more updates from the more-money-than-sense dimension :
the 3-disc steelbook Blu-Ray animated "Doctor Who - The Macra Terror".
Is it worth it? Well....
There's a slim booklet of production notes (in lieu of subtitled information text usually used on the live-action stories).
You get both a black and white and a colour animated version, so if you must have it in colour you can.
And you get a 1992 audio & still-picture version using telesnaps and the soundtrack, with optional narration.
Plus various scraps - animation tests and galleries, trailers, the snippets of original footage that survive, production paperwork and so on.
As with these later DVD releases of stories of this period, because practically everyone associated with these episodes is dead, the commentary is a mixed bag of usual suspect Toby Hadoke valiantly trying to coax new stories from Fraser Hines and a lady who plays one of the majorettes and a gent who plays one of the colony attendants, plus various bits of archive interviews Toby's conducted with various personnel, like the story's director, recorded in cafes over the years.
Imho it's not the best story from that era; I was familiar with it from the audio soundtrack that's been available for years.
It's a while since I've watched the other Troughton animations, but my gut feeling first seeing this was that the likenesses of Polly, Ben and Jamie are a bit poor. But given the limitations of resources, that's usually the case.
They've gone to town with the Macra , as you'd expect, and made them enormous, presumably to fit in with the "Gridlock" story in the new series where they were seen to be crushing flying cars within their claws.
They've made a slightly odd choice, in my view, to cut out a few minutes of the first episode where the Doctor and his companions get "pampered" on arrival at the colony, and the Doctor gets put in a machine to clean his clothes (
while still wearing them obviously) doesn't like it, and leaps into another machine that messes him up again. OK it's arguably lame comedy padding and not essential for the plot but I don't see why you would cut it purely for that reason. Was there some special reason it was felt to be too difficult to try and animate this sequence ?
The 3-disc set includes the David Tennant episode "Gridlock" also featuring the Macra milling about at the bottom of the endless motorway. Safe to say that probably isn't in many people's lists as one of the vintage Nu-Who episodes either ? And there's the companion Doctor Who Confidential programme, for those that must have these things.
There's a bonus animation of the first ten 10 minutes of the first episode of the incomplete Troughton Cyberman story "The Wheel In Space". Whether this means animation of the missing episodes of this story for release with the remaining existing episodes is a real prospect in the future is anyone's guess.
Moving on, of course, there's the other essential "Classic Who" purchase: Season 18 Collection Boxset -Tom Baker's swansong.
There's very little new to see here.
Matthew Sweet - who seems, slightly worryingly, to be becoming a bit of a fixture of these latest boxset releases - conducts some slightly cringe-inducing new audio commentaries with Tom Baker and Lalla Ward (separately of course, and on different stories, Tom on "The Leisure Hive", Lalla on "State of Decay") and tries to coax gossip out of each of them about the whole wedding thing. Lalla Ward flatly refuses to discuss it and brushes off or quashes his tentative leading questions to her on this subject so often it's almost comical. I'm not sure he could really have been expecting anything else could he ?
There's a new "Making-Of" documentary on Logopolis, where Janet Fielding gets to see her old air hostess costume somebody's found in a cupboard, and tries to put the jacket on, over her clothes. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't fit.
The guy playing The Watcher gets to stand by the road again and tell us just how unpleasant and cold it was being filmed standing in a field he didn't have permission to be filming in.
And there's a rag-bag of other "special" features - writers of various stories in the season talk shop with Christopher H Bidmead; there's a 50th anniversary documentary on the 4th Doctor, a 2013 interview with Adric Waterhouse, an old 1993 interview with Tom Baker, and some 1997 adverts Tom Baker made in New Zealand.
For real masochists, the bonus disc includes the "K9 & Company" episode.
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