DVD extras from early Doctor Who
Jan. 13th, 2012 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dbskylerI just got "Invasion" from Netflix, and after watching the first two parts -- and thoroughly enjoying the Brigadier's Brigadiery-ness *g* -- I took a break and watched one of the DVD extras. It was called "Love Off-Air," and I thought that maybe it was going to tell me about some off-screen romance between, I don't know, Frazer Hines and the actress who played Isobel Watkins or something. I couldn't have been more wrong! Instead I got a delightful set of interviews from people who made their own audio recordings of Doctor Who, combined with interviews from the people who then took those recordings and used them to reconstruct wiped episodes. It was full of nostalgia and love -- nostalgia for recording with cassette recorders with their big red buttons, and the need to keep everyone else in the room quiet; nostalgia for the excitement of listening to Doctor Who the next day and revisiting the episode (one person said he would re-enact "Armageddon Factor" with his Doctor Who action figures, but he didn't have a Romana so had to fill in with a Scotty from Star Trek, LOL!); and above all, pervasive love for Doctor Who. They even had a quote from someone who had only heard a friend's recording of "The Daleks," and was convinced that at one point the tape recording had picked up the beeping of someone honking a bicycle horn outside, but when he finally got to see the episode years later, he found out it was the sound of the TARDIS' food machine! And he was disappointed! LOL, I would've been disappointed to learn that was an intended sound effect, too.
Speaking of DVD extra gems, I also recently watched the extras on the "Edge of Destruction" DVD, and they were like a "Here's everyone who created Doctor Who" special event. Interviews with Verity Lambert, and Sydney Newman, and Brian Hodgson, who's the guy who made the TARDIS dematerialization noise -- still used today, and probably my all-time favorite sound effect EVER -- and Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who took Ron Grainer's score and made it into the original Doctor Who theme by building up the sound electronically one piece at a time.
So that was also very, very good, but I have to confess that the one that really left me with a smile on my face was "Love Off-Air." Of course, it helped that when they started waxing on about the vagaries of cassette tapes, I knew exactly what they talking about, right down to the part where you try to fix them with a pencil inserted into those holes to rewind the tape. : )
Speaking of DVD extra gems, I also recently watched the extras on the "Edge of Destruction" DVD, and they were like a "Here's everyone who created Doctor Who" special event. Interviews with Verity Lambert, and Sydney Newman, and Brian Hodgson, who's the guy who made the TARDIS dematerialization noise -- still used today, and probably my all-time favorite sound effect EVER -- and Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who took Ron Grainer's score and made it into the original Doctor Who theme by building up the sound electronically one piece at a time.
So that was also very, very good, but I have to confess that the one that really left me with a smile on my face was "Love Off-Air." Of course, it helped that when they started waxing on about the vagaries of cassette tapes, I knew exactly what they talking about, right down to the part where you try to fix them with a pencil inserted into those holes to rewind the tape. : )
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-14 06:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 06:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 07:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-14 07:06 am (UTC)I had no idea all that stuff is on the dvd. I' definitely dragging it out to watch!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 06:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-14 03:13 pm (UTC)Sigh. Audiobooks are on CDs now. Analog devices have some real benefits: you can't stop a CD at a given point, remove it from one player, move it to another player, start it again and have it start where you had stopped.
In other news: I've only looked at the DVD extras for a couple of Who episodes so far (I only just started replacing my VHS tapes). My all-time favourite is the spoof interview with Sutekh on "Robots of Mars", with OMG Gabriel Woolfe actually doing the voice work OMGOMG squeeee.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 06:19 am (UTC)True! And the same, alas, is true of a DVD over a VHS tape. With videotapes, there's usually one scene that I really love to watch over and over again, and the tape is permanently queued up right there! I take it off the shelf, put it in the machine, and there it is! At least, there it is for as long as I still have a working VCR and VHS tapes that still play . . . *crosses fingers*
LOL, I LOVE that spoof interview of Sutekh! I think it's my all-time favorite DVD extra. "Neil before the might of Sutekh!" And the fact that it's actually Gabriel Woolfe doing the voice again is the BEST. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 09:30 am (UTC)On Earthshock there's animated 'Episode 5' that is, um, also quite priceless in its own way.
Really, though, I'm butting in here to say, but now you can rip your favourite scenes and make a thing of them all together. If you wanted. So there are digital compensations. I have one DVD where the scene chapters are in v handy places for rewatching the only bits I'm interested in, which doesn't often happen.
And, to save, two comments, happy 1960s DW love forever! ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-14 05:50 pm (UTC)I tend not to like the fannish ones so much, so I hadn't watched that one off the Invasion - maybe I should sometime now, then!
But, yay, for happy DW love! Especially 1960s happy DW love. ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 06:22 am (UTC)