As “Doctor Who” continues its push to have all the classic series serials out on DVD by the series’ 50th anniversary in 2013, fans of the third Doctor era are quick to point out that the run from 1970-74 still has a lot of stories left to hit DVD.
Part of that is due to the amount of work required to bring the episodes up to the high standards set by the “Doctor Who” Restoration Team for the DVD line.
The era was when color came to the show. However, when the BBC decided to delete the series from its archive in the 70’s, the original color prints of several of the serials from that era were lost. The era was eventually restored with full versions of all the stories available, but some were only available as black and white prints.
Over the years, the Restoration Team has worked to restore the original color to the stories and bring them back to as close as possible to when they were originally transmitted.
One thing working in favor of the show is that some of the black and white prints still had the color information included in the prints. Using a new process, the team is able to extract and restore the color information to the original episodes. The technique was used for last year’s release of “Planet of the Daleks” and is reportedly being used to restore color to “The Mind of Evil.”
Now come reports that the process could be used for the seventh season story, “The Ambassadors of Death.”
The story has several episodes that are still in color. The seven-part story, however, has gaps with only the black and white print to fill it. The team tried to use the same technique to restore the color to the entire story that was used for the video release of “The Daemons” and “Terror of the Autons” when they hit VHS, but it was deemed too expensive and time consuming to complete at the time.
Now, the new technique could mean fans will see the story fully in color for the first time since the 1970’s original transmission.
“It seemed almost impossible,” Steve Roberts, the team’s supervisor and a BBC senior engineer tells Wired. “But when they made the black-and-white recordings, they didn’t filter off the colour carrier [encoded as a ‘chroma dot’ pattern in each frame], which for the last few decades has been nothing more than an annoyance.” Team member Richard Russell used the signal to reverse-engineer raw colour pictures that could be retouched frame by frame.
“It’s very, very labour intensive — several hundred man hours’ work every episode,” says Roberts.
However, a new “quadrant editor” is helping them to produce better source material upfront, so they hope to deliver the “Ambassadors” episodes to the BBC within weeks.
No word yet on when the story might hit DVD. A commentary track for the episode was recorded several years ago featuring members of the cast and crew.
Brian from British Invaders says
Many of the Pertwee episodes that I first saw in black-and-white are now available in colour. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have *all* of the 1970s episodes in colour? This is great news.
I don’t think the BBC “decided to delete the series from its archive”. They simply made no efforts to maintain a complete archive, so many things *were* deleted. That may be a minor point, but I think it’s important.
The BBC set its archival policy in 1978, and they have been trying to recover “missing episodes” ever since.
Michael Hickerson says
The BBC only maintained certain episodes from the early days as examples of their era or if they did something special or different…hence the large gaps, esp. in the Troughton years.
For Pertwee, whether a serial was syndicated in black and white or color depended on how much or little of it was still around in color. In the case of stories like “Planet of the Daleks” and “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” this meant leaving out an episode since it wasn’t in color. For others like “Ambassadors,” “Silurians,” “Terror of the Autons,” “Mind of Evil” and “The Daemons” this meant that the entire story was black and white…
It’s amazing what the Restoration Team has done for this era. I’m a bit surprised that given the expense of restoring the color to just one episode that the BBC and 2|Entertain have signed off on doing it for multiple episodes for “Evil” and “Ambassadors.” Don’t get me wrong…I’m ecstatic they are, but surprised.
Michael Hickerson says
And actually the BBC did decide to delete the older episodes of Who.
They simply felt that they had no value and were taking up too much space.
Cameron Skirving says
When the ABC last ran the classic series in 2003, they showed The Daemons in colour (from the VHS restoration) but not Doctor Who and the Silurians or Terror of the Autons. I had heard that Terror was the best quality out of the three. Does anyone know the reason why? Also, given that Day of the Daleks was kept by the BBC, why has that been released on DVD yet? I know that is supposed to be released soon. In 2003, the ABC wasn’t able to broadcast Day of the Daleks. I only have an edited omnibus VHS of the story so have for years been keen to get it episodically