Dr. Who and the Daleks

It is somehow fitting that a British TV show using time travel as a vehicle for disseminating lessons about science and history wound up running not the proposed one year but for twenty-six. Produced by the British Broadcasting Company, Doctor Who premiered in November 1963 and starred veteran actor William Hartnell as an alien Time Lord padding around the galaxy righting interstellar wrongs in a time travel/space folding craft known as a T.A.R.D.I.S. (an acronym for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space), which appears from without to be a standard British police box but is paradoxically bigger on the inside. Pitched at children but with a blending of drama and humor that proved a lure for adults as well, Doctor Who was structured as a series of self-contained adventures comprised of several episodes each. After the completion of the four-part premiere story, "An Unearthly Child," which transported the Doctor and viewers to the dawn of time and attended man's discovery of fire, the BBC was caught without a follow-up script. Although a production edict had vetoed the use of "bug-eyed monsters" on the series, the available Terry Nation teleplay "The Daleks" was rushed into production and depicted what would be the Doctor's first dust-up with the eponymous and thoroughly evil race of mutants whose hideously deformed corporealities are encased in metallic sheaths bearing more than a passing resemblance to salt and pepper shakers. With their robotic gyrations, Snap-On ordnances, and shrill metallic battle cry of "Ex-ter-min-ate!," the deucedly inhuman Daleks proved to be the perfect foils for the prickly but never less than humane Time Lord, and remain half a century after the fact as crucial to the Doctor Who mythos as Professor Moriarty was to Sherlock Holmes and The Joker to Batman. The popularity of the seven-part "The Daleks" led to the villains being given their own comic strip; the Daleks were well on their way to becoming a national institution when they, and the Doctor, were cast in their first feature film, Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965). Produced by American expatriates Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose Amicus Productions had traded youth-oriented pictures for anthology horror films, Dr. Who and the Daleks took considerable liberties with the BBC series with a mind toward more global appeal for the franchise. Rather than have William Hartnell reprise his role from the small screen, Rosenberg and Subotsky cast Peter Cushing, whose international popularity was on the rise thanks to star roles in a run of Gothic horror films from Hammer Film Productions. Lost in the translation from the small screen to the big was the character's alien origins, with the Doctor rebranded as a human inventor whose surname (unlike that of his TV counterpart) really is Who. Shot at Amicus' home base of Shepperton Studios in April and May of 1965 under the direction of Gordon Flemyng, Dr. Who and the Daleks marked the character's debut in color and widescreen. (The TV series did not default to color for another four years.) While the average episode budget of the series was in the neighborhood of $3,500, Dr. Who and the Daleks was allotted better than $250,000 with which to knock around, resulting in a production that was, however set-bound, light years ahead of the BBC original in terms of visual splendor. Subotsky's screenplay rejiggers the characterizations of the Doctor's traveling companions as well, rendering his equally-alien granddaughter Susan (Roberta Tovey) human as well and making another granddaughter of Barbara (Jennie Linden), who on TV had been a history teacher privy to Susan's true identity. The action hero of the BBC series, science teacher Ian Chesterton, is reduced in the feature to comic relief, and played to a bumbling turn by song-and-dance man Roy Castle. Despite scuttling the entire cast of the BBC's Doctor Who and playing hob with a mythos that was quickly becoming chapter-and-verse among science fiction aficionados, Dr. Who and the Daleks was sufficiently profitable for Amicus (operating behind the aegis of a AARU and British Lion) to roll out an immediate sequel. Peter Cushing returned to star in Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966), which ditched the characters of Barbara and Ian entirely (and trucked in a Whovian niece, played by Jill Curzon) for a bracingly violent parable about Nazism and local resistance. Conspicuously absent from the film's title, Dr. Who also had less screen time; felled by illness during production, Cushing had to leave some of the heavy lifting to support players Andrew Keir, Bernard Cribbins, and Ray Brooks (fresh from Richard Lester's The Knack... and How to Get It, 1965). A third Who-venture was proposed but never materialized and the character returned to his former, extraterrestrial (and, as it happened whenever the lead actor had to be recast) regenerative glory. The original Doctor Who series fell victim to low ratings in 1989, ending an impressive 26 year run. An abortive attempt to revive the character for American audiences in 1996 via a one-shot TV movie resulted in a reappraisal of the franchise and a series reboot in 2005. By Richard Harland Smith Sources: Dr. Who: A History by Alan Kistler (Globe Pequot, 2013) Dr. Who by Jim Leach (Wayne State University Press, 2009) Terry Nation: The Man Who Invented the Daleks by Alwyn W. Turner (Aurum Press, 2013) In All Sincerity, Peter Cushing by Christopher Gullo (Xlibris Corp., 2004)