The next Dr Who Blu Ray release is… Blake’s 7?

It turns out the next Doctor Who blu-ray release is… the first season of Blakes 7? Wait, what? Holy Smokes!

I describe Blake's 7 as “the other, other, other, British Science fiction show”, implicitly after Doctor Who , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Red Dwarf. Unlike those other three, Blake didn’t get widespread PBS airings in the US (I’m not sure my local PBS channel ever showed it, and it ran everything.)

Which is a shame, because it deserves to be better known. The elevator pitch is essentially The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai in space”; a group of convicts, desperadoes, and revolutionaries lead a revolt against the totalitarian Earth Federation. In a move that could only be done in the mid-70s, the “evil Federation” is blatantly the Federation from Star Trek, rotted out and gone fascist, following a long line of British SF about fascism happening “here.”

It was made almost entirely by people who had previously worked on Doctor Who, and it shows; while there was never a formal crossover, the entire show feels like a 70s Who episode where the TARDIS just never lands and things keep getting worse. My other joke though, is that whereas Doctor Who’s budget was whatever change they could find in the BBC lobby couch cushions, Blake’s budget was whatever Doctor Who didn’t use. It’s almost hypnotically low budget, with some episodes so cheap that they seem more like avant garde theatre than they do a TV show whose reach is exceeding its grasp.

On the other hand, its got some of the best writing of all time, great characters, great acting. It revels in shades of gray and moral ambiguity decades before that came into vogue. And without spoiling anything, it has one of the all-time great last episodes of any show. It’s really fun. It’s a show I always want to recommend, but I’m not sure it ever got a real home video release in North America.

So a full, plugs out release is long overdue. The same team that does the outstanding Doctor Who blu-ray sets is doing this; same level of restoration, same kind of special features. Apparently, they’re doing “updated special effects”, except some of the original effects team came out of retirement and they’re shooting new model work? Incredible. The real shame is that so many of the people behind the show have since passed; both main writers, several of the actors, including the one who played the best character. Hopefully there’s some archive material to fill in the gaps.

Blake ran for 4 years, presumably the Doctor Who releases will stay and 2 a year with Blake getting that third slot.

Handicapping Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases, Updated

Previously: Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases

…And they’ve announced the next release: Season 25. I’m pretty pleased with myself, since that was one of the ones I predicted for release this year. Also delightfully, this make my boy Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor the first classic series Doctor to have a complete run on blu-ray. This should be a great one, extended cuts on all four stories, new sound mixes, and they really did get the rights to that PBS documentary I was thinking about. Mark Ayres, who did the music for several Seventh Doctor stories, was the last employee of the Radiophonic Workshop when it closed down, and has been a key member of the restoration team for the home video releases has been working hard to make sure the McCoy episodes got the absolute gold-star treatment, and this looks like a fitting conclusion.

On the other hand, I get docked some points since I guessed this would be a three-release year, and it sure looks like they’re only going to do two. Looking at the pattern now, it sure looks like two a year is going to be the standard? That implies they won’t be done until 2030, which is in keeping with this show to finish a set of releases long after the format has been surpassed. I was hoping they’d be done before the kids all moved out of the house, but what can you do? This also means the Jodie Whittaker logo is now the “Classic Who” logo, and is going to stick around probably long past the end of the RTD2 run? That’s funny.

This also means that for the rest of the run, we’re now even between color and black&white seasons left to do, with five of each—1 & 3-6 for B&W, and 7,11,13,16,21 in color (plus the hypothetical but almost certain “Wilderness Years” set.)

Looking back at my predictions from January, I think my reasoning is still sound, but assuming only two a year changes things a little. I genuinely can’t believe they’d have a year with only B&W releases, so that implies a color and B&W every year from here on.

So, re-dealing them out, my revised predictions look like:

• 2024:

  • 15—done.
  • 25—and done.

• 2025:

  • 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if the rumors are true and they are replacing those dinosaurs.
  • 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?

• 2026:

  • 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”
  • Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.

• 2027

  • 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
  • 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.

• 2028

  • 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
  • 5—The last missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually.

• 2029

  • 21—one last Davison set.
  • 1—the checks should have cleared by this point.

• 2030

  • 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.

Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases

With the announcement of Doctor Who Season 15 on Blu-Ray, that means we’re a little over halfway done with the blu-ray re-release of the old show, and of 27 possible sets, there are 12 remaining. Part of the “fun”, for certain values of “fun”, is that they release them out of order, and never annouce more than one ahead.

The DVD releases worked the same way, and back then I used to try and reverse-engineer the release scheme. I enjoy this sort of corporate kremlinology, so lets see if we can guess which ones are coming next.

First, some prelimiaries!

I’ll leave these two links here for anyone who wants to play the home game:

List of Doctor Who episodes (1963–1989) )

List of Doctor Who home video releases

The out-of-order releases are for a couple of reasons. First, Tom Baker Fourth Doctor sells the best, followed by Jon Pertwee’s Third, and the color seasons sell better than the black-and-white ones, so they like to spread the better selling ones out. Second, some of these seasons are “harder” to put together than others. All of the first six seasons sill has episodes that are missing. The BBC has been re-creating these with animation, but they’re not done. As a side effect of what state formerly-missing episodes were recovered in, every season up through (at least) 11 has at least one show that needs some heavy-duty restoration.

Looking back at the blu-ray releases so far, they do 2 or 3 releases a year, and like to spread out the “hard” ones. They kinda seem to alternate between 2 and 3 in alternate years, pandemic non-withstanding?

With all that said, which seasons are left, and what problems do they all have?

• 1—William Hartnell’s First Doctor, black and white, one unanimated missing story, and some weird rights issues around the first story, “An Unearthly Child.”
• 3—First Doctor, black and white, four unanimated missing stories including one really big and complicated one.
• 4—Mostly Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor with a pair of Hartnell stories at the start of the year before the handover, black and white, two unanimated missing stories, although one of these is strongly rumored to be in production as I type this.
• 5—Second Doctor, black and white, one unanimated missing story, plus this season contains the one officially missing story that’s known for a fact to exist in private hands.
• 6—Second Doctor, black and white, one unanimated missing story.
• 7—Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, originally made in color but three of the four stories were only preserved in black and white; the color has been restored at various levels of success, and clearly would need more restoration work for a blu-ray release.
• 11—Third Doctor, originally made in color, but a single half-hour episode only survived in black-and-white, which is also the same story full of terrible dinosaur special effects, which if you’re already throwing a bunch of money at fixing the color why not also do new dinosaurs?
• 13—Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, color, no issues I know of, but back in the DVD days there was a long-standing rumor that the first story in this season, “Terror of the Zygons”, was going to be the last one released on DVD, and it essentially was.
• 16—Fourth Doctor, color, no issues as far as I know.
• 21—Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, color, no issues as far as I know.
• 25—Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, color, there was a American PBS behind-the-scenes documentary made for one of the stories this season which they would absolutely want to include and I could see having some complex rights issues to sort out.
• The 1996 TV Movie, plus “the wilderness years”—Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor, color, there’s some strong rumors that they’re going to wrap the terrible FOX movie in a set covering all the weird stuff that happened between 1989 and 2005, there’s actually quite a bit of stuff you could put on such a set, rights allowing. (Curse of Fatal Death, Scream of the Shalka, the web version of Shada with McGann, the material made for the 1999 “Doctor Who Night”, the FMV from “Destiny of the Doctors”?)

Assuming 2 or 3 a year, that’s 5 more years. Let’s try to guess a release plan.

The two best-selling Doctors, Tom Baker and Pertwee, have five seasons left between them (including the just announced season 15.). Assume one of those a year, alternating. We also have five B&Ws left, so we can assume one of those a year. That leaves seasons 21, 25, and whatever they do with the TV movie as the three “floaters” to make up a third release. And, just for fun, let’s assume “Terror of the Zygons” is last this time too.

We can also kick season 1 to the end, to leave more time for the AUC rights situation to shake out. It’s hard to guess what the gameplan will be for unanimated episodes? The season 2 release has one incomplete show on it, so they’re willing to ship blu-rays with gaps.

Since the last two years have been two-release years, we can guess we’re due for a triple-release year this year, then alternating after.

So, putting some bets down, that all looks like:

• 2024

  • 15—always start a list with something you can check off at once.
  • 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?
  • 25—they did a Davison last year, so this is the other remaining 80s season.

• 2025

  • 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if they do try and replace those dinosaurs.
  • 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”

• 2026

  • Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.
  • 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
  • 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.

• 2027

  • 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
  • 5—The missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually .

• 2028

  • 1—the checks should have cleared by now.
  • 21—one last Davison set.
  • 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.

That kinda hangs together? Except 2027, thats gonna sell terribly and is definitely wrong. On the other hand, that’s how the cards dealt out. We’ll see, I guess!

Doctor Who Season 15 on Blu-Ray

They’ve announced the next Classic Doctor Who Blu-Ray season set, and as such there’s an absurdly overly elaborate trailer:

Leela vs the Time War | The Collection: Season 15 Announcement Trailer | Doctor Who - YouTube

Over the last few years, they’ve been re-releasing the old show on Blu-Ray in season sets (whereas before they released it on DVD a single story at a time). They’ve become the gold standard for an archive TV release: fully restored and cleaned-up picture and sound, upscaled to HD despite having been shot in extremely not-HD, making-of documentaries for every story, historical interviews, new interviews deleted scenes, any other thing they can find that’s relevant in the BBC vaults.

The DVDs were mostly released before the show came back, so they had a sort of, not apologist attitude, exactly, but certainly defensive. Lots of interviews on the theme of “it’s not as bad as it looks, you wouldn’t believe how little money we had,” and so on. The Blu-Rays, made in a world where the new show is occasionally the biggest thing on the BCC, are much more relaxed. Much more willing to lean back and just say “yeah, this one was trash, but the next week, that one was pretty good.” That, mixed with a sense that this is their final swing at this, so there’s an impressive amount of attention to getting the details right, cleaning up things that were skipped on the DVDs, digging up any potential bonus material. It helps that physical media has gone back to being a niche thing, so it’s understood that these are a deluxe product for mega-fans, not a low-price item that someone is going to impulse by at Fry’s Electronics. (RIP)

One of the goofy new special features they do for the Blu-Rays are these announcement trailers, which have grown in complexity into being, essentially, bite-sized episodes of the old show. They get back a variety of the old actors, build sets, put credits on them.

Mostly they’ve fallen into a pattern of “let’s see what happened to the companion from this season after they left the show,” which isn’t a terrible impulse, but the answer is never interesting. The downside is that there’s a certain subset of fans who want everything to be moar epic, which is not the register in which Doctor Who operates the best. But that’s how we end up here, where poor Lousie Jamison is acting as hard as she can against a bluescreen that’s going to have Daleks added on later, because the answer to “what happened to Leela” is “she fought in the Time War”, which… okay? So what? (This also feels like someone was ticking a box, and since Leela was never in a Dalek episode, she got one here.). And it ends with a big speech about how great the (off-screen) Doctor is, and then she gets to escape while everyone else on Galifrey burns? The ethics there are a little questionable, but this was witten and directed by the same guy who wrote the episode where Space Amazon were the good guys and the workers looking for labor protection were the bad guys, so no surprise there. And this is as close as something with only one female character can get to failing the Bechtel test.

That’s the best idea you have for a mini-sequel trailer thing? Leela monologues at some Daleks and then beams away? And they’re all like that, zeroing in on some weird fan lore point with Big Speeches. The limit case for this was the Season 17 trailer, Davros Rises! which was an overwrought fan-fiction elaborating on a moment in the deeply terrible Dalek episode they did that year, which is utterly bizarre since that’s the same season where Douglas Adams wrote the single best episode of the old show with seven (authentic) Mona Lisas. (“Where are you going?” “I’m going to go see a middle aged Italian. Well, late middle-age, early renaissance.”). Which tells you a lot about who they think the target audience for these are.

Personally, if I had gotten this kind of budget to do a mini-sequel to an episode from season 15, I’d do a fake episode of In Search Of about the mysterious deaths in the 1920s at the lighthouse on Fang Rock, and have one of the locals be Leela, now mysteriously living in retirement in the mid-1970s. Put a glimpse of a Time Lord robe in her closet. K9 is in the shed.

But grousing aside, it’s all in good fun, and what a joy that my favorite TV show gets this kind of treatment.

Wait, Which Hundred?

The Disney Corp turned 100, and as a company thats never willing to let a good “limited time” logo go to waste, we’re fully in the thick of “Disney 100” merch. To wit: this week’s announcement of a 100-film “Legacy Animation” box set for fifteen hudred bucks. That is a lot of money, but in that way where you stop and go, “well, fifteen bucks a movie isn’t that bad, really,” but still never consider buying the thing.

That said, in a world where Disney seemed to be moving away from physical media over the last few years, between this containing several titles that hadn’t previously gotten a widely-available blu-ray, and the new remaster of Cinderella, we might finally be moving past the “streaming only” era.

The contents are pretty great, though. Because: which 100 movies? There’s only sixty-one “Disney Animated Movies” in the way most people mean it. Okay, throw in the Pixar movies, thats another 27. Add Henry Selick’s Nightmare before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach and we’re up to…. 90?

Imagine the meeting! “The box says 100, we need ten more!”

You can’t just add all the DisneyToon direct-to-video sequels, because then we’d be up near to 150. The remit is “fully animated,” so you really can’t throw in Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks , or Roger Rabbit.

So which ten do you pick?

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall the day they gritted their teeth and picked the last ten:

“Goody Movie!”

Yes!”

“DuckTales Movie!”

“No!”

“First TinkerBell movie!”

“Yes!”

“Tinkerbell sequels?”

“No!”

“Beauty and the beast mid-quel?”

“No!”

“That piglet movie?”

“Yes!”

You can almost smell the flop sweat from here.

—

And, two asides:

First, as always when Disney releases something from the Deep Vault, the usual suspects show up and demand to know where Song of the South is, like it’s some kind of gotcha. These people always tell on themselves because it’s Song they bring up, instead of Victory Through Airpower, or So Dear to my Heart, or any other movie that’s slipped into the freezer section of the Vault. And look, if you can read the web, you can scare up a copy of Song, it’s not that hard to find. But let me save you the time: not only is it crazy racist, it’s also just a a bad movie. It’s not good. If you really need to watch some vintage Disney racism, this box set does include Saludos Amigos, so go nuts.

Second, there was a weird tone in a lot of the coverage along the lines of “physical media? How quaint!”. And, man, that would have been a great take in 2021, but unless you can show me where to watch the episodes I missed of Jeff Goldblum’s show, maybe that’s not the best angle anymore?