek fans would hate anything without Kirk and Spock, anyone else would hate Trek. So we thought).

Heh, I watched "Encounter at Farpoint" with a couple of dozen other people, most of us still wearing our medieval costumes from the SCA feast we'd had earlier that night. We were at the home of one of the members who'd taped it. So yeah, I remember it when it was brand-new as well.

 

[FredH]

Continued...

BBV also did the P.R.O.B.E series featuring Caroline John as returning Third Doctor companion Liz Shaw. By all the accounts I was able to find, these weren't very good but I think I would still like to see them all the same. Although, I think the former Doctors constantly turning up in different roles would pull me out of the story every time.

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BBV's Auton trilogy was originally supposed to be a Reeltime production featuring Nicholas Courtney and Beverly Cressman returning as the Lethbridge-Stewarts. When Reeltime found themselves unable to produce the project, they passed it on to BBV. Nicholas Courtney soon bowed due to health issues and the Lethbridge-Stewart's were written out entirely. I would love to see the alternate reality where the wilderness years were ruled by the continuing adventures of the Lethbridge-Stewart's.

Apparently, at one point, a character in the "Auton" stories makes mention of the scientific works created by a UNIT scientific advisor by the name of "Dr John Smith". Sneaky.

I was also surprised to read that Nicholas Courtney was bowing out of projects due to health issues as early as this. Wikipedia says that he suffered from clinical depression, which put some real perspective into it for me regarding his subsequent cancellations of Doctor Who appearances.

Sadly, without Courtney's involvement to lend legitimacy to the project, this one comes off as a little schlocky to me.

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BBV also produced the reportedly achingly bad "Cyberons", featuring obvious Cyberman ripoffs...

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... And it's sequel, "Zygon: When Being You Isn't Enough", which I saw described online as "soft core porn with Zygons".

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That's an eclectic collection of content. For those of you who lived through this era, what was your opinion of this stuff? Was it like ambrosia to the masses, or were fans indifferent? Some of it seems interesting, but a lot of it looks like absolute schlock, with some of it bordering on copyright infringement.

No matter what the quality of the final product, you can't deny the love that went into these projects. A time when the fans ruled the roost. Definitely an interesting time in Whovian history.

Well, this was the same era as the Virgin Doctor Who novels — and those, I think, form the single best chunk of the entire franchise after the Hinchcliffe era.

 

[kirk55555]

Exactly. NuWho became egregiously dumbed-down and I got into an argument with someone on my gaming forum who likes Who. I mentioned how stupid I thought the story about the Moon-as-an-egg was, and he said, "A friend of mine wrote that!" and I said, "Sorry, but your friend wrote a stupid script that makes no sense whatsoever."

Note that I was speaking negatively about this person's friend, not the person on the forum, who is a very intelligent individual (has a doctorate in theology, loves Doctor Who, and we're both Dragonlance fans). He was still offended on his friend's behalf, and I wondered how he couldn't tell that it was an awful script.

Classic Who did tackle some serious issues, such as drug trafficking and addiction, genocide, and many more. It didn't (usually) have the attitude of "It's kids' science fiction, it doesn't HAVE to make sense!" that so many nuWho stories appeared to have. There were plenty of times during the first two Capaldi seasons that I wondered if the showrunner had forgotten that he had scientifically-literate adults among his viewers, and not just 8-year-old children (most of whom could also likely have seen through the nonsense).

It makes me think of The Happiness Patrol. Its a story about a planet where everybody literally has to be happy all the time or face the consequences, with colorful pink haired guards enforcing the law and a candy based side villain and it still feels more serious then a lot of NuWho. Plus the story in general has a point to it andit even manages to show how the "goofy" villains are really deadly threats. I'm not saying that the story is without flaws, but you couldn't get a story like it in NuWho, which would turn up the goofiness and turn down the message and probably the violence as well. I shudder to think what NuWho would do with characters like Helen A or the Kandyman, especially RTD.

 

[Timewalker]

It makes me think of The Happiness Patrol. Its a story about a planet where everybody literally has to be happy all the time or face the consequences, with colorful pink haired guards enforcing the law and a candy based side villain and it still feels more serious then a lot of NuWho. Plus the story in general has a point to it andit even manages to show how the "goofy" villains are really deadly threats. I'm not saying that the story is without flaws, but you couldn't get a story like it in NuWho, which would turn up the goofiness and turn down the message and probably the violence as well. I shudder to think what NuWho would do with characters like Helen A or the Kandyman, especially RTD.

Gah. That one was awful. I haven't been able to touch that kind of candy since then, as it carries bad memories of the show.

Pink is not necessarily a happy color. Delores Umbridge, one of the worst HP villains, always wore pink.

The whole point of this story probably would have sailed right over the heads of the nuWho showrunners.

 

[kirk55555]

Gah. That one was awful. I haven't been able to touch that kind of candy since then, as it carries bad memories of the show.

Pink is not necessarily a happy color. Delores Umbridge, one of the worst HP villains, always wore pink.

The whole point of this story probably would have sailed right over the heads of the nuWho showrunners.

Oh I'm not saying its a spectacular story, although I have a fondness for it. But its definitely a style of story that Nuwho just couldn't do, and if it tried would (either purposefully or ignorantly) miss the point of a lot of it.

 

[diankra]

Heh, I watched "Encounter at Farpoint" with a couple of dozen other people, most of us still wearing our medieval costumes from the SCA feast we'd had earlier that night. We were at the home of one of the members who'd taped it. So yeah, I remember it when it was brand-new as well.

played some of it to my sister, who was then 16 and visiting me at uni. "Is that Bones?"

 

[diankra]

It makes me think of The Happiness Patrol. Its a story about a planet where everybody literally has to be happy all the time or face the consequences, with colorful pink haired guards enforcing the law and a candy based side villain and it still feels more serious then a lot of NuWho. Plus the story in general has a point to it andit even manages to show how the "goofy" villains are really deadly threats. I'm not saying that the story is without flaws, but you couldn't get a story like it in NuWho, which would turn up the goofiness and turn down the message and probably the violence as well. I shudder to think what NuWho would do with characters like Helen A or the Kandyman, especially RTD.

The bluray has Dame Sheila Hancock doing Behind the Sofa. Back then her late husband John Thaw said :'Good script, how many days?' She told him, and he said .'No chance'.

 

[Timewalker]

Everyone there was so pleased to see McCoy. It was nice to know at least one person among the TOS crew was still alive.

 

[diankra]

played some of it to my sister, who was then 16 and visiting me at uni. "Is that Bones?"

I sort of brainwashed my sister. She remembers Genesis, when she was closing on four..

 

[marillion]

I had no idea what Dr. Who was until the 7th or 8th grade year, when my brother, who was working at the University of Wyoming newspaper, wrote an article about it, as it was just starting to make the rounds on PBS for the first time. So I gave it a shot and was hooked.

Soon enough, I was hanging out with bunch of nerdy Whovians and helping out with pledge drives at the PBS station. I got the books, the Marvel comics and attended conventions. Once the reruns stopped, things just kind of petered out with the local fan club. I lost track of it but was excited by the 1996 movie and the potential it held. Ah well, alas...

I never really knew about these offshoots until the new series started up. I've enjoyed watching most of them. Mileage varies, of course. LOL

 

[Steve Roby]

I first heard of Doctor Who in the late 1970s, but it didn't seem to be on any of the channels we got at the time. Over the next couple of decades I picked up a few comics, a couple of books, and managed to catch a few random episodes. I saw the TV movie when it aired. In 2001, with no new DS9 or B5 and some of my other shows going down the tubes, I picked up a Doctor Who novel mentioned in alt.horror.cthulhu as one of the Lovecraft crossovers. Then I asked my wife if she'd be interested in watching some; she'd watched it when she was younger, and said sure, so we bought The Stones of Blood on VHS. And then I basically bought everything I could find. In Canada, that meant videos and novels, though I was able to buy some BF audios and other things by mail order. It took some time before I was able to find any of the semi-official videos, and I still haven't seen many. But you can get the Reeltime videos as well as a lot of other related videos from the publisher in inexpensive downloadable video format through Vimeo or on DVD at their website.

It was fun diving in at a time when the actual TV series was effectively dead, because not only was there so much to catch up on, there was a lot of creativity and risktaking in the tie-ins and spinoffs. There were spinoffs like Bernice Summerfield and Faction Paradox. Big Finish's ranges kept expanding. There were Telos novellas, fanthologies, and more. And then Scream of the Shalka and the announcement of a new series, only two years after we jumped in. It was a fun and wild time (see what I did there? at least a couple of you did) and some of it didn't survive the return of the show to TV, not unlike the Star Trek litverse coming to an end because of all the new shows. But it was great for a while there. And the return of the show to TV has been great too. Hard to believe we're not far from the 20th anniversary of "Rose."

 

[JD]

I never experienced the Wilderness Years since I didn't get into Doctor Who until Rose came, but that did get me interested enough that I started tracking down the DVDs of Classic Who, and I ended up getting Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, Horror of Fang Rock, The Five Doctors, and Caves of the Androzoni. For a long time that was all of the Classic Who I saw, but a couple years ago I signed up for BritBox through Amazon Prime, and since they have all of Classic Who on there, I've been working my through it. For a while I was just watching a few random recommended episodes, but I a while back I decided to start going through them in order based on Doctor. I started with the Third Doctor since I liked him, but hadn't seen much of him before this, and I'm up to The Daemons, and when I finish up some other stuff I've been watching I'll probably get back to it.
So far the only experience I've had with stuff from the Wilderness Years is the 8th Doctor movie, and I'm working my way through Storm Warning in Hoopla.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Exactly. NuWho became egregiously dumbed-down and I got into an argument with someone on my gaming forum who likes Who. I mentioned how stupid I thought the story about the Moon-as-an-egg was, and he said, "A friend of mine wrote that!" and I said, "Sorry, but your friend wrote a stupid script that makes no sense whatsoever."

Note that I was speaking negatively about this person's friend, not the person on the forum, who is a very intelligent individual (has a doctorate in theology, loves Doctor Who, and we're both Dragonlance fans). He was still offended on his friend's behalf, and I wondered how he couldn't tell that it was an awful script.

For what its worth, I don't consider Kill the Moon all that bad.

Classic Who did tackle some serious issues, such as drug trafficking and addiction, genocide, and many more. It didn't (usually) have the attitude of "It's kids' science fiction, it doesn't HAVE to make sense!" that so many nuWho stories appeared to have. There were plenty of times during the first two Capaldi seasons that I wondered if the showrunner had forgotten that he had scientifically-literate adults among his viewers, and not just 8-year-old children (most of whom could also likely have seen through the nonsense).

The Davison/Colin B. eras, season 24 and nearly the whole of Troughton's era largely doesn't support your thesis. In fact, the essential difference between OldWho, NuWho and DisneyWho is, the latter two are definitively more character-driven than the former was for most of the time, which was always plot-driven. As far as the "science" being more fact-based on OldWho... bollocks to that. Maybe they did more effort in, say, the Hartnell era or the Hinchcliffe era of Tom Baker, not to mention Bidmead's, but Graham Williams? Who had a frickin' couch on a spaceship in his second serial that introduced K9? Please.

 

[Timewalker]

For what its worth, I don't consider Kill the Moon all that bad.

So you think it's plausible that the Moon is an egg that will hatch a space bird that's bigger than itself.

O-kay...

The Davison/Colin B. eras, season 24 and nearly the whole of Troughton's era largely doesn't support your thesis. In fact, the essential difference between OldWho, NuWho and DisneyWho is, the latter two are definitively more character-driven than the former was for most of the time, which was always plot-driven. As far as the "science" being more fact-based on OldWho... bollocks to that. Maybe they did more effort in, say, the Hartnell era or the Hinchcliffe era of Tom Baker, not to mention Bidmead's, but Graham Williams? Who had a frickin' couch on a spaceship in his second serial that introduced K9? Please.

I mentioned social issues. As in there are some Classic Who stories that tackle them. I have no idea what you mean by "season 24". That was a very long time ago for me, so you're going to have to be more specific.

What's "DisneyWho"? I stopped watching after the Christmas special following Clara's fake death, so for me Disney doesn't come into the equation.

You're tossing out names that I assume are producers? The references are lost on me because I never consider this show in terms of the producer.

"Couch on a spaceship" - WTF?

 

[JD]

I'm not @Emperor-Tiberius, but I hope it's OK if I still respond to this.

So you think it's plausible that the Moon is an egg that will hatch a space bird that's bigger than itself.

O-kay...

Just because part of a story is implausible doesn't automatically make it bad, there are plenty great episodes of sci-fi shows with lots of that kind of stuff in them. Hell I'm pretty sure there are probably a few episodes of Classic Who.

What's "DisneyWho"? I stopped watching after the Christmas special following Clara's fake death, so for me Disney doesn't come into the equation.

The current series and all future series are being released by Disney+ in the US and possibly some other non-UK countries. I'm not sure, but I think might have also helped produce it too.

 

[Timewalker]

Just because part of a story is implausible doesn't automatically make it bad

There's a difference between merely implausible and "we know this story is full of shit, but the audience won't know any better, so let's roll with it."

I really dislike the sense that the production team thinks the audience is stupid, and I don't forgive that.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

So you think it's plausible that the Moon is an egg that will hatch a space bird that's bigger than itself.

O-kay...

You're being disingenuous. I never said it was plausible. And thats because the premise is fantastical, doesn't mean the episode is actually bad.

I mentioned social issues. As in there are some Classic Who stories that tackle them.

Yeah, and NuWho was mostly better at handling those said social issues.

I have no idea what you mean by "season 24". That was a very long time ago for me, so you're going to have to be more specific.

Season 24 is when the show became a kids' show. Dragonfire was when they started veering off, but the whole of it is almost unmistakeably an '80's kids show starring the Doctor.

You're tossing out names that I assume are producers? The references are lost on me because I never consider this show in terms of the producer.

That's on you, not me.