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!