I guess people are busy downloading tonight. Should be fun seeing these episodes. Can someone comment later on how well the episodes were restored?
Official release and list of episodes from BBC
I hate itunes and refuse to ever download that software unless I become truly desperate, so I’m wondering if they ever intend to release this via any other channels. I’m not in any hurry and I have to think some sort of fixed media is given.
I also refuse to use ITunes. I’ll buy the dvd’s ASAP. They should be much higher quality than streaming video from ITunes.
Doctor Who magazine has this to say about the DVD releases:
“The Enemy of the World will be released on BBC DVD on Monday 25 November 2013, and The Web of Fear DVD will be released in early 2014.”
http://www.doctorwhomagazine.com/the-enemy-of-the-world-the-…
I only watched the first episode of Enemy of the World. It looked fantastic! It was fast paced,unusual for an early Who. The story has me hooked,I’m trying to savor them and watch one a day. Troughton is a joy to watch.he makes Matt Smith seem positively grown up! I love this show!
So have I, and I agree about it looking great. I wonder how long the BBC have had these - the restoration is excellent.
When I first started watching the Doctor, that’s how our local PBS station was showing them. They later cut them as 90-minute movies. I liked the cliffhangers, though.
About once a week, I go over to my parent’s place for dinner, and then watch a movie with my dad. Last night, we watched Enemy of the World. All in one go, so no cliff hangers for us. My dad’s responsible for introducing me to Who, back when PBS was running them, so this was a nice treat for both of us.
The restoration looks fantastic, especially in HD. They did an excellent job on it. You would not have guessed that this came from a can of film that had been sitting in a Kenyan warehouse for forty years.
The episodes themselves hold up pretty well. There’re a few howlers - the enemy guards are hilariously easy to incapacitate, for example, and a nifty plot twist in the fifth episode relies on a group of adults behaving with the naivete of a toddler for over five years. The editing towards the end is a bit rushed - I get the feeling something was cut, although it might have been at the scriptwriting stage. The villain’s second in command is suddenly under arrest at one point, but it’s not really clear why, and the arc ends with a fairly bizarre abruptness - although on reflection, this might have been a cliffhanger for the start of the next arc.
I really, really liked Patrick Troughton. I’ve only seen one of his serials before. He also plays the villain, who by random coincidence happens to look exactly like the Doctor, and does a great job switching back and forth between the characters. It does lead to my biggest complaint about the serial, which is that while it has a whole lot of Patrick Troughton, it has relatively little of the Doctor - for most of the arc, Troughton is either playing the villain, or playing the Doctor pretending to be the villain. Considering how much of Troughton’s run is lost, it’s a bit disappointing that one of the newly recovered serials sees him spending so much time playing someone other than the Doctor.
Next week, we’ll tackle Web of Fear.