In preparation for the arrival of the 9th Doctor in March, I was discussing Doctor Who with Whiny the Elder. He remembered watching the series on PBS when he was very little, but pretty much the only things that stuck were the theme music and the Daleks (“EXTERMINATE!”). So, when I mentioned that to Sgt. Grump, out he trots with two boxes of VHS tapes.
Yep. We now have every episode of Doctor Who up through the made-for-tv movie.
We gots us some TV watchin’ to do…
UPDATE: The plan now is to try and watch the first and last episode of each Doctor, plus the “best” one from each incarnation per the Outpost Gallifrey 2003 Reader Poll.
We are missing quite a few episodes from the the first two Doctors, including the last one of the first Doctor (The Tenth Planet) and the first one of the second Doctor (The Power of the Daleks). Plus, we don’t have the first Doctor’s best (The Daleks Master Plan) or the second one’s (The Evil of the Daleks). However, we did watch the first two stories in the series (An Unearthly Child and The Daleks), and Whiny thought they were very good. I had a hard time convincing him to skip ahead to the second Doctor! We made do with The Tomb of the Cybermen before I zonked out.
This is the coolest thing since we sat down and tried to watch all of the episodes of The Prisoner.
Hey, you define “cool” your way, and I’ll define it mine.
Sounds like a geeky-fine family time to me!
No, I’m quite happy to accept your definition of cool.
There are only 17 episodes of “The Prisoner” — an easy weekend of geekery. You boys are going to be busy for a while with all those tapes.
Good point. What I did not remember was that each “story” in Doctor Who is actually made up of 4 to 7 individual 25 minute episodes. So, for example, watching “The Daleks” took almost 3 hours!
Sounds like his collection rivals that of my buddy Hairboy’s. Those must have been big boxes if it only took two of them to hold them all.
Back in my youth when Hairboy let me borrow upwards of 10 tapes at a time it took me the better part of 3 months to get through every single episode of Doctor Who that was available, and this was back when Colin Baker was still playing the part in England. Ahhhhhh. Such gloriously wasted days of my youth!
As a result I’ve seen pretty much every single episode that the BBC hadn’t lost themselves. I even have an official tape of the unfinished Tom Baker episode titled “Shada.” I am SUCH a Whovian Geek.
“Shada” is the one tape in the set that he purchased. The rest are all taped off the air from when the local PBS station showed them. I think the ones that are missing are ones that had not been found by the time he stopped taping or are still lost.
oh my maudy, that is *such* a Grump thing to do.
Grump. but AWESOME. way to go!