Handicapping Doctor Who Blu-Ray Releases, Continued
I missed this back in all “the excitement” around the end of the year, but the next classic Who Blu-Ray release is going to be Season 7, one of the two remaining Jon Pertwee 3rd doctor seasons left to release.
Season 7’s a weird one (mostly complementary?) 1970! First year in color, Pertwee’s first year in the part, along with being one of those transitional years where it was essentially a whole new show with a whole new crew and it took ‘em a season to figure out what they were doing.
Despite being made in color, there’s a couple stories there that only survived in black and white film recordings, with various attempts to recreate the colors from sources like off-air 70s era beta recordings, interference patterns in the B&W image, computers, and just plain sitting in front of photoshop. The previous DVD realeases were… fine? But very curious to see what another decade or two of tech can do with the material they have. In keeping with the blu-ray line’s vibe of “settling all outstanding debts,” curious to see what their final statement on the re-colorization will be.
Feeling, maybe, 60% smug about my previous prediction for the first slot in this year, which was Season 11—the other remaining Pertwee season. I won’t retype my whole list again (see the second previously above,) but I stand by my guess that the second release this year just has to be a B&W, which means it has to be a Troughton—as the only Dr not on Blu-ray yet, and that almost certainly means Season 6 since that’s the closest to complete modulo what stories they’re actually likely to animate.