The Gentleman in the Blue Box, A Doctor Who Timeline

[DG Valdron]

So what have we got here?

In 1965, Peter Cushing starred in a movie version of Doctor Who, titled Doctor Who and the Daleks. It was a raging success. The follow up movie, not so much. Along the way, Cushing apparently voiced the pilot episode for an unmade radio serial. These two movies, the lost audio, and a few other odds and ends - comic strips, stories, novels, fan made trailers, a cut down radio adaptation of one of the movies, etc., and apocryphal attributions, comprise the reign of the Peter Cushing Doctor

So my thinking is - what if the Cushing Doctor had a much longer career - something analogous to Cushing's turns as Baron Frankenstein or Van Helsing for Hammer. Suppose he had a run of seven movies between 1965 and 1979, as well as an actual audio series, a parallel Doctor running beside the television Doctors


Why?

Fun, I guess. I'm interested in Jazz media. Basically, the way a particular piece of art is transformed or adapted when translated to another media, the compromises that come about, the new directions, the erratic inputs. Assuming that Doctor Who ended up as a successful or semi-successful movie franchise, somewhere between Quatermass and James Bond what would it have been like. Where would it have gone.


Compromises, erratic inputs? Sounds like you intend to be fairly disrespectful?

A bit, yes. I don't think it would be interesting to write a Doctor Who timeline as a triumphal progression. "We had a genius plan, we implemented our genius plan, everything went off brilliantly, gosh aren't we geniuses." That doesn't really interest me.

Instead, I'm interested in plans falling apart, people falling on their faces, I'm interested in the producer who has a 'brilliant idea' that derails the whole production, and maybe makes it better, or worse, or just average, but very different from what came before.

Nothing exists in a vaccuum, I'm interested in how outside forces affect things. James Bond is popular, so maybe they decide to try to imitate that. Maybe they make a movie to satisfy contractual obligations. Maybe Peter Cushing has a career renaissance and they jump on that bandwagon. Maybe a movie gets made for spite. The series searches for an audience, it tries different tones.

So basically yes, a certain amount of chaos, infighting, backstabbing, bad decision, etc., ends up happening. It makes life interesting.


This isn't the first time you've tried to do a Cushing - Doctor Who timeline is it?

Correct. There were two previous efforts, neither of whom made it very far. So this is kind of unfinished business. I want to do it right, once and for all.


You figure you'll get it this time?

Yes. I've been kicking it around for a while, and I've got a lot of left field ideas. I have the whole thing mapped out, a lot of it written. This time, I'm going to hit it out of the park.


You've done a lot of Doctor Who timelines haven't you?

Timelines and mini-Timelines, yes.

There are three big ones. The first is The Nelvana Doctor. In 1990, Nelvana animation was negotiating for the rights to make a Doctor Who cartoon series. They put time and effort into it. Four scripts were actually written, a lot of production artwork was done (some of which you can still find online). The project was aborted at the last minute. But I thought the idea was really interesting, and was intrigued by the idea of adapting Doctor Who to the radically different format of Saturday morning animation - during the golden age of Saturday Morning Cartoons.

The New Doctor. Basically, in 1991, a guy named David Burton started driving around in a car blazoned 'The New Doctor Who.' When asked, he told a bizarre story of shooting a secret pilot for a private group called Millennium Productions. Since then, there's been absolutely no proof of his story, and it's commonly disregarded as a hoax. But there were a lot of pitches going on around that time, so I take the premise that Millennium was real, shot a pilot and actually managed to get a license from the BBC. The resulting ultra-low budget version of Doctor Who ends up hilarious anarchy behind the scenes, as the crew desperately tries to finish the season before they melt down completely.

The second one is A Change of Life. Between 1984 and 1988, Seattle International and Barbara Benedetti produced a series of four half hour, professional quality fan films, starring Barbara (a trained actress) as the Doctor. Through a bizarre but intensly researched and plausible set of events, Barbara is hired on for a few episodes as the Doctor in a ratings stunt by John Nathan-Turner.... who then leaves. A new production team assembles, and the five seasons of the Barbara Benedetti era begins.

The rest are minor - or mini - a lot of them are buried in A Change of Life.

Sarah Jane and K9 - a spin off of the Benedetti timeline. As a result of issues with the show, Liz Sladen and Bob Baker's K9 are brought back to fill in a few episodes. Sladen and Baker then put together a production company and make a pitch.... which ends up with ITV competing with the main series before relocating to Australia - told as an extended interview series.

The Monk - Craig Charles is arrested for sexual assault (really happened) Rob Grant and Doug Naylor's careers are on the line. To salvage their asses, they propose a Doctor Who series, which morphs into a Doctor Who spin off, which ends up starring the Monk, played by .... Sylvester McCoy.

The Gwen Belsen Story - a memoir of a fan and cosplayer, Gwen Belson, who played the Benedetti Doctor through a series of fan films.

Seven Nights a Cyberman - In 1975 there was a Doctor Who play, Seven Keys to Doomsday, which was a commercial failure. In this timeline, the play is a success, and spawns an entire series of Doctor Who stage productions, starring Trevor Martin as the Doctor - permanently under Tom Baker's shadow, plus a revival and follow up. Told mainly through the eyes of an enthusiastic stagehand.

There are a few other throwaway bits -

A premise for an American Doctor Who starring Robert Downey Jr., on the US Sci Fi Channel, brought in as a replacement for Sliders after John Rhys Davies has his melt down. The wrinkle is that in this version, Earth was meant to be destroyed. But Downey's Time Lord fell in love with an Earth woman and saved the world. But fate isn't easily deterred, Earth's frustrated destiny is to be obliterated, and so the world is constantly afflicted by an unending series of disasters, mad scientists, invading aliens, etc. etc., all the result of the Universe trying to set history right. All of it, constantly blocked and foiled by Downey's Doctor, now fully a renegade, arrayed in a single handed fight against the forces of destiny, and all for love. In his Tardis, there's a vast room containing the record of every moment of the woman he love's life, and once he visits that moment, he can never visit it again. He's been protecting the Earth for a long time, and he's been visiting the moments of her life for a long time, the forces against him grow ever more insurmountable, and the moments left to him to visit the life of the woman he loves grow fewer and fewer, a bare handful. It's totally out of continuity with anything of course, I just loved this premise of the Doctor waging this one man war against fate, for the sake of true love. And I liked the thought of Robert Downey Jr. as the Doctor, particularly during or shortly after his Ally McBeal heroine period. And I liked the idea of something so operatic, so grandiose, so sweeping and romantic, attempted with the budgets and technical resources available to Hollywood's Sliders. Apart from the wonderful premise, it feels like there's plenty of room for crazed backstage shenanigans. Honestly, I didn't sketch out much more than you see here... But maybe someday.

Another throwaway premise for an American Doctor who was a spin off of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - the Irwin Allen series. For those too young to remember, Irwin Allen was a film and television producer during the 1970s. He's best known for a series of big idea Sci Fi television shows - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, and Lost in Space. Plus a few sci fi pilots that didn't go anywhere. He had a comeback in the 70s with big theatrical disaster movies like Towering Inferno and Earthquake. In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, he actually has a couple of episodes featuring a mysterious, mischievous time traveller - the only time in the series that there was a returning character. My idea was that this character would be Irwin Allen's American Doctor Who, spinning off from Voyage, and replacing the Time Tunnel series. I wasn't too serious about this one, it was just a bit of goofy fun. This was 'Hollywood 60's Television Factory production.'

Oh, and I've got another Doctor Who timeline on the go - Clash of Titans, where Lenny Henry edges out Sylvester McCoy and becomes a much different, much more political Doctor, setting him on a collision course with Margaret Thatcher. Still working on that one.


That feels really obsessive. Have you considered seeking professional psychiatric help?

Ain't no help for what I got.


Why the obsession with Doctor Who timelines?

I like the show a lot. It's production history is fascinating. And I'm interested in playing variations and spins on things. It's a nice platform to go off telling anarchic stories about art and media and how culture affects things.

What qualifies you to write Doctor Who timelines?

I actually have quite a bit of background in film and television production. I've actually written three books on Doctor Who - The Pirate's History of Doctor Who, Another Pirate's History of Doctor Who and The Last Pirate's History of Doctor Who. While ostensibly about fan films and fan film production, I explore the esoteric corners of Doctor Who's BBC history, plus animation, audio, copyright, etc. They're quite good books. They were good enough to get me a couple of guest invites to conventions. So I can claim to be a little bit of an expert on the subject.

Also, I've written four books about the LEXX television series. LEXX Unauthorized, Backstage at the Dark Zone. This was a Star Trek inspired offshoot about an immortal undead assassin, a hybrid love slave, a renegade robot head, a security guard, and a ten kilometer bio-ship built to blow up entire planets. It was a Canadian series, with British, German and American input that lasted four seasons. I was invited by the creator to do a book about the show, and I spent several years working on it, interviewing everyone in sight, visiting the sets, etc. The show was brilliant, surrealist and now almost unheard of. My books are brilliant, if I do say so myself. And for four years, I had a front row seat and interview privileges to the making of an international television series.

Apart from that - I was a member of a film makers cooperative for a few years, I have short film credits. I worked at a drive in movie theatre for years, saw thousands of B-movies, read everything about the subject. I live and breath this stuff, and I have deep insights into background and production, particularly struggling and marginal productions, where there's not enough money, or where inspiration and opportunity come to the fore.

I'd like to think that this gives my timelines some authenticity.


Jesus Christ! Have you thought about getting a life?

Yes.


Do you do any timelines that are not Doctor Who? Or are you just completely sad?

Well, I've actually done several. I think the most famous ones are Green Antarctica, and Land of Ice and Mice both found here.

Green Antarctica is an ASB timeline about an Antarctica that never glaciated, maintains an exotic suite of flora and fauna, and develops a series of terrifying civilizations collectively called the Tsalal, who develop in isolation, and evolve to match or exceed Western civilization. Eventually, they swat the entire British Empire. It was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's story. Sometimes its straight up horror. Sometimes its a cautionary tale of how humans are our own worst enemies as the characters build civilizations that are toxic to them. Sometimes its a critique of western imperialism as Europe finally encounters its match. I have a bunch of ideas, but I haven't been working on it lately.

Land of Ice and Mice is a much more rigorous, non ASB timeline about a small change in cultural practice ultimately results in the people who would become the Inuit - the archaic Thule, developing an arctic circle agricultural proto-civilization. Also somewhat regretfully abandoned. I want to come back to it. It's actually under someone else's name. I had a partner, "DirtyCommie" but he drifted away almost right away, so it's 99.999% me.

Axis of Andes, a rigorous 20th century timeline about WWII in South America. My idea was that WWII was actually two wars - An asian war - Japan vs China and the US. And a European War - Germany vs USSR, Britain and US, with some interlocking parts. So why not a third theatre - another continental war, loosely affiliated with the other two. It started with a real life brushfire war - The Ecuador Peru War of 1941, which lasted a month, killed very few people, and cost Ecuador half its territory. In this reality, things go badly. The war escalates and escalates until it involves literally every country in South America.

There's a few others - Bear Cavalry, the Moontrap Timeline, Empire of Mu plus contributions to other timelines.

Actually, some of my timeline work has been pulled out, rewritten, reorganized, and presented as books - Axis of Andes, Bear Cavalry, Dawn of Cthulhu and Fall of Atlantis are all available as Ebooks on most platforms, and can be found as audiobooks or even print editions. Reviews have been very nice. Feel free to seek them out.


Getting into Shameless Self Promotion are we now?

I suppose so, but I feel it's fair.

I joined this site, in part to develop and flesh out world building ideas for novels and projects I had in mind. My quest was always to be a published writer, to have books and ebooks and audio books out, to be in bookstores. That's my dream, to walk into a bookstore, go to the Spec Fiction section, and see my books up there along with everyone else's. And frankly, I did learn a lot from being on this site, I found inspiration, an audience, an opportunity to write and hone my writing. This place is a fairly significant stage of my quest for a professional writing career.

So it's not surprising that I'd cannibalize some of my work here and mount it up on the pro-writing world. And honestly? This place is a moving target. You do something, its nice while you're doing it, but it gets buried and forgotten. My first version of Axis of Andes is still up here, and if one person a year reads it since I completed it, I'd be amazed. But my print/audio/ebook edition of Axis of Andes has sold hundreds of copies, and it's gotten critical reviews. It's found a new audience. I don't know if I'm stepping on toes, or breaching etiquette, but in repurposing the work I did here, somewhere else, I've been able to find new readers.

And of course, the other side is that a lot of my mainstream work finds its way in here - My LEXX and Doctor Who research and work on books, my film experience, animates the timelines that I do. It's a mutual exchange.


It still feels like hucksterism. Like you're dropping hints that maybe people should go out and look up your books and maybe buy them.

I'm just mentioning them, not posting links to buy. I did them, they're part of my life. If someone wants to look up a title, who am I to object.

At least look up some of my other timelines. I think people enjoy Ice and Mice, or Green Antarctica.


Uh huh. Any other books you feel the need to mention?

I have a trilogy of collections of horror stories - Giant Monsters Sing Sad Songs, What Devours Also Hungers, and There are No Doors in Dark Places. Plus I have a couple of books of funny fantasy and science fiction stories coming out Drunk Slutty Elf and Drunk Slutty Elf and Zombies. And I have an artistic collab project called Echelon, with artist Robert Pasternak coming from At Bay Press. Plus, a handful of unpublished novels I'm shopping to agents and publishers. Keep me in mind.


You are shameless, and a little sleazy. Back to Doctor Who. I'm assuming someone as narcissistic as you will be putting up links to your other Doctor Who timelines?

Yes. I intend to do that. I'm just running out of time tonight. But I like my Who Timelines, and would love to share them with other Who fans.

For what it's worth, when I was doing and finishing my timelines, I made a point of giving shout outs and putting up links to other terrific Who timelines by other Alt history writers on this site. I hope to do that again. And as a matter of fact, if any of you reading this have been doing a Doctor Who timeline.... feel free to post a link here. I'd be happy to help you promote your writing.

 

[DG Valdron]

The Story Begins....Doctor Who aired on television in 1963, and would go on to become a classic British program, running up to 1991, until the death of Barbara Benedetti, and then reappearing in specials like Dark Dimensions, spin offs like the Nelvana cartoon series, or revivals or remakes including Burton's New Doctor, and Robert Downey Jr's The Doctor.

But in 1965, with Peter Cushing, Doctor Who would go on to have a parallel second career in movies and radio that would span a decade, six movies, a stage play and three seasons of radio serials in foreign locations.

The story begins with Joe Vegoda. Born in 1910, Joe Vegoda had found work in the British film and television industry. In his early fifties, he=d moved into a producer role, acting as an uncredited producer or executive producer for What a Whopper, Fury at Smuggler's Bay and Live Now, Pay Later. He set up his own company, Regal International pictures. It was Joe Vegoda who had the brainstorm of making a Doctor Who movie from the serials.

Back in those days, television programs were aired once, and broadcast on relatively poor resolution, small screen, black and white televisions. Television was a brand new medium, and the rules were still being developed. There was no such thing as reruns or syndication in British television back then. Rather, a lot of British television was live, or shot so close to live as hardly made a difference. When you wanted to edit videotape, you actually had to cut and splice it by hand with scissors and glue.

The background of British Television came not from movies, but from a centuries old and well developed theatre tradition, and that tradition was, once you finished a run, it was finished. No coming back, no replays, no reruns. Even if you wanted to replay or rerun a serial, how would you deal with the actors rights? Would you pay them again, full rates? No one knew. There just didn't seem to be any use for the old programs once you aired them. Excepting the prospect of international sales, itself having a limited shelf life, there was no point in preserving any of it.

It was this attitude that would result in so many of the old Doctor Who serials, and so much else being junked in the 1970's.

So, back in the 1950s and 1960s, if a British program or serial was a ratings hit, well, too bad. That broadcast was a one time only thing. It was never going to be aired again.

But that also opened a door. There was opportunity to remount the story again for the theatre on the movie screen, with a bigger budget and more impressive production values. Given the tiny budgets, and the limitations of television generally, it was pretty much a requirement to do it bigger and more impressive. The original broadcast on a low resolution twelve inch black and white screen with crackling sound. The remake would show up in high fidelity, on a 20 foot or better screen, in full colour, with camera quality resolution. You had to do it bigger and better, there was no other choice. And you also had to adapt long for the shorter self contained stories of the movie theatre format.

The movie remake of a popular television show wasn't just a spin off - it was literally a step up into the big time. Full colour, big screens, bit sets, better actors, more production time, more production value, a full on experience where you left your home and travelled to a palatial theatre, rather than sitting at home.

The 1950's and early 60's, had seen this done with the two Quatermass movies, with Canadian actor Brian Donlevy replacing Andrew Keir in the Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II, in 1955 and 1957. Bereft of rights, Hammer had intended a third Quatermass movie, X the Unknown, 1956, starring Dean Jagger, although because Kneal refused the rights, Hammer, couldn't call it Quatermass, and likely lost some opportunities. Later, Kneal and Director, Val Guest, returned to Hammer for a fourth 'Quatermass-without saying the name' movie, starring Peter Cushing, also in 1957, the Abominable Snowman. The final entries were Quatermass and the Pit, in 1967, and the Quatermass Conclusion.

In a sense, there was a lost opportunity here - These five films follow the adventures of an extremely well defined, rugged scientist, with a commonality of theme and style. There was an opportunity for a lasting franchise, perhaps something akin to James Bond, or perhaps closer to Hammer's monster franchises - Frankenstein and Dracula, if only the other two movies had retained Donlevy, had retained the Quatermass name, they'd have been more commercial, more thematically coherent and appealing for an audience, there might have been further movies and popular culture would have been slightly different.

Note that Peter Cushing had played a Quatermass character in the Abominable Snowman. Cushing got around. He played Sherlock Holmes as well although never as heavily identified with the part as other actors. He was identified as both Baron Frankenstein and Professor Van Helsing through Hammer though. In television, he was successful in a rendition of Orwell's 1984. 1984 had also been remounted as a movie, following a successful television run, although Peter Cushing, who had starred in the TV broadcast found himself replaced. It was almost like musical chairs back in those days.

So in late 1964, Vegoda approached the BBC, intent on remaking Doctor Who as a theatrical feature, or more accurately, remaking the Dalek serial as a feature. Doctor Who had hit the big time, it was going to be a major motion picture.

The BBC turned out to be receptive, and why not? The Daleks were a hit. Doctor Who and the Daleks had already been separately licensed to two different comic books. Toy manufacturers were buying the right to Dalek toys. Between 1964 and 1966, England was seized by a phenomena called Dalekmania. Over three hundred sorts of toys were licensed during this time. Daleks were in demand for public appearances. Children ran up and down the streets imitating them. They appeared in cartoons. There was a radio song - Christmas with a Dalek. There was talk of a stage play, a spin off television series. Back then, Daleks and Doctor Who were indistinguishable. Daleks were hot, and the Doctor was their delivery vehicle.

So why not a movie, to be made from a serial that had already aired and would never air again? It certainly could do nothing but help the continuing show.

The problem was that the production was too big for Vegoda alone. Regal International Films might be nice on a letterhead, but it was essentially Joe Vegoda in a small rented office.

He didn't have a lot of independent history, and he didn't have access to financing, and a Doctor Who film was going to be expensive. Even a comparatively small production was going to cost at least a few hundred thousand dollars. He needed to bring in partners....

Footnote #1: All of this is OTL as far as it goes.

Footnote #2: There's not a lot of information out there on Joe Vegoda, so I'm employing a certain amount of guesswork. While the first two Doctor Who movies were being made, he appears to have folded up his company and moved over to British Lion, a distribution company.

 

[DG Valdron]

In one guise or another, Amicus Films, between 1960 and 1975, produced over thirty movies before its final dissolution. One of England's leading independent producers, it was best known for its horror anthologies, making it Hammer Films biggest rival.

Among their titles were Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, the Skull, the Beast Must Die, The House That Dripped Blood, the Deadly Bees, the Terrornauts, Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, The Land That Time Forgot, At The Earth's Core, the People that Time Forgot and so forth.

Oddly enough, this quintessential British institution was actually the work of two New York jews, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky.Subotsky in the 1950's was an earnest young scriptwriter. In 1956, he submitted a script to Hammer studios titled Frankenstein and the Monster, and never quite forgave them for turning him down.

Rosenberg was the son of a furrier. After graduating law school, Rosenberg got into the film business in 1939, distributing foreign films in America.

In 1954, he hooked up with Milton Subotsky and the two of them became producers, taking advantage of funding and distribution opportunities. Basically, it was relatively cheap to make movies in Britain, you could find financing readily, and then you could sell them in America to the secondary markets – television, drive-ins, b-movie venues, small town theatre chains and distributors.

Together they produced a handful of forgettable teen flicks, such as Rock, Rock, Rock and Jamboree. This was the era of the baby boom, and the American teenager, as a phenomen, was a recent invention.For the first time, you had a large population of mostly urban teens, who were not getting put straight into adulthood. Instead, they drove cars, went to dances, suffered through high school, and partied. It was the golden age of rock and roll. And that meant that teenager oriented rock movies were the natural target of a pair of want to be producers, trying to bite off a piece of the youth market.

Of course, if you're not a teenager yourself, or in tune with teenagers, that's a hard market to bite into. Nothing fails harder than a teen movie about teenagers made by non-teens, who just 'don't get it.' Going at the target is a mug's game. On the other hand, teenagers loved horror, they loved monsters. Horror movies weren't about teenagers, except peripherally, they were just as much about monsters.

The real money proved to be importing British horror films. These were movies that were accessible, or could be accessible to an American audience, particularly to the audience of youth and teenagers who were the primary consumers of horror movies.

British movies were shot in English, the accent was familiar, their locations and situations were recognizable to Americans. British films were foreign, but only a little foreign – they were the right kind of foreign. Just foreign enough to be intriguing, but not foreign enough to be alien. And most importantly, they could be made cheaply. The cost of production in England was a fraction of what it was in America.

In 1954, Rosenberg obtained the rights to Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein, for half a million dollars and made seven million in tickets. That was the breakthrough moment.

For Subotsky it was a sort of personal insult, Hammer had turned down his Frankenstein script... and then made their own.

In 1960, Milton Subotsky moved to England. Still working with Rosenberg, under the name of Vulcan productions, they made City of Death, a fairly traditional gothic horror starring Christopher Lee. A few years later, they formalized their relationship under the banner of Amicus Productions.

Their first real production as Amicus was Doctor Terror's House of Horrors, the film which would put them on the map, and set the model for many of their future productions.

Footnote: All this is OTL, just setting the stage....

 

[DG Valdron]

There's no house involved. Instead, five men enter a train car where they encounter Peter Cushing as the titular Doctor Terror, aka Doctor Shreck.

Doctor Shreck, of course, is a reference to Max Shreck, the German actor who played Count Dracula, or Count Orlock, in F.W. Murnau's original classic, Nosferatu, a movie that was essentially lost at that time, but had passed down into legend. Of course, Cushing's character isn't a Vampire, and definitely doesn't look like Nosferatu, it was just Subotsky being literary, or in modern terms, fanservice.

To while away the time, Doctor Terror produces a tarot deck and tells each of them the story of their fate...

* In the first story, we hear of an ancestral curse, a gothic house in the Scottish highlands, and a werewolf bent on revenge.
* The next story is a sci fi tale of a vine that grows in a garden and turns out to be bent on homicide.
* In Voodoo, Roy Castle, a Jazz musician, gets into trouble when he steals a west indies tune.
* Christopher Lee stars with Michael Gough in a story about a severed hand.
* Finally, Donald Sutherland gets mixed up with Vampires.

At the end, Doctor Terror tells the men that the only way to avoid these fates is to die first. It turns out to be unnecessary advice, as there has been a train wreck, and they're all already dead. Doctor Terror turns out to be death.

There's a corny quality to these stories, a very EC Comics vibe, each story ends with an ironic twist. The stories hit all the traditional bases - there's a vampire, a werewolf, voodoo sorcery, a vengeful disembodied hand, and even a sci fi.

Consider the marquee though - you had Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Donald Sutherland, Michael Gough and a host of recognizable names to draw in a crowd. That was the secret of the portmanteau or anthology film. You didn't have to pay each of these actors the full rates for starring in an entire movie. You paid them to appear in a short film segment, a few days work, and then you plastered famous names all over your poster.

Shooting as a series of self-contained short films simplified problems every which way and contained costs. You didn't need to commit to extensive locations, productions. You basically got a small cast and crew together, knocked a short story off, and proceeded to the next. You could make it very cheaply, and with a series of headline names, you could sell it easily. In terms of audience satisfiction, you weren't putting all your eggs in one basket. For the audience, well, if one of the stories didn't work, they'd simply go on to the next one. There was something for every taste and inclination. Portmanteau films would turn out to be a winning formula for Amicus.

Behind the scenes, Milton Subotsky wrote the script, Rosenberg produced, and Freddie Frances directed. Joe Vegoda took an uncredited role helping the production along as an uncredited Executive Producer.

This was very much Milton Subotsky, for all his desire to be a screenwriter, Subotsky's sensibility had formed on the pulp sci fi and EC comics of the 1940's and 1950's.

He liked Frankenstein and Dracula and all that, he liked family friendly horror, and he had little taste for the harder edged, sex, gore and shock that would come to define the genre as the years wore on. His writing style and choice of subjects was already old fashioned in his heyday, and as the 70's wore on, he drifted further out of touch.

Made for the paltry sum of 105,000 pounds, it was shot in May through July, 1964, and released in February, 1965. It would go on to make its money back several times over, inspiring Subotsky and Rosenberg to visit that well again and again.

More importantly, it established Amicus, and Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, along with Joe Vegoda as a credible team who could put a serious project together, who could find the money, book major talent, and get the production going. It proved that they could not only make a movie, but they could also handle the horror / sci fi material that was Doctor Who. Finally, it established the talent - Peter Cushing and Roy Castle, would, of course, transition from this film directly into the Doctor Who movie. In a sense, their participation here got them their roles in the next.

As a result, some fans of the Cushing-Who franchise consider this the Proto-Doctor Who, or the first film in Amicus' Doctor Who franchise, a claim that is perhaps more apocryphal than real. However, the subject became retroactively confused, when in the 1970s, Doctor Terror was renamed as Doctor Who's Journey of Terror (translation), and included in a package sale of Amicus' Doctor Who films to a European distributor - the German dub includes a voice over as Cushing's character announces that he is Doctor Who, traveler through time and space, come from the future to reveal men's fates, and offer them a chance to escape their destiny."

Footnote: Again this is all OTL stuff, but I find it interesting.

Footnote #2: Except for the final paragraph, obviously. While there's an argument OTL (and much better ATL) that Doctor Terror is the Proto-Doctor Who movie for Amicus... it's mainly just a supernatural potboiler, and Cushing's Doctor here has no resemblance to the one he will play later. This is just a matter of the retroactive marketing of movies in International markets, where in the course of dubbing and packaging into foreign languages, names would be changed, and Dracula or Frankenstein, for instance, would have their names added for marquee value. As an example, a South Korean Godzilla/Gamera rip off called Yongary was marketed in Germany as "Godzilla and the Giant Claw."

 

[DG Valdron]

AMICUS - THE LITTLE FILM COMPANY THAT COULD

Amicus' next film would be Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965), followed by Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 (1966), and Amicus/AARU would become known for a franchise that extended through Doctor Who and the Menace from Space (1967), Daleks versus Robots (1969), Doctor Who and the Robots of Terror (1971), Doctor Who and the Dinosaurs (1976) and Doctor Who's Greatest Adventure (1979), as well as apocryphally for Peter Cushing's three seasons of radio adventures as the Doctor for the unrelated Stanmark Productions.

But before we explore the remarkable history of these productions, it is worthwhile to explore the body of work and operations of Amicus films and its principles, to put these movies into a larger context.

Doctor Terror's House of Horrors was not just the Proto-Doctor Who, the portmanteau format, for reasons discussed above, proved both easy and lucrative. So Doctor Terror was also the prototype for a whole range of Amicus films, including Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Tales From the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974).

Oddly enough, despite the obvious advantages and profitability, Amicus didn[t proceed immediately with the portmanteau genre - having made Doctor Terror, their next step was to go with Doctor Who and Sci Fi films, like Terrornauts, and even more conventional single subject horror movies. from low budget potboilers like the Deadly Bees, to high concept art-horror like I, Madman, there were gothic stories like the Skull and Now the Screaming Starts, and even a new wave horror, Scream and Scream Again.

Oddly, although horror, including Portmanteau films were a large part of their output, they never aligned themselves with any iconic monster or property. Perhaps this was because Hammer had already grabbed Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman and the Mummy. There weren't a lot of classic monsters or identities left over. Amicus in its films would use vampires, werewolves and even Jekyl and Hyde style villains, but never established an iconic horror franchise, monster or star. Indeed, as they went along, they seemed to lose some confidence, their particular style of horror was going slowly out of fashion, and instead of changing, they tried to return to and cling to their earliest success.

Hammer, more dominant and with more iconic monsters had the same problems, but tried to update their material, introducing new and sometimes ridiculous ideas, or increasing sex and gore content, something Subotsky was loathe to do.

In the late seventies, Amicus became a little schizophrenic. Having established themselves as prolific and successful film makers through the 60s, in the early 70s they tried to go upscale, with larger and more prestigious movies. This may have been a reaction to their brand of horror and sci fi slowly going out of style. Or perhaps a disinterest in where the horror market was going. Or it may simply have been a sentiment that Amicus needed to go up to the next level.

This wasn't terribly successful. And by the mid-70s, they had shifted gears again, producing a series of 'giant monster' action and adventure movies based on Edgar Rice Burroughs works - The Land that Time Forgot, At the Earth's Core and People that Time Forgot.

But by this time, the relationship between Subotsky and Rosenberg was breaking down. Subotsky was suspecting, and becoming increasingly certain, that Rosenberg was stealing from him. He probably was. Rosenberg was the business, Subotsky was the art, it happens. Rosenberg on the other hand was less and less enchanted with Subotsky's artistic pretensions, particularly if they lead to unsuccessful projects that didn't make money. Lawyers got involved, and it turned out that the partnership had never been put on paper and was a mess.

The differences were briefly papered over with the success of the Burroughs films, but by 1976, the partnership was over. The final film The People that Time Forgot was released as an AIP production, the final giant monster film Warlords of Atlantis, was produced independently.

For all of its output, and we're talking over thirty films in a twelve year span, Amicus was a modest affair. It was literally a small office, rented for Milton Subotsky, on the Shepperton film lot, stacked with paperbacks, comic books, scripts, correspondence, and posters, where Subotsky worked with only a secretary. In New York, Rosenberg helped to arrange business.

It was literally ahead of its time, a virtual film studio that existed as a small office, two partners on opposite sides of the ocean, and as a web of deals, contracts, arrangements and relationships. Physically, Amicus barely existed. But it got movies made.

Although the temptation was to see Subotsky as the creative side, and Rosenberg as the business side, and although that was mostly true, it was a bit more complex. The two men argued and bickered frequently, and their roles sometimes blurred. Subotsky sometimes put together deals, Rosenberg sometimes put together films.

Despite the remarkable volume of output, Amicus always remained a bit player on the scene - someone like MGM or Fox or ITV or the Rank organization could have bought them out for pocket change. But they survived and thrived as ground level opportunists, improvising, finding and filling niches.

It was this improvisational, opportunistic quality that would end up driving the course of what would become Amicus's only true iconic franchise, the Cushing Doctor Who series.

Footnote: Basically, this is all OTL.

 

[DG Valdron]

LICENSING AND OPTIONING DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS

Doctor Who premiered on television, November 23, 1963. The Daleks serial ran between December 21, 1963, and February 6, 1964.

Joe Vegoda was literally out the starting gate, sometime between July, 1964, and December, 1964. Doctor Who was not even a year old when Vegoda and Royal Pictures were approaching the BBC, trying to put together a film deal for a Doctor Who movie. The second Dalek serial had barely started in November, 1964. On screens, Doctor Terror's House of Horrors would only hit the theatres in February, 1965.

And yet, somehow, in late 1964, Joe Vegoda had partnered up with Subotsky and Rosenberg, forming a new company, ARUU. Negotiations proceeded and by December of 1964, AARU Productions had negotiated a license with Terry Nation and the BBC for a Doctor Who and the Daleks, movie, with an option for more films. Doctor Who was on its way to the theatres.... All they needed was a star, a budget, a studio... and some Daleks.

How did it happen so quickly and so cheaply? A number of factors came into play. Terry Nation was eager for a theatrical release, for instance. Dalekmania was starting, and he was writing his second serial, but it was nowhere as huge as it would be yet. The Daleks, remember, had only had their first serial, and it had ended six months ago. There was no proof that they would be an enduring phenomenon, and the wave could crash at any time. Nation was also starting to make money off of merchandising and licensing, and he needed to keep the buzz going. Hence, his second Dalek serial. A theatrical Dalek film would be a huge advertising platform, so he was willing to make a deal.

In other respects, the BBC didn't quite know what they had with Doctor Who, or what to do with it. Television in the early 60s was still a business in its infancy, and in some ways unsophisticated. Television and movies were understood completely differently back then, with television being a poor quality, grainy, staticky image on small screens, airing live or pre-recorded but with programs never to be repeated. Successful television programs frequently inspired movie versions.

It was because of these early days, both for the BBC and Doctor Who, that AARU was able to negotiate not just a Doctor Who movie, but literally an open ended option. So long as AARU exercised an option for a further movie within a specific period of time, three years, they would have the rights to a further Doctor Who movie. This had been inspired by industry scuttlebut or tales about Hammer's experience with X the Unknown. Terry Nation's agent, more cannily, limited his client's grant of option to two further movies only.

At the time, little attention was paid to the 'open option' by either AARU or the BBC. Doctor Who was, after all, a marginal childrens/family adventure drama. No one expected any particular longevity to the property. Going by the Quatermass example from a few years previously, a successful production might justify a sequel, or two at most, likely within a narrow time frame. This obsequious and overlooked provision would have unforseen consequences.

Footnote: Most of this is OTL, with the exception of the details of the License Contract. To be quite honest, I have never seen or read the original license agreement from December, 1964. I suspect that fellows like Richard Bignell may have tracked it down. The information on it is scanty and slightly contradictory. But the facts seem to be (1) That the license was relatively cheap; (2) That Nation, for once, was relatively cheap; (3) The rights were for the Dalek serial; (4) There was an option for at least one more film, although I've seen some sources which suggest a two film option.

My POD here is that in December, 1964, as a result of some sloppy draftsmanship by the BBC's lawyers, or perhaps some canny negotiations by Vegota and Subotsky was that there was a non-transferable, open ended option.

 

[DG Valdron]

The Making of DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS

It fell to Vegoda, Rosenberg and Subotsky to make a Doctor Who movie. Principal photography was scheduled for six weeks in April, 1965, a mere four months after the ink was signed on the license deal, and that left the completion of principal photography sometime in July, and the post-production to follow up. This was for a release date of August, 1965.

In modern terms, we're used to seeing movies take a year or even years in production. This scattering of months seems like a breakneck pace.

That pace left very little time for pre-production, including writing the script, casting, set design and construction, dalek builds and budgets. Gordon Fleming came in as Director, he had worked with Subotsky in 1963. Malcolm Lockyer did the musical score.

Ironically, William Hartnell would not be available for the film role. During the period the original movie was in production, Hartnell was engaged in a grinding schedule for the Space Museum and the Chase. Back in those days, Doctor Who averaged between 40 and 45 episodes per year, and each episode could take as much as ten days. Hartnell was pretty much working year round. In order to take a vacation, they would literally have to write him out of an episode.

In any event, AARU was looking for international marketability - they needed a star with recognition in the United States and Europe. That wasn't Hartnell. The obvious choice was Peter Cushing, who had just starred in Doctor Terror, famous for his work as Van Helsing and Doctor Frankenstein in the Hammer films, he had the international bankability they were looking for. Cushing's Doctor would have two central traits - he had to be a brilliant inventor, after all, he'd built a time machine in his back yard, but he also had to be a grandfather, so he had to be played as an older man, more grandfatherly than leading man or action hero.

Of course, at this time, the cumulative personality, arrogant, brilliant, mercurial, witty, passionate, of the Doctor hadn't emerged. Remember we were barely out of Hartnell's first year, and his character was continuing to evolve. The 'heroic Doctor' would really only come into its own with Troughton. All of it would come later.

So Cushing and Subotsky can hardly be faulted for their own spin. Also coming over from Doctor Terror was Roy Castle, a song and dance man, who would take over the part of Ian. Subotsky was strongly cognizant of the importance of the youth market. His earliest films were rock and roll, for teenagers. Ian and Barbara would no longer be a pair of fusty old school teachers, but rather, young adults for audience identification. No longer a schoolteacher, Barbara, played by Jenny Linden, became the Doctor's older'teenage' grandaughter, and Ian became her 'teenage' boyfriend.

Meanwhile, the original television teenager, Susan, would be played even younger by the precocious child actress, Roberta Tovey, again, to appeal to the pre-teen audience demographic. Subotsky and many others had noticed how popular the Daleks were with children. So there was obviously a strong need to appeal to the twelve and under Demographic.

That pretty much drove the scripting and casting process, they only had the one "name: star, the other choices were based on audience demographics. This was hardly unreasonable.

Ironically, as it turned out, this left a hole in the script. There was no place for the classical "leading man.'" Without a central adult protagonist, the movie tended to devolve toward's a 'boy's own adventure.' Enthusiastic, but superficial. This was in tune, however, with Subotsky's pulp sci fi/EC comics sensibility.

For the most part, the script, by Milton Subotsky and David Whittaker amounted to a compressed, but streamlined and energetic and largely faithful version of the serial. There was some debate as to whether Whittaker or Subotsky really wrote the script, or the degree of collaboration. Whittaker at that time was the story editor for the BBC series and had supervised Terry Nation's scripts. It was pretty straight on, there was little in the way of rearrangement. Ian's part was reduced, and he became more of a comic foil, given to pratfalls. Susan's part increased, and her character became braver and more resourceful. Details changed, but it was pretty much a straightforward edit.

That was probably a good thing, since Terry Nation's script tended to be slow moving and draggy, in order to stretch across six expisodes. In contrast, the movie was fast, economical, and efficient in its storytelling, even as it became more superficial, more a children's movie than a family movie. But back then, it was much less of a distinction.

One of the most controversial changes in hindsight was dispensing with the Doctor's backstory as an alien wanderer. The film didn't actually dispense with it, it simply didn't allude to it, leaving the conclusion that Doctor Who was simply a regular earthman.

Truthfully though, at this time, there was hardly any backstory to dispense with. The Doctor wouldn't encounter another member of his race until the Time Meddler, later in that year. The Time Lords wouldn't be named or appear until 1969 and the War Lords. The Doctor's two hearts, the name of his homeworld Gallifrey, would only show up in the Pertwee era, and it would take Tom Baker's Doctor to actually visit Gallifrey. In the beginning of 1965, all we knew was that the Doctor and his granddaughter was not from Earth and he seemed to be hiding. All the backstory, all the legend and lore of the Doctor, that was still to be invented, back in 1965... there just wasn't enough to matter. Even the name, Doctor Who, rather than simply "Doctor" or "The Doctor" would periodically show up in the television series, in serials like the War Machine or Underwater Menace, and would remain on the credits until well into the Pertwee/Baker era. Again, at the time, it just didn't matter.

The real stars of the show, however, were Daleks, and AARU gave us more, bigger and brighter Daleks than ever seen before. Eight full working Daleks were commissioned from Shawcraft, in February, 1965, at a cost of $350 pounds apiece, another ten full sized prop daleks, with working lights and poseable limbs were cast at Shepperton plaster, for a veritable army of eighteen Daleks. Up to this time, the BBC itself had built only six. The AARU Daleks would be taller to make them more intimidating, with larger fender skirts, larger dome lights, and some of them were equipped with claws rather than suckers. Instead of solarizing a television image, which wasn't practical, they would actually fire jets of smoke, rather than drawn in laser beams.

An earlier notion to equip them with flamethrowers died quickly, fortunately for all. Most gloriously of all, they were in full colour - electric blue, resplendent gold and fire engine red.The only downside was that during shooting, the Director didn't realize that the Daleks dome lights were meant to flash in time with their dialogue, and so they simply flashed randomly. This made for post-production headaches as editors struggled to synch up Dalek voices to the dome lights.

Also impressive were the sets. Taking place on an alien world, Doctor Who and the Daleks were entirely set bound. And what spectacular sets these were. The production went all out, renting Shepperton Studio's largest sound stages, including the largest sound stage in Europe. An entire petrified forest, complete with charcoaled animals, dim and forbidding in somber blues and greens. The Dalek City was an alien artscape of peaches and bronze. There was even the lava cliff face, before the Dalek city, reproduced with fiberglass, as a climbable fort- foot prop. There was an entire village of Thals, and the Thals themselves rendered as day glo androgynous toughs.All of this in the super-saturated intensely bright colours that were the hallmark of British Cinema in the the 1960s. Colour had been around, but it had been expensive, and the frugal British Cinema of the 40's and 50's had made do with black and white. But now that it was financially viable, British film makers went wild with colour in the sort of way that only a child with a brand new toy can. The television show would not go to colour until 1970, five years later. The movie was a glorious candy coated confection in contrast.

It was in Widescreen, something the series would not attempt until 2005.Doctor Who and the Daleks cost 180,000 pounds. With an exchange rate of about $2.80 per pound, that came to a roughly half-million dollar budget. Compared to other genre offerings, 1964's The Time Traveller by Ib Melchior, came in at about $250,000. The Budget for Amicus previous offering, Dr. Terror's House of Horrrors was roughly 105,000 pounds, or slightly better than a quarter million dollars. Doctor Who and the Daleks was entirely respectable and within the range for a genre offering.

Still, it wasn't huge. In comparison, the Beatles Help cost 1.5 million, and the James Bond film of the year cost 9 million. The massively inflated budgets of the modern era were still decades away, and film budgets were all over the map. A James Bond or a Doctor Zhivago might cost several millions, but on the other side of the map, a $50,000.00 B-movie could still get theatrical release.

American movie budgets on the whole, probably averaged a half million to a couple million. British budgets were often under a million. As always, there were huge discrepancies between American and British films, between Studio and Independant productions, and between big movies and small ones. Whatever it's shortcomings, Doctor Who and the Daleks looked far bigger and more expensive than its costs, which is not something that can be easily or often said.

Footnote: All of this is basically OTL. I've made a few assumptions about who made decisions or how they were made, but it's pretty much a straight retelling.

I actually watchedDoctor Who and the Daleks, on my grandmother's colour television, in St. John, New Brunswick in the early 70s. It was probably my first exposure to Doctor Who. I don't remember a lot of it, but I do remember some of the striking images and colours, including the petrified lion. It would be another decade or so before I discovered and got into the television series.

Its reputation has suffered as the decades have worn on. This is partly because the show evolved in different directions, and there's been a tendency to judge the movie against standards that weren't in place at the time. It's also partly because with colour television, reruns, VHS and DVD and the raw longevity of the old and new series, a lot of things that made it special then don't seem so special now. Partly because the past is an undiscovered country and so many of the things that were going on back then that made the movie so special are now forgotten to us, we're looking at an artifact from an alien land, and so no wonder it doesn't speak to us in the same way.

Having watched it again recently I'm struck by how visually gorgeous it is. It's as much a product of its time, a visual product of its time, as Barbarella, or the most overwrought Hammer spectacle. In comparison, 2001 A Space Odyssey seems restrained and drab in comparison. With its day glo sensibility, the visual androgyny of the Thals, its almost perverse disregard for large parts of what is now rote formula I think it's worth reappraisal.

I'm not sure I'd call it a classic, ultimately while the script moves faster and is more efficient and watchable than the Hartnell serial, a lot of subtext has been left out and the impression is somewhat shallow and juvenile. But it is, confidently, its own thing. That's to be respected.

 

[DG Valdron]

I'm not sure. Should I bother putting up a synopsis of Doctor Who and the Daleks? On the one hand, it's a real story, you can track it down and watch it. On the other hand, it might round out the timeline. I'm inclined not to bother, but if someone wants a detailed synopsis, I can do. In the meantime, a short version:

"Ian, a fulsome teenager, visits the home of his girlfriend, Barbara, and her sister Susan. Also at home is their grandfather, Doctor Who, who has built a time machine in his back yard. As the Doctor proudly shows off the time machine, Ian knocks something over, catapulting them to another world and another time - a radiation blasted world. They spot a city in the distance and decide to explore. But it turns out it's the city of the Daleks, who capture them. As if that wasn't bad enough... everyone is getting radiation poisoning. Susan manages to leave the city, where she meets the Thals, the primitive enemy of the Daleks. Soon Doctor Who and friends are caught up in the conflict, and eventually rouse the pacifist Thals to kill off the Daleks. With that happy ending, the Doctor and his friends leave for earth, only to materialize in the Roman empire, in the midst of a battle."

 

[DG Valdron]

1965 became the year of Dalekmania. The British went mad for Daleks. Truthfully, the phenomena had begun December 21, 1963, when the Daleks had begun their initial six-episode serial run, ending February 1964. But the BBC hadn't realized the phenoma it had. In fact, after the serial ended, two of the four Dalek props had been donated to Barnardo's Children's home in Ilfort as life sized toys. The BBC simply didn't see any further use for them. It was only later, when Dalek Invasion Earth was commissioned, that the BBC, a touch shamefaced, had to come back to the boys home to ask for their Daleks back.

But it really began to kick off on August 23, 1964, a little over six months after the Daleks had gone off the air. That was when they appeared suddenly, at Trafalgar Square. and at the the Houses of Parliament, they were spotted crossing Westminster Bridge, loitering on the Albert Embankment invading the Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial in South Kensington, they were even spotted at the Palace of Industry in Wembly. This was location shooting, of course, for the newly commissioned serial, Dalek Invasion of Earth. It was actually the first major location shooting of Doctor Who, apart from a few short scenes in the Reign of Terror, and would bring the show a new level of realistic production value outside the studio. But what was important, was that the Daleks, after six months of silence, were out and about, appearing in public, accessible to the newspapers. To waiting crowds, magazines, newspapers, they were easy to photograph, and the news went around, the Daleks were back... and not in outer space, they were here on Earth.

Terry Nation's Daleks Invasion Earth serial would feature some of the highest production values of the show so far, and it would bring the Daleks closer to home than ever, although the serial was still set in the 22nd century the world it depicted was profoundly familiar to the Londoners who looked out their windows, and particularly to those who remembered the blitz. Nation's script was near the top of his powers, his last really good Dalek story until Genesis of the Daleks, a decade later. The show would give Doctor Who its best ratings to date, over twelve million viewers at its peak, almost a quarter of the British population watched.

The Dalek cameod in the Space Museum was on April 4 and May 26, 1965. This lead directly to the next serial, The Chase ran from May 22 to June 26, 1965.

Barely two mnths later, Doctor Who and the Daleks, the movie, launched August 23, 1965, to sell out crowds.

Mission to the Unknown, Nations backdoor pilot, aired October 9, 1965.

Another serial, the immenxe Dalek Masterplan ran from November 13, 1965, and ran to January 29, 1966.

A stage play, Curse of the Daleks, opened its doors on December 21, 1965 running through January, 1966.

Between November 21, 1964, and January 29, 1966, the Daleks were on television or in the movies for a minimum of thirty of those weeks, plus treading the boards on stage, guest appearances, photo ops, magazine appearances, personal appearances, radio songs, They were everywhere.

The movie was a huge part of that Dalekmania, it was an EVENT taking place in a Mania. Among other things, an armada of 18 Dalek props were constructed for the movie, and now they were available for marketing. A squadron of Daleks invaded Cannes. One was shipped to Australia. The movie Daleks, brightly coloured and imposing were making public appearances all over England. The stature of Peter Cushing pushed the movey, and child actor Roberta Tovey had a heavy schedule of public appearances. She even released a novelty Doctor Who single for the radio at Christmas. AARU was making money hand over fist.

So of course AARU and Amicus, Subotsky, Rosenberge and Vegoda immediately announced a new Doctor Who movie: Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 - The Doctor didn't even get his name in the title, that was how big the Daleks were.

Discussion of the new film started April, 1965, before the first one even completed production. It wasn't until December 16, 1965 that the new Dalek movie was official. In particular, Milton Subotsky was beginning to drag his feet, feeling that the wave of Dalek hysteria was going to crest and break sooner or later.By that time, production was already well underway.

Footnote: All this was OTL of course. There really was Dalek Shampoo, Kids Costumes and 80 different toys by mid-1965. The Daleks really did do guest appearances on sitcoms and a dance number on the 'Black and White Minstrel Show' (shudder!) It really was that huge a national phenomenon. Sorry about all the backstory, but it seems to me that to really know alternative history, you have to know the history. You have to set the stage. ....Ah, who am I kidding. I love digging this stuff up.

 

[DG Valdron]

December, 1965, between Doctor Who and the Daleks, and Daleks Invasion Earth, there was a sneaky hidden entry into the AARU universe.

In particular, there really was a stage play, 'Curse of the Daleks' starting December 21, 1965, and running through January, 1966. Written by Terry Nation and David Whittaker. It didn't involve Doctor Who at all. They only had the rights to the Daleks, not to the rest of the show.

The play is set about 50 years after the original Dalek serial (or perhaps 50 years after a Dalek/Human war). The Daleks have been cut off from their power supply and have gone dormant. A couple of generations later, humans start visiting the Dalek world and accidentally reactivate them. At first, the Daleks play nice.... But of course, they're Daleks, and things go badly. It's an attempt to work a new riff on the Daleks.

Why is this set in the AARU universe? Interestingly, the production featured a total of FIVE operating Daleks, and therein lies a tale. Where did they come from? Who built them? What happened to them? Apparently, they were built for the stage production, with special design requirements for several of them. When the stage play ended, they were surplus to requirements, and they were sold at auction... where they were bought by Terry Nation, who then rented them to the AARU Production Crew, to fill out their armada of Daleks.

Another version of the story is that they were constructed by AARU productions for Dalek Invasion Earth 2150, and borrowed or hired, and slightly customized for the requirements of the stage play, appearing on stage before they were needed for the movie shoot. The least likely version seems to be that they were built for the original movie, Doctor Who and the Daleks, and had a little excursion on stage, before joining their brethren for the movie.

It's not clear which version is correct, I go with the first. But what is incontrovertible is that the stage Daleks appear in the movie. And that Terry Nation later acquired a personal fleet of Daleks that he rented out.

Since the second movie was only official on December 16, 1965, and the stage play started on December 21, 1965, less than a week later, that doesn't give much time to build five Daleks. In fact, it's no time at all. The construction of these Daleks had to have been no later than November/ December.Which means that the decision to go with the second movie, the real decision to start spending money on the project, placing orders, commissioning Daleks, scripts, set design and sets, would have been taken September/October at the latest.

The actual decision to go with the second movie probably took place within a month or so after Doctor Who and the Daleks.The most significant thing, however, was that the play amounted to evidence of a fairly close relationship between Terry Nation and Milton Subotsky, for Subotsky to be willing to allow and even modify his brand new Daleks for stage half a year before they'd appear in the movie houses.

 

[DG Valdron]

THE MAKING OF DALEK INVASION EARTH 2150

As we've noticed, it's a sign of how incredibly popular the Daleks were, and how they so completely overshadowed the show is they occupy the title. Doctor Who isn't even mentioned.

Based on the second Dalek serial, Dalek Invasion Earth, that had aired November and December, 1965, the AARU crew had obtained their option to make a movie literally before the series had even ended. The ink on the scripts was literally still wet, when they exercised their rights. In many ways, this was a close and faithful follow up to both the prior movie and the serial. Gordon Flemyng returned as Director, as did many of the production crew. The script was written by Subotsky and David Whittaker, the script editor for Terry Nation's stories, and with a few adjustments, the stories followed very closely.

Peter Cushing returned as Doctor Who, as did child actress Roberta Tovey. The rest of the cast were abandoned, Roy Castle who had played Ian, and Jenny Linden who had played Barbara, did not return. Instead, Bernard Cribbens, best known for his Carry On movies, shows up as a wayward policeman stumbling into Tardis, and we meet the Doctor's niece, Louise, played by Jill Curzon to add some extra sex appeal.

The story was the same: The Doctor and his friends travel a short distance into the future, where they encounter a ruined world of broken and decaying buildings and starving population. An Earth conquered by the Daleks, using humans as slaves in their projects, and reducing some humans to zombified 'Robomen.' The Doctor and his friends end up trapped in this grim world, separated from each other, and joining the resistance. Eventually, they come together, discover the Daleks plan to literally gut the Earth's molten core, and foil them by turning the Robomen against them.

One issue which was inescapable was a massive tonal shift in the production. Doctor Who and the Daleks had been something of a fairy tale, with its oversaturated day-glo colours, exotic and unearthly sets of a ruined world and alien city, where the Thals radiated a kind of gay androgyny. It was an adventure in another time and place. Terry Nation had shifted his serial to a kind of post-apocalyptic modern world, a nightmarish version of the world outside our windows, and it worked on television, adding tension and a sense of desperation to the proceedings and heightening the drama. But Nation had gone from one confined black and white serial to another - one was still close to the other. On a big screen, the gap opened up immensely.

Nation's Dalek Invasion Earth, with its extensive location footage and dramatic imagery had upped the ante dramatically for production value. Invasion Earth 2150 followed suit, and was a much more ambitious production for its time, set in a post-apocalyptic version of contemporary earth, employing extensive location and outdoor shooting around Shepperton studios, elaborate sets, exciting and genuinely dangerous stunts, and a large cast, throngs of extras and ambitious special effects ranging from model flying saucer superimpositions to explosions, The film featured an Armada of 19 working Daleks, including returning Daleks from the first movie, five from the stage play, and a series of new builds, and additional inanimate props, and even toy models for some scenes.

It cost 286,000 pounds, with 50,000 pounds being spent on promotion. That came to almost a million dollars in US currency, in part, it was the typical inflation of sequels, and in part, it was rising ambition in response to the previous serials and movie, the bar kept on rising, and partly it was blind optimism. The first movie made a killing, the second one should do even better.

Unfortunately failed to draw audiences, and the critics were harsh. Many complained of the tone of the film, which seemed unsuitable for the children who were part of the audience. People were killed on screen and at times, inappropriate comic moments took place with dead bodies laying about. The robomen eschewed the zombie versions of the TV series for a sort of futuristic latex storm trooper outfit, that was sometimes played for awkward laughs. The post-apocalyptic London ruled by the Daleks was altogether too grim for an audience looking for escapist fare. It was too dark, too much of a change from the candy coloured fairy tale of the previou movie.

The timing was also poor - it premiered August 5, 1966, at the end of summer, just before the resumption of school, when audiences were seeking lighter fare. Meanwhile, the Chase had run from May 22 to June 28, 1966. So audiences pretty much had had their Dalek fix barely a month before. And to be honest, the Chase hadn't been all that great, a meandering, aimless farrago, audiences were down, viewer appreciation below 60%. it likely disappointed television audiences, and dissuaded paying ones from the theater.

By the end of its theatrical run, Invasion Earth 2150 was judged a critical and commercial failure.

Subotsky and Vegoda had exercised their option on The Chase, while the serial was playing and before Invasion Earth 2150 had hit theatres.

But now, they had serious second thoughts. Neither of the movies had turned out to have done particularly well in the US, and while the first movie had been a hit in Britain, it looked like the Dalekmania wave was peaking. Subotsky in particular was disenchanted with the rambling narrative of the Chase, which he regarded as unfilmable for a ninety minute movie.

All else being equal, this would have probably been the end for the Doctor Who film franchise.

Footnote 1: This is basically exactly OTL.

Footnote 2: For what it's worth, I recommend Dalek Invasion Earth 2150. The original serial is of course padded and dragged out and at times is slow and uneven. Compressed, it's a snappier, more energetic and engaging story. The production values of ruined London, and a starving, desperate post-apocalyptic society under alien domination are well done. And while the action sequences and stunts pall compared to today's standards, they're still impressive, particularly for their time. One scene where a fleeing van races across the landscape doing hairpin turns and crashing through Daleks was actually done live, without seatbelts and with Roberta Tovey in the passenger seat because they couldn't find a stuntman her size. Another sequence had a fleeing stuntman getting physically injured dodging Dalek blasts. There are a number of memorable scenes - including the Dalek rising from the waters, or the Dalek saucer circling London. Cushing's Doctor comes into his own, focussed, resourceful and cunning. Even the Robomen are intimidating with their black latex outfits and visored helmets - they look like futuristic S&M policemen, a stripped down version of Judge Dredd. It's not a bad movie at all, and I'll take it over the original serial.

Footnote 3: For what it's worth, this movie may be canonical to the TV series. In Genesis of the Daleks, Tom Baker's Doctor is put under torture by Davros, and forced to recount the Dalek's future failures. Davros intends to use the information to make sure his Daleks win. But when the 4th Doctor recounts the events of the Dalek Earth Invasion, he remembers and recounts the events of the Cushing movie, not the Hartnell serial. Okay, so Terry Nation's memory just played him false, after all, he wrote them, right? EXCEPT he didn't write the movie, David Whittaker and Milton Subotsky did. So he's remembering, and the 4th Doctor is remembering, the events of a script that he didn't actually write. Food for thought.

 

[DG Valdron]

Doctor Who and the Menace From Space
Released May 1, 1967

Directed by Freddie Francis
Written by Milton Subotsky
Starring Robert Hutton, Jennifer Jayne, Zia Moyheddin
Guest starring Peter Cushing and Michael Gough

Doctor Who, played by Peter Cushing, leaves a smoking police box, gets in a car on an urgent mission and crashes, ending up badly injured. Later, in the hospital, bandages are removed, revealing the Doctor is now played by Robert Hutton. As the Doctor convalesces, a flight of meteors comes down to earth in formation. A colleague of the Doctor, Professor Lee, played by Jennifer Jayne, leads the scientific team investigating the site, but she and her colleagues are soon taken over by disembodied aliens. Jayne cuts off all contact, but begins requisitioning millions of dollars of equipment. Curious the Doctor attempts to investigate but is rebuffed. This only drives his curiousity. He discovers that the site is now an armed camp at which unnamed scientific activities, including rocket launches are carried out. As he investigates, a scarlet plague breaks out, complicating matters. Eventually, with the help of Farge, played by Zia Moyheddin, he manages to rescue Lee and drive the alien from her. They figure out a defence to keep the aliens from invading them. The Doctor realizes his injuries give him natural immunity. Lee and Farge are kidnapped, and the Doctor hitches a ride to the moon to rescue them. The aliens, Lead by Michael Gough, billed as Master of the Moon, reveal that they are sad existential wanderers who only want to go home. The Doctor, understanding, offers to help them.

Doctor Who and the Menace From Space was notable for heavy re-use of sets and props left over from Dalek Invasion Earth 2150. In the United States, the two movies were released marketed together as a double bill.

Footnote 1: B-movie afficionados will note that this is 'They Came From Beyond Space' an actual Amicus movie, released May 1, 1967, and starring Robert Hutton. It actually did re-use a lot of Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 sets and props. In the United States, it was released with another Amicus Sci Fi film, Terrornauts.

Footnote 2: The only difference between Doctor Who and the Menace from Space and They Came From Beyond Space, apart from the title, is the appearance of Peter Cushing and the blue police box in some initial scenes.

Footnote 3: Although there's a fan sentiment that says that At the Earth's Core is the unofficial third AARU Doctor Who movie, there's a good case to be made for They Came From Beyond Space. Indeed there are a number of eerily prescient parallels to Pertwee's Spearhead from Space, which would premiere a few years later. Both stories feature a Doctor who drives an antique car. Both feature an older Doctor who is nevertheless a man of action. Both Doctors are hospitalized at the outset, and the plot opens up without them. Both stories have a female professor or doctor, working and helping lead a scientific/investigation team. In both stories, there is an unusual anomalous guided landing of meteors. In each case, the meteors bring an alien presence to earth, which begins subverting and taking over local resources for its own use. In a tip to Return of the Autons, They Came even introduces its own 'Master' in the form of Michael Gough. And finally, we have the Doctor offering a hand of friendship to suddenly sympathetic aliens, a compassion that Pertwee's Doctor often showed. The level of coincidental similarity is really quite remarkable.

Footnote 4: There is an argument that both movie and serial were inspired by Quatermass II, a 1950s serial and subsequent Hammer film, which also features an anomalous landing of meteors, and aliens who take over human resources. In the case of They Came From Beyond Space, Subotsky was adapting a novel, The Gods Hate Kansas, written 1941 by Joseph Millard. Subotsky was living in the US in the 50s and didn't move to England until 1960, so he wouldn't have seen the Quatermass II serial, he may or may not have seen the Hammer movie made from it. Robert Holmes, of course, lived in England throughout, and likely would have seen both Quatermass II either as a serial or movie, and They Came From Beyond Space. But truthfully, the bare bones of the story shared among Holmes, Kneale, Subotsky and Millard are pretty standard, each man brought their own unique independent spin. I can't accuse Subotsky of being derivative of Kneale. Although the overlaps between Subotsky and Holmes are much greater than between Kneale and Holmes, I won't him of being derivative of either. Instead, think of it as Jazz, different musicians playing their own riffs on a similar melody.

Footnote 5: Don't take my word for it though. Seek it out for yourself. It's actually worth watching. It's a relatively compact, energetic little Sci Fi thriller with decent twists and turns, good performances, decent action and characters and a better look than you'd expect. it makes the most of its budget, and the re-use of Who props and sets actually helps it along. It's kind of fun to watch to spot what was carried over from the previous movie, or to watch for the similarities with Spearhead from Space. There are goofy bits, like wearing a collander as a headpiece to protect against aliens... but not that many.

Footnote 6: Sadly, the companion film, the Terrornauts, is a crashing disappointment. It looks and feels so cheap, in contrast, that you might think it was made with change found behind the couch cushions. Much of the film is set in literally one room, making it feel like a stage play, with most of the other scenes taking place in nondescript offices and rooms. The special effects, props and particularly the alien and robot are laughably bad. The climactic action is basically a video game - the characters wear headpieces to control a space station and shoot down invading enemy ships. Although based on a Murray Leinster story, and written by Sci Fi great John Brunner, the dialogue is stilted and seems to be written for elementary school students. I

Footnote 6: This by the way, is the BIG POD. The tweaking of the contract the year before was the small POD, but here is where the Doctor Who series takes off on its own.

 

[DG Valdron]

EXCERPT FROM 1976 INTERVIEW, DWAS FANZINE, WITH JOE VEGODA OF AARU PRODUCTIONS

DWAS: Doctor Who and the Menace from Space.

Vegoda: I wasn't really involved in that one. I was a bystander really.

DWAS: It really is the odd man out in the AARU Doctor Who series.

Vegoda: That's something of an understatement.

DWAS: How did it come about? Can you shed any light?

Vegoda: A little I think. You must understand, I didn't have much to do with this one. Mostly, I was a bystander. I heard the stories, was present for some of the arguments. So take all of this with a grain of salt.

Vegoda: Very well. Here goes. You have to remember that the second Cushing movie, Dalek Invasion 2150 performed well below expectations. We spent a lot of money on it, a lot, and the returns were disappointing. So we weren=t at all sure where to go with it next or even if we should bother. It's entirely possible that the AARU Doctor Who franchise could have ended right then and there. And certainly, if it was to continue, there was no clear idea as to what direction it should take, certainly not the children's movies that Milton eventually went with. That wasn't obvious. Really, I think that the intention was to just park Doctor Who and decide later on, I really do think we were ready to leave it behind.

DWAS: So what happened?

Vegoda: I think that the first thing was that Dalek Invasion Earth was an expensive film. We'd sunk a lot of money into it - sets, Dalek Props, that spaceship model and so on. Some of it was just sunk - you couldn't use all those expensive Dalek props for anything but another Dalek movie. We weren't sold on doing that, but we weren't going to throw them out until we knew for sure. So they went into the warehouse.

Vegoda: But other sets, other props, they weren=t as ... particular... so there was a strong incentive to reuse them. They were expensive, they were already paid for so if we could find a use for them, we could make another sci fi movie much more cheaply. I say we, but mainly it was Milton (Subotsky) and Max (Rosenberg). They actually planned on a couple of sci fi movies as their follow up. One of them ended up being the Doctor Who.

DWAS: What was the other one?

Vegoda: Terrornauts? I think? Yes. Terrornauts. That was about an astronomer who gets kidnapped by alien robots and has to fight an alien invasion. It had Charles Hawtrey in it, from the Carry On films. I suppose that could have ended up being the Doctor Who film. No wait, it couldn't.

DWAS: Why not?

Vegoda: Neither of them were intended, actually. That was a decision that got made late in process, almost at the last minute. It certainly wasn=t planned. The other film was actually based on a short story or pulp novel that Milton had the rights to - The Gods Hate Kansas. Nothing to do with Doctor Who, that was a completely unrelated property.

Vegoda: Basically, that one was straight up science fiction - body snatching aliens come to earth in meteors, and they take over everyone, except this one man with a silver plate in his head. In the end, I don't think the aliens are really bad, just driven. It was very twilight zone, I think. Much more thoughtful than action oriented.

Vegoda: I've heard it compared to Qatermass II, but that's very superficial. Milton retitled it "They Came From Beyond Space" which was very much a nod to "They Came From Outer Space" itself similar in idea.

DWAS: Where did the Doctor Who aspect come into play?

Vegoda: I'm getting to that. Anyway, Max (Rosenberg) hated the script. He thought it was slow and too philosophical. He wanted more action. That=s where I think he got his idea. You see, back then around 65 and 66, spies were huge. You had James Bond, Our Man Flint, Matt Helm in the movie theatres, on television there was Danger Man, I Spy, Man From Uncle even Get Smart. Spies were all over the place.

Vegoda: Suddenly, that was what Max wanted to do - spies. Milton had to rewrite the script completely to make it a kind of espionage thriller. He refused to give up the Sci Fi aspect though, the whole point of the project was to get some use out of all those sets. But they compromised. Max would have his espionage movie, Milton his science fiction, it would be spies versus body snatching aliens - a metaphor for communism I suppose.

Vegoda: They'd worked it out, and that;s when Max had his great stroke of genius. Let me ask you a question: Name a James Bond movie.

DWAS: Man with the Golden Gun. Thunderball. Her Majesties Secret Service. Diamonds are Forever.

Vegoda: No, name the most famous one.

DWAS: Casino Royale.

Vegoda: No. Doctor No.

DWAS: Doctor No?

 

[DG Valdron]

PART 2, EXCERPT FROM 1976 INTERVIEW, DWAS FANZINE, WITH JOE VEGODA OF AARU PRODUCTIONS

DWAS: Doctor No?

Vegoda: Doctor No, the first James Bond novel. The first Bond movie in 1962, the start of the entire franchise, the one that set the pattern for all the others. Doctor No.

DWAS: All right?

Vegoda: So Max, he's looking to get in on that James Bond action, he wants his espionage hero. He wants people to think of Bond, or Helm or Flint, or Napoleon Solo, or Drake... But mainly Bond. He wants an allusion to Bond. So he thinks Doctor No.... Doctor Who? They have a license to the name, so... Doctor Who. The Cushing movies did no business in the United States. But Connery and Doctor No had been huge, everyone knew them, so play off that and use the Doctor Who name.

DWAS: Doctor Who?

Vegoda: That's all. It turns out the Japanese had already done the same thing with their King Kong movie - the villain there is Doctor Who. So Max isn't even being original.

DWAS: So it wasn't going to be a Doctor Who movie at all? It was just the name, because it remind people of the name of a Bond film?

Vegoda: That's correct. It literally had nothing to do with the previous movies. They'd cast an American actor, and they barely use the name in the film, I think they=d already started shooting. I think he was Doctor Temple, originally, but they edited that out of the audio-just deleted Temple, so it was simply "Doctor." By the way - That's when the character started being referred to just as Doctor in the movies and television series. Before that it was Doctor Who. That's where it it started. It was all literally that last minute. There's no connection to the previous movies in the script.

DWAS: That's a bit shocking.

Vegoda: There was a huge falling out over it. Milton was outraged, he was absolutely against it. He was always more interested in the artistic side. For Max it was a straight out business decision, just a marketing ploy. But for Milton, it was 'We have two previous films, and now you're going to change everything, throw everything away, do something totally different.' And Max is going 'It'll make us money.' They were really at loggerheads.

DWAS: How did they sort it out?

Vegoda: Well, just before that, I think it was the beginning of 67. January maybe. Or maybe November or December 66, William Hartnell left the television series, and Patrick Troughton took over. And it was fine, audiences accepted the new Doctor. I think that was what decided it for Milton. If the telly show could change Doctors, so too could the movies. He wasn=t happy with it still, but he decided to go along with it.

DWAS: And how did Cushing take it?

Vegoda: I don't think anyone asked him, really. I don't think he was all that wedded to the role, or identified with it. That would come later.

DWAS: But he's in it.

Vegoda: Yes, for less than five minutes. That was Milton. He accepted that the Doctor was going to change. But he insisted on some kind of transition. So they hired on Peter for an afternoon, filmed him getting in and out of a police box, then getting in a car and driving... and that was it. Maybe ten lines, but it was Peter Cushing, so he got co-star billing with Hutton. Or guest star. The idea is that his Tardis stops working, so he goes out, goes for a drive, and then has a car crash, and because of his injuries and plastic surgery, he comes out as Hutton, with a silver plate in his head. It was just a five minute fix up. I hear that there are some versions of the film where they don=t even bother, just open with a car crash.

DWAS: So it wasn't a Doctor Who movie at all, really?

Vegoda: Yes and no. It's official title is Doctor Who and the Menace From Beyond. There's a shot of a police box, Peter Cushing is in it for a moment. So there's that. But really? No. No one was really thinking of a connection.

Vegoda: That ended up happening though. The plan was that after first run, Menace From Beyond was going to play a double bill with Terrornauts, But that... distributors were throwing up their hands, they'd take it, but they weren't happy. So instead, we packaged Menace with Dalek Invasion Earth 2150, for a double bill, They actually did okay together, went over well, made some money. So I guess they ended up being connected.

Vegoda: Terrornauts got marketed as a children's movie on its own, and later we packaged it as a double bill, second feature, for Doctor Who and the Daleks, again, children's market. It went over better that way. Still, it's funny. A few years later, they changed Doctors again, Jon Pertwee - and his story, Spearhead from Space, it has a lot of resemblances to Menace From Beyond. So there's that. Maybe it was just ahead of its time.

DWAS: How did it do?

Vegoda: Not as well as they'd hoped. Maybe the spy thing was passing by that time, who knows. Or maybe it was just a tougher genre to break into. I think they were disappointed. Milton especially, he was disappointed and angry. He'd been pushed into this, and he'd allowed himself to be compromised and it turned out not to have been for much. I think it strained the relationship between the two men. They patched it up, but...

DWAS: But...

Vegoda: But I think Milton had something to prove after that. He'd compromised himself for Max's idea, perhaps he found that humiliating. And I think afterwards, he was really insistent on rejecting it. He publicly stated that Doctor Who Menace from Beyond should never have been a Doctor Who film. I think he even re-released it under its old title, with the Cushing scenes cut out, They Came From Beyond Space. There's two versions of the same film out there, under two different names.

Vegoda: Milton had something to prove after that. He was very adamant after that about control over Doctor Who, Max was pushed right out of AARU, he was in it, but he had no creative input on the AARU stuff. They were still partners in Amicus, they still worked together for many years, and collaborated on projects. But I think that was the beginning of the split. Doctor Who was Milton's. Max did some of the business work, but he wasn't allowed near the creative side. Milton was extremely possessive, even hostile about it.

Vegoda: You know, it's funny, but I think without Doctor Who and the Menace from Beyond, the next Doctor Who film wouldn't have been made at all. Not that this one or the prior had made so much money a sequel was in the cards, but it was this way - Milton had his back up, and he wanted to do it his way, the right way, and to prove himself. It was a very personal thing.

Vegoda: I think that if not for that personal thing, I don't think anyone would have bothered. The franchise could have ended with two movies, we'd have all gone on to other things. But Milton had something to prove, and he had Peter Cushing and Roberta Tovey and all those Daleks in a warehouse....

DWAS: The rest, as they say, is history.


Footnote 1: And none of this is OTL, obviously. Happy? I don't actually have a clear idea of what Vegoda was up to after Dalek Invasion Earth 2150. He seems to have moved on to other areas of the business. In this timeline, he's at least on regular speaking terms with Milton Subotsky when all this is going on.

Footnote 2: Doctor Who is actually a character in the Toho film King Kong Escapes, 1965. The character is a villain with Cliff Richars hair and a Dracula Cape. He tools around in a secret Ocean liner (it was the 60s, give me a break). Doctor Who in the movie is after a rare radioactive element, and has built himself a giant Mechanical Ape to mine it (what?) but the radiation is too much for the robot so he kidnaps and hypnotises King Kong, because the Ape will be more resistant to radiation (what???). Doctor Who is funded by an unnamed oriental communist power, and he's pretty henpecked by the liaison. Eventually, things go wrong, King Kong escapes hypnosis, battles the giant mechanical ape, and then eventually smashes up Doctor Who's cruise liner. Toho, after they lost the rights to use King Kong, briefly considered using their Mechani-Kong in stories.... until a whole bunch of lawyers pointed out that was not a good idea. The King Kong Doctor Who is clearly based on Doctor No.

Footnote 3: And it was Doctor Who, not 'Doctor Hu' or some weird oriental riff. King KongEscapes was actually a spin off of a British Rankin Bass comic series about King Kong. Kong's nemesis in the animated series was also named Doctor Who - weird bald little guy who was also derived from Doctor No. You can track some of those animated episodes down on youtube. But this does beg the question - Rankin Bass was a British company, surely they knew about the BBC series and were stepping on toes. No one seems to have made a big deal about it back then though.

Footnote 4: I suppose if you're a sufficiently maniacal continuity connection fan, you could, if you wanted, try to integrate the two King Kong Doctor Who's into the overall world of the time traveller with the blue box. I suppose in the Timeless Child era, they're just another pair of Doctors. Or, since their names are Doctor Who, maybe they belong at the edges of AARU Canon. Clearly.... I need to stop.

Footnote 5: Anyway two fun things for me - the idea that Doctor Who gets the next movie in such a cynical, self serving, off the wall way. And the notion that it's resentment, grievance and one upsmanship that will result in Subotsky taking the trouble to make the next movie after that.

 

[DG Valdron]

THE MAKING OF DALEKS VERSUS ROBOTS, PART ONE

Max Rosenberg continued to push Amicus' attempts to cash in on the James Bond movies, with the Eliminators, eventually retitled Danger Route. This was based on a 1966 spy novel by Andrew York, which was eventually parlayed into a series of books. The novels were about a government assassin working for a secret government organization called The Route. Optioned in January, the film was released in October, 1967.

Milton Subotsky's determination to make a final Doctor Who film more in line with his vision was neither quickly nor easily arrived at. Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 had been a commercial and critical underperformer, Doctor Who Menace from Beyond had gone in a direction that Subotsky loathed and had failed to justify itself. Through the remainder of 1967, even while focussing on Danger Route, Subotsky toyed with the idea, going so far as to approach both Peter Cushing and Roberta Tovey for a possible return.

Roberta Tovey, of course, was fully available. But Peter Cushing was booked for the year, working on a 15 episode Sherlock Holmes series for the BBC, which was in production from May through December, 1967, and eventually airing in 1968. Cushing's lack of availability meant that the next Doctor Who movie, if there was to be one, would be pushed off at least to 1968 and even 1969. The one positive, however, was that Cushing was very receptive to Subotsky's ideas for the next movie - he felt constrained by his work with Hammer, and wanted to branch out beyond that.

Initially, Subotsky considered doing an original story, or perhaps licensing or adapting some existing work into a Doctor Who story. The trouble was that he'd determined on a Dalek story. At that point, Daleks were still immensely popular, Terry Nation was in the throes of negotiating a spin off series. Subotsky'd perception at the time was that the Daleks and the Doctor were inextricably linked - you couldn't have a 'real' Doctor Who movie without Daleks.

Which lead to a couple of roadblocks - the next Dalek serial was The Chase, which Subotsky regarded as unfilmable, but which AARU had an option for. In the meantime, however, by 1967, there were three more Dalek serials to choose from - the Dalek Masterplan, the Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks, any of which were preferable. Unfortunately, by that time, the asking price had gone up, and Terry Nation's agent proved a difficult adversary. Subotsky wanted Daleks, he just didn't want the story he had the option for. Negotiations with Nation dragged on through 1967, complicated by what Subotsky saw resentfully as extravagant demands for money and script approvals.

A complicating factor was that Nation wasn't actually interested in giving any further rights to AARU. In fact, he wasn't particularly happy that they had rights to an option on the Chase. Back in 1967, Nation was actively engaged in trying to launch his own television series around the Daleks. At this point, during Dalek Masterplan, he was actually putting the pieces in place for a Dalek Spin off, with the one off episode Mission to the Unknown. In Dalek Masterplan he introduced several characters he was planning for the spin off series. These characters and this world would be developed further in the Doctor Who annual. He got as far as the edge of actually shooting a pilot episode, the Destroyers, and negotiating with ABC in the United States. Unfortunately, his demands were excessive, he wanted the BBC to completely forego all royalties and sign 100% of the rights over the Daleks to him. Ultimately, the project fell apart.

But this meant that through 1967, Nation was chasing his white whale. He wasn't interested in another AARU movie. In fact, he tended to regard it a distraction at best, and unwelcome competition and dilution of the Dalek brand. Which meant that the prices were going to be high and the negotiations would be difficult, and even unpleasant. Indeed, the fact that there even negotiations at all suggested that Nation was using them to delay the possible Dalek movie, keeping it on ice, while he moved forward with his own agenda.

Of course, by 1968 the landscape had changed considerably. ABC had turned down the project, the pilot hadn't been filmed, the BBC hadn't conceded the rights, and worse, had decided to retire the Daleks permanently. Evil of the Daleks in 1967 would be the last Dalek story until Pertwee's Day of the Daleks, five series later, in 1972.

There were a couple of reappearances - Evil of the Daleks was re-broadcast in February and March 1968, and they appeared in an Outer Limits style anthologoy series in April 1969, There were a handful of publicity appearances in 1968, but the star was clearly fading.

By the middle of 1968, Nation was considerably more amenable - Dalekmania was over, or if not over, fading into the background, the Daleks were exiled from the BBC, he had his personal fleet of Daleks for public appearances and marketing, but pickings were thin. The price dropped and overtures were considerably more friendly. But by that time, Subotsky had been badly burned by Nation's treatment, and wasn't willing to play ball. He had his option on the third serial, that would do, he exercised it, paid Nation much less money than he wanted, and that was that.

The Chase was rewritten - the title dropped. Subotsky decided that the core of the story should be the battle between the Daleks and Mechanoids, set on a colourful alien world reminiscent of Doctor Who and the Daleks. The term mechanoids was dropped in favour of the more accessible Robots. The script was retitled Daleks vs Robots, and once again, poor old Doctor Who failed to make the bill. Deliberately aiming for a children's market, Subotsky introduced a second youth - Mike, a young newspaper-boy who stumbles into the Tardis. Mike was intended to be the same age as Roberta Tovey's Susan, and appears to be based on the character created for the Doctor Who Radio series starring Peter Cushing, that was playing in international markets.

Footnote 1: Surprise! Amicus really was trying to cash in on the James Bond / Espionage craze in 1967. Andrew York's spy novel - The Eliminators, was a real thing, and pulpy trash it was too. And it really did spawn a succession of equally pulpy and now mostly forgotten trash novels. Speaking of which - Danger Route was an utterly appalling title, they should have stuck to the Eliminators. The production was largely a mess and the resulting film was appalling. Milton Subotsky called it a 'total failure.' But it does reinforce the trope that Amicus was trying to cash in on espionage, and it does cast a new light on the 'espionage' like aspects of They Came From Outer Space.

Footnote 2: Yes, the Chase really is that incoherent. It is a six episode serial. The Doctor acquires a time scoop from the previous serial, the Space Museum, and uses it to reveal that time travelling Daleks are after them (this is the first time that we see Time Travelling Daleks, or Dalek craft with the same abilities as the Tardis. My thinking is that the Chase is actually from the Time War. Anyway, the Tardis goes on the run - it starts off on the beach/desert planet Aridus, features a sandstorm, a Dalek rising up out of the sand, there's an attack of Mire Beasts, the Tardis flees to the top of the Empire State building circa 1960s, then the Marie Celeste (a 19th century naval mystery where a derelict ship was found with the crew vanished), then to a haunted house with Dracula and Frankenstein (who turn out to be theme park robots), after that the Daleks create a robot copy of the Doctor to infiltrate the Tardis, so that Hartnell has to fight himself, finally they end up on the planet of the Mechanoids, where the two robotic races fight it out. Eventually, Barbara and Ian take a Dalek time machine and go home. There's no plot, just a succession of incidents.

Footnote 3: In terms of dates here goes:
The Daleks - December 21, 1963 to February 1, 1964
Dalek Invasion of Earth - November 21 to December 26, 1964
Doctor Who movie deal signed December, 1964
The Chase - May 22 to June 26, 1965.
Movie - Doctor Who and the Daleks - August 23 - August 30, 1965
The Dalek Masterplan -November 13, 1965 to January 29, 1966
Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 announced December, 1965
Movie - Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 - August 5-12, 1966
Power of the Daleks - November 5, 1966 to December 10, 1966
Evil of the Daleks - May 20, 1967 to July 1, 1967.
Rebroadcast of Evil of the Daleks, February/March 1968
Out of the Unknown - Get off My Cloud (BBC colour Sci Fi anthology series episode in which the Daleks guest starred) - April 1, 1969

Footnote 4: As with so much else so far, the Terry Nation Dalek TV series spin off is mostly OTL. It seems to have started up in 1966 with talk of a Dalek television series on BBC2. But that didn't fly. For a while, Nation was talking to ITV. Then apparently there was interest from ABC one of the three main channels in the US. Nation actually travelled to the US. The Dalek 6388 people chronicle the adventure in some detail on their youtube video.

Footnote 5: It's actually likely that Nation's efforts to launch his TV series may have interfered with or been at cross purposes to any potential third Dalek movie OTL. A third movie would have effectively diluted the brand at the same time Nation was trying to sell his show. At the same time, Nation's asking price was probably going way, way up - he'd signed a lot more merchandise deals and was much more aware of cash flow.

Footnote 6: For any of you alternate history buffs, I've always thought that there was fertile material here for a Who/Dalek Alternate History. Nation's television series came very close to launching - to the point of obtaining Daleks, renting studio space, spending some thousands of pounds, and literally being at the edge of filming a full colour pilot. A pilot script was written and is accessible. It's likely that there's a series bible. And the Dalek Masterplan, Mission of Doom and the Doctor Who annuals provide a lot of background research material. And Nation actually did write a space opera over a decade later. During this time Lost in Space was on CBS from 65 through 68. Star Trek was on NBC 1966 to 1969. So it's not unreasonable that ABC wouldn't have greenlit its own exotic space opera. If things had turned out differently....

 

[DG Valdron]

THE MAKING OF DALEKS VERSUS ROBOTS, DALEK INTERRUPTED

1967 had proved a difficult year for Subotsky to find any traction on his Doctor Who movie. The slot for the third movie had been taken up by Max Rosenberg's effort to cash in on the James Bond lead spy-mania. Internal conflicts and difficulties with Nation consumed the balance of the year. A third (or fourth) Peter Cushing-Doctor Who adventure would not come any earlier than late 1968, it that.

But in 1968, much of Rosenberg's and Subotsky's time and energy would be consumed by a prestige project - The Birthday Party, based on a play by Harold Pinter, directed by William Friedkin, and starring Robert Shaw, with a budget of approximately a million and a half dollars. The movie was a passion project by William Friedkin, and he was the driving force. The Birthday Party represented a major step up into respectability - Amicus had been something of a bottom feeder in the movie world, producing low budget, thrown together productions, and opportunistic cash ins. This was a real movie, with recognized and critically acclaimed Hollywood names.

Subotsky's Doctor Who project was sidelined once again. Not quite ignored, but assigned a decidedly lower priority, with time consumed by the dying negotiations with Terry Nation in early 1968, and then Subotsky's determination to simply write his own script thereafter.

Sometime in mid to late 1968, Subotsky was inspired by Harryhausen's special effects in the 1966, Raquel Welch movie One Million BC, and looked into the prospect of adding stop motion monsters to his Doctor Who. Terry Nation's The Chase had, after all, featured an attack of 'Mire Beasts.' This proved largely unfeasible, but drawing on this inspiraciton, Amicus films acquired rights to dinosaur stock footage from 1940s One Million BC, starring Victor Mature, and Subotsky began a rewrite to incorporate the footage.

In the meantime, The Birthday Party took up time and energy through the last half of 1968. The Birthday Party premiered in December, 1968, and proceeded to flop, critically and financially.

Despite the lack of success, the involvement with The Birthday Party had conferred a degree of respectability on Subotsky and Rosenberg, and they became involved, in late 1968 and through 1969, with a couple of other 'prestige' projects. The first was A Touch of Love, based on a novel by Margaret Drabble, a major British literary figure, and directed by Waris Hussein, released in September. The next was another adaptation of a literary work, The Mind of Mr. Soames, directed by Alan Cooke, starring Terrence Stamp and Robert Vaugn, released in November.

Side by side with these project, Daleks vs Robots plodded onwards,from late 1968 through early 1969. Peter Cushing and Roberta Tovey were formally signed back on. Jack Wild, a young stage actor, was cast as Mike in January of 1969. A new character - the Master of Robots, was created, originally to be played by Michael Gough, but with the help of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee agreed to come on Board. Final principal cast members were Carry On's Angela Douglas and Jim Dale, as Drayan and Ardor, in a romantic subplot not found in the original story.

Footnote 1: The actual movies - the Birthday Party, A Touch of Love and Mind of Mr. Soames, with their novel authors, directors and stars are all real. Amicus really did attempt to go upscale in 1968 and 1969. It's quite a journey from 'Rock Rock Rock' to 'Doctor Terrors House of Horrors' to 'Doctor Who and the Daleks' and 'Terrornauts' all the way to Harold Pinter, Margaret Drabble and William Friedkin. I think it illustrates the fluidity of Amicus' productons. They could be quite unpredictable.

Footnote 2: I can't remember the source, but I believe that at one point, Jim Dale was considered for the role of the Doctor. Dale was best known as a leading man in several of the Carry On movies. In this ATL he follows after his Carry on Alumnus, Bernard Cribbens, as a Who player. Christopher Lee, as I understand it, was fairly contemptuous of Doctor Who and refused to appear in the show, but in this case, his close friend Cushing talked him into it. Finally, Jack Wild was a real person, a child stage actor who had appeared in Oliver Twist in 1967. He's the right age to appear alongside Roberta Tovey.

Footnote 3: One Million Years BC was a black and white 1940 caveman epic starring Victor Mature. It later became a cheap source of stock dinosaur/monster footage for several 50s and 60s sci fi films. From Wikipedia: "Footage from this film, as well as numerous unused scenes and outtakes, went into a stock footage library. This footage was then used by numerous companies through the years by producers who wanted to save money on costly special effects shots in films that featured dinosaurs. Even a few Westerns used footage of rockslides and volcanoes from this film. Because of this, footage from this film appeared in numerous films throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. These films include Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943), one of the chapters of the serial film Superman (1948), Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), Two Lost Worlds (1950), The Lost Volcano (1950; one of the films in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy series), the American version of Godzilla Raids Again (1955) known as Gigantis the Fire Monster (1959), Jungle Manhunt (1951; one of the films in the Jungle Jim series), Smoky Canyon (1952), the "Yesterday's World" episode of The Schaefer Century Theatre (1952), Untamed Women (1952), Robot Monster (1953), The Lost Planet (1953), King Dinosaur (1955), the Three Stooges short film Space Ship Sappy (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), She Demons (1958), Valley of the Dragons (1961), Journey to the Center of Time (1967), Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970; the stock footage was tinted in color for this film), the Mexican films Island of the Dinosaurs (La isla de los dinosaurios 1967), Adventure at the Center of the Earth (Aventura al centro de la tierra; 1966) and The Ghost Jesters (Los fantasmas burlones; 1964), One Million AC/DC (1970), TerrorVision (1986) and Attack of the B Movie Monster (1989)"

Footnote 4: The important thing to remember is that Subotsky is not diving deep, he's just got a grab bag of ideas in The Chase, and he's trying to put together elements for a successful children's movie. The Daleks vs Mechons thing was the most successful part of The Chase, so he's building from that. He sees the Raquel Welch film, thinks Kids love dinosaurs, he looks around for a way to incorporate those. Dracula and Frankenstein appears in The Chase, these are popular characters, so why not have Christopher Lee and a vaguely Dracula-like character.

 

[TGW]

Hi there! Uh, so I've just reached the end of the chapter of the first movie, though I intend to finish the rest, but I do want to just jot down a quick note here to say that I am REALLY enjoying this so far!

I had the great joy of going to see the Cushing films in the cinema this year, with my mother who broke her 'no cinema on Sundays' rule specifically for these films. We went in and sat down and we watched them and honestly I don't think I've had quite as much fun as I have had in ages. Reading your write-up of the first film and indeed your own thoughts upon it brought it all flooding back to me. I absolutely believe that this was a movie made for the big screen, and that any attempt to shove it into the smaller screen did damage their reputations a bit over the years. I found them a joy to watch, and you are quite right in that they are absolutely of their age and that there aren't really films like this anymore, either in tone or in look or in style. A tale where Peter Cushing carries on as Doctor Who is really interesting, and I am fascinated to see how it all pans out.

I am really liking the breakdown of events thus far, and I am very curious to learn where you are taking this timeline.

EDIT: Also having just finished it all, I have to say that the list of actors in the film is making me grin like mad. You could not get a more British Sixties cast if you tried, and I love it! I am slightly disappointed that there will be no battles between Frankenstein and a Dalek though.

 

[DG Valdron]

THE MAKING OF DALEKS VS ROBOTS - PART THREE. BRING CEREAL, TOYS AND MONEY!

In his album, Excitable Boy, Warren Zevon wrote the character of an adventurer trapped in Havanna, who calls out "bring lawyers guns and money." For Milton Subotsky, the quest to make the next Doctor Who amounted to a desperate plea for Cereal, Toys and Money.

Money makes the film world go around, for a movie to be made, the financing had to be there. There were a dozen different ways to find the money. Investors might put up the money, or distributors might advance funds. With a commitment from a distributor, you could borrow bridge financing to make the movie. You could even find sponsors to contribute.

Part of the funding for Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 had actually come from an unusual source. Invasion Earth 2150 had obtained funding and sponsorship from Quaker Oats to promote its sugar puffs cereal brand. Like many others, they weren't happy with the movie. Basically, what they got out of it was product placement in the form of colourful Sugar Puffs posters showing up incongrously in the stark wastelands of a ruined and conquered London. Their product was juxtaposed with urban ruins, starving citizens and dead bodies laying in the street. "Breakfast Cereal for the Holocaust?" - It wasn't quite the image they were looking for and they let their unhappiness be known.

On the other hand, they'd made a huge investment in the project, and it was hard to simply call it a loss and walk away. There's something called the 'sunk cost fallacy' where if someone throws money into a losing proposition, they find themselves compelled to throw more money. Walking away amounts to an admission that you've wasted your money, and it's easier to dig deeper rather than admit that. If there was no follow up, then Quaker's officials had to admit that their investment had been a massive blunder. If there was a follow up movie... they might consider some further participation, if it looked good.

Milton Subotsky had dealt directly with Quaker Oats over the Sugar Puffs material. The promotions for the movies had taken the Daleks through department stores, so they weren't unknown to retailers and toy manufacturers. So this was a rare instance where Subotsky rather than Rosemberg was the one with a direct link to a financing source.

When Subotsky came calling, Quaker Oats didn't quite shut the door on him entirely, but they did let him know they were unhappy. Before they'd consider working with him again, they wanted assurances that there would be a much more positive portrayal of their cereal, such as having people actually eating it on camera and complimenting it. And for God's sakes, no bombed out London, no corpses in the street. Rather, something friendlier, less grim, something more like the original movie.

Subotsky, desperate to secure funding, was more than willing to do things their way. In many ways, the emphasis on a more children's friendly movie, more like the original, was in line with his own vision. Quaker Oats made a commitment, with it's conditions.

Even then, however, the venture was still short of money. This is often the way with films. Sometimes, putting together film financing was like putting together a house of cards, where you had to convince each card. A key element of putting together financing was to find that initial commitment. No one liked to be the first to take a risk... you might be the only one, you might lose your investment, and worst of all you might be investing in a project that everyone else knows is a dog. So that first funding commitment is essential, it tells other funders that the water is safe... or relatively safe. It makes other partners more willing to take a risk.

With the Quaker Oats commitment, a distributor was more willing to agree to carry the movie, a guarantee or prospect of future funding and a return on investment. There were more pieces of money. But that wasn't quite enough.

Enter Louis Marx and Company, toy makers.... One of the Quaker Oats executives was working on a product tie in with Marx Toys, one of those little cereal box toys. That became the channel that lead Subotsky to Louis Marx Ltd., which had produced the first toy Dalek. Marx produced a 6.5 inch battery powered Dalek that would change directions when it bumped into an object, they also had a flashing light in the dome, and later versions had a siren. Dalek toys were a lucrative product line for Marx.

The Marx Daleks were so good, in fact, that they had actually been used by the series itself, in Troughton's Evil of the Daleks to depict multitudes of Daleks in the battle scenes set on Skaro. They were used again later for a Dalek army in Planet of the Daleks, in 1973. Indeed, a Marx Dalek had appeared in Dalek Invasion Earth 2150, painted and used as the prop for a climactic explosion where a Dalek is pulled into the gravity well.

Subotsky went to Marx, cap in hand. On paper, it seemed like the perfect fit - a Dalek movie hooking up with a Dalek toy maker?

Unfortunately, Marx was just fine with its Daleks. They sold perfectly well. They didn't need a movie to sell more.

On the other hand, they had other toys, lines of pressed tin Robots, that they might be interested in promoting. So sitting in the Louis Marx boardroom, facing the managers and executives, they just had one question for Milton Subotsky.... perhaps, they might consider providing some funding if Subotsky could include some of their robots? Perhaps a lot of their robots?

Footnote 1: Believe it or not, Quaker Oats participation in Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 was absolutely real. Basically, it was the 1960s, Britain had just come through economic privations after the war, the economy was booming, and breakfast cereal companies were offering tons of sugar. They were looking for advertising opportunities, and Doctor Who seemed like a good fit. Based on the first movie, it was. If you go back and watch Dalek Invasion Earth 2150, you'll notice incongruous and brightly placed adverts for their cereal.

Footnote 2: And yes - Marx Daleks were used in Dalek Invasion Earth 2150, Evil of the Daleks, Planet of the Daleks. I wouldn't make that up. Actually, some of the movie and stage Daleks actually made it into cameo appearances in the television series, I'd have to look up the episodes though - or you could check out Dalek 6388's incredibly detailed web site. None of the television Daleks did stage or movie appearances. And Terry Nation's stage/movie Daleks were used for the publicity photos in the 1975 stage play Seven Keys to Doomsday, although for the actual stage play, that production built a set of new Daleks. I don't think that the stage play Daleks of Seven Keys to Doomsday or the Ultimate Adventure did any travelling into other media. But in the new Doctor Who series, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the 'all era assembled' Daleks in Asylum of the Daleks and The Magician's Apprentice/Witche's Familiar hadn't had careers. Daleks got around!

 

[DG Valdron]

Hi there! Uh, so I've just reached the end of the chapter of the first movie, though I intend to finish the rest, but I do want to just jot down a quick note here to say that I am REALLY enjoying this so far!

I had the great joy of going to see the Cushing films in the cinema this year, with my mother who broke her 'no cinema on Sundays' rule specifically for these films. We went in and sat down and we watched them and honestly I don't think I've had quite as much fun as I have had in ages. Reading your write-up of the first film and indeed your own thoughts upon it brought it all flooding back to me. I absolutely believe that this was a movie made for the big screen, and that any attempt to shove it into the smaller screen did damage their reputations a bit over the years. I found them a joy to watch, and you are quite right in that they are absolutely of their age and that there aren't really films like this anymore, either in tone or in look or in style. A tale where Peter Cushing carries on as Doctor Who is really interesting, and I am fascinated to see how it all pans out.

I am really liking the breakdown of events thus far, and I am very curious to learn where you are taking this timeline.

EDIT: Also having just finished it all, I have to say that the list of actors in the film is making me grin like mad. You could not get a more British Sixties cast if you tried, and I love it! I am slightly disappointed that there will be no battles between Frankenstein and a Dalek though.

I'm absolutely thrilled to see that someone is actually reading and enjoying this. Welcome aboard!

 

[DG Valdron]

THE MAKING OF DALEKS VERSUS ROBOTS, PART FOUR - THE RISE OF THE ROBOTS

Louis Marx Toys made a great deal of money from selling clever little toy Daleks. But truthfully, it was early 1969, and Daleks hadn't been on television since July 1, 1967. They'd been gone for a couple of years. That was a concern. A Dalek movie was a welcome prospect. Welcome, but not essential.

This meant that Marx was willing to pick up the phone when Subotsky called, particularly when he called with a reference from Quaker Oats. Subotsky was talking about another Dalek movie, which would at least get Daleks into the movie theatres and in front of children, which was almost certain to help them sell toys.

So they were willing to pick up the phone, but not much more than that.

Daleks and Dalek merchandise was a lucrative part of their toy lines, but it was only a part. In addition to Daleks, Marx made a number of toys, including Rockem Sockem Robots, big wheel tricycle, tin plate toys, toy soldiers, action figures, boxed playsets with themes ranging from westerns to space, and robots from the simple tin dime store variety to quite complicated and ambitious products.

Two were notable - There was Big Lou, billed as the largest toy Robot. Approximately three foot tall, it was modeled on a 19th century hussar, complete with peaked helmet and elaborate costume. It had all sorts of functions, and could shoot missiles from its forehead. It was also hideously ugly.

Another remarkable was the Great Garloo, this was a two foot tall robot, more an action figure, with scaly green skin and a spiky ridged crest. Garloo seemed intended to be a cross between Godzilla and Kong, and television commercials depicted the toy menacing train set and miniature towns.

Marx was commissioning and paying for television advertising for both of these products. Why not a little product placement in a movie? It might be cost effective, particularly if they had some control over the manner of product placement for best effect. They were agreeable to providing funding based on a series of conditons, primarily showcasing their toys, or reasonable facsimiles thereof.

Subotsky's film project, based on the Chase, had the Daleks battling a race of robots. The awkward metallic soccer balls that had been the Mechanoids hadn't been particularly impressive or appealing. Subotsky had very little clear idea of what his robots should look like. There were possibilities in that....Marx Toys and Quaker Oats together were able to represent enough money as a 'seed' that Subotsky could bring to Greenberg, who put together the balance of the financing package from the usual sources. Basically - since money was already staked to the project, demonstrating confidence in the project and spreading the risks, other funders were willing to commit.

Even then, there wasn't that much money, and the intent was to do something quick and cheap that could cash in on whatever residual goodwill Doctor Who had - the total budget was barely over 100,000 pounds. This paltry compared to Dalek Invasion Earth's 335,000 pounds, or even Doctor Who and the Daleks, 180,000 pounds. But it was enough.

Marx's final demand related to timing - the movie needed to launch and make its way through theatres in the across the country during the Christmas toy buying season. The movie would premiere in November 21, 1969.

Footnote 1: Obviously, we're deep in ATL territory here. But Marx's toys were real. Here's a youtube video showing a 1961 television commercial for the Great Garloo.

Footnote 2: And on the subject of hideously ugly toys, here's another youtube video showing Big Loo.

Footnote 3: Rockem Sockem Robots commercial from 1965.

Footnote 4: Here's a couple of videos on 1960s toy robots. One of them is fairly long.

A history of toy robots.....

Footnote 5: If you're inclined on youtube or elsewhere, you can take a look yourself. But in addition to Daleks and Robots, Marx manufactured a lot of toy lines, including toy space vehicles and playsets for the Moon and Mars exploration.

Footnote 6: Oh, and I should probably back up and say.... this really happened. Not in this case, but by the 1980s in the US toy companies were commissioning entire television shows to showcase and sell their products. He Man - Masters of the Universe was actually based on Conan, Mattel couldn't get the rights, so they literally created a line of toys and playsets, hired Don Glut to write a backstory, and created the cartoon line. And they weren't the only one. A lot of Saturday morning cartoons in the 80s and 90s were based on toy lines, and truthfully, were simply advertising vehicles for toys. The only thing remarkable about this is that Marx and Subotsky are really only a decade or so ahead of their time.