DVD extras from early Doctor Who

[dbskyler]

I 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. : )

Comments

[shadowturquoise.livejournal.com]

Ah yes! The constant worry that someone in the room would forget and open their big mouth while the tape recorder was running and thus ruining the tape of the episode! Fun days.

I had no idea all that stuff is on the dvd. I' definitely dragging it out to watch!

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

There are all sorts of fun things on the DVD extras! You should definitely check them out.