At long last...
If you only own one other Dr. Who video, your collection is incomplete without The Tenth Planet. It depicts, of course, the most significant turning point in the history of the show, the departure of William Hartnell as the Doctor. That, in itself is more than enough reason to buy this video.
As a special bonus, there are the Cybermen. Don't be fooled as I was by the still photos which gave them a cheesy appearance. They don't appear terrifying at all until you see them in action. The lip action and voice characterization are nothing less than chilling. I first saw the Cybermen in "Revenge" then later in "Earthshock" and "Attack" and found them scary enough then. Now that I've seen "Tenth" I realize that they actually got less and less scary as time went on, which makes this one the scariest ever.
The reconstruction of the unfortunately missing final episode is surprisingly and absolutely brilliant. The audio track is complete and...
DVD Extras for a Long-Awaited Serial with Cybermen Ancestors!
It's 1986. Two astronauts in the Zeus IV space capsule relay photos back to their base, code-named Snowcap, buried under the Antarctic snow. Everything is going smoothly until one of the soldiers at Earth base looks through his periscope to the snowstormed continent surface and sees - a pretty woman!
It's Polly! She, Ben and the Doctor just landed in the TARDIS, and decided to explore. In short order, soldiers appear from a hatch and take our trio down into the buried base. They're at the South Pole Base of International Space Command, and the suspicious C.O., General Cutler, doesn't buy their story of landing in "a sort of spaceship".
However, the General has more to worry about. The Doctor informs him that a 10th planet has appeared. Not only is its gravitational pull affecting Zeus IV, but it is draining the power from the capsule, endangering the astronauts.
Before you can say "cyber-bully", three robot-like aliens infiltrate and take over the...
A new body, at last!
Whether you grew up watching "Doctor Who" as it was first broadcast in the UK, or in endless 1980s US PBS reruns, "The Tenth Planet" is one of those stories you were dying to see again and again. Annoyingly, you couldn't, because the BBC destroyed all prints of the fourth and final episode, and the story was thus "incomplete" and never re-aired.
The recent BBC releases of stories featuring William Hartnell, the First Doctor, have been exemplary, and this VHS continues the trend. The first 3 episodes of "Tenth Planet" -- long seen only on dim, bootlegged, Nth generation copies of the original -- are nearly pristine. Episode 4 is reconstructed using existing still photos, the audio track, and a few well-used video effects which serve to add to the pictures, not detract from them. (It's heartening to note that for this story, the "restoration" team did not seek to alter the existing footage by replacing scenes with outtakes, or...
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