you're listening to fusion patrol a listener supported podcast
each week we take a single episode of a science fiction tv series movie or
audio and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life welcome to the discussion
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol. I'm Eugene.
And I'm Simon.
And tonight, a little bit of a variation.
It's very rare indeed that we know when an episode of Fusion Patrol is going to go out or where it's going to slot into the schedule.
But we are recording this in the period of time between Doctor Who series 2024 episodes 6 and 8.
And that's because episode 7, The Legend of Ruby Sunday, was a two-parter.
And as is standard for Fusion Patrol, we try to treat the two-parters as one story.
So we will be reviewing both of those, that and part 8, next week.
So this week, perhaps not coincidentally, as a gift from the Doctor Who gods,
the Celestial Toymaker animated recreation was released.
And so this week, we're doing the Celestial Toymaker.
We're going to start with an episode synopsis, as always, and move on from there.
The Doctor mysteriously becomes invisible and intangible, and the TARDIS lands in a mysterious place.
The Doctor suspects and later confirms that they are in the Celestial Toyroom.
The domain of the Toymaker.
The Doctor and the Toymaker have met before.
The Toymaker brings people to his realm and makes them play games.
If they lose, they become his toys forever.
He wants the Doctor to stay, and so he forces the Doctor to play a game of Trilogic,
with a maximum number of 1,023 moves.
Meanwhile, Steven and Dodo are forced to play a series of physical games in order to find the TARDIS.
Steven and Dodo have a deadline.
They must win back the TARDIS before the doctor reaches 1,023 moves.
When the doctor tries helping them, the toy maker makes the doctor intangible and mute,
leaving only his hand available to play the game.
First, Stephen and Dodo must navigate an obstacle course in a competition against two clowns.
Stephen must navigate the course blindfolded,
while Dodo gives him directions by honking the horn of a car.
When the clown is caught cheating by using a see-through blindfold,
he fails to complete the course, giving the win to Steven and Dodo.
As a reward, they are given a riddle to solve and sent on to the next game.
The next game is a variation of musical chairs.
Players must pick one chair from seven to sit in.
Six of the chairs are lethal.
They compete with anthropomorphic cards, including a king, queen, knave, and joker.
Throughout the competition, whenever the toymaker thinks the doctor is stalling,
he penalizes the doctor by forcing the game forward a few hundred moves,
putting more pressure on Stephen and Dodo.
Stephen and Dodo defeat the chairs and are given another riddle,
and moved to the next game.
They are placed in a kitchen with Sergeant Rug and Mrs. Wiggs,
and they must find a key to open the next door.
Rug and Wiggs are there to be unhelpful,
but they get into an argument which eventually reveals the location of the key,
allowing Stephen and Dodo to move into the next room, the ballroom.
They must cross a dance floor and not get trapped into dancing by the animated marionette dancers.
Steven fails this spectacularly, and soon Dodo follows.
Rug and Wiggs have also followed them with instructions from the toy maker to get to the TARDIS on the other side of the dance floor first.
When Wiggs becomes trapped on the dance floor, Steven and Dodo maneuver themselves into a position to swap partners, and the two of them dance to the TARDIS.
It is, of course, not the real TARDIS, but they have won another game and move on to the next.
They reach the final game, and this time they must play a hopscotch game against a school bully named Cyril.
The first to navigate the course and reach the TARDIS wins.
According to the toymaker, Cyril doesn't like to lose.
The game has several forfeits and isn't quite as straightforward as rolling the dice and hopping the number of squares.
Of course, if they fall off the square, the area in between is electrified, and they will die.
Steven and Dodo suffer several setbacks, including dirty tricks by Cyril.
When it looks like Cyril is going to win, he slips on one of his own booby traps and falls to his death.
Steven and Dodo have won.
The doctor has been restored to visibility and tangibility, and he has also completed, almost, the Trilogic game.
He is at 1,022 moves and has one move left that will win the game.
He refuses to make the last move, insisting on inspecting his TARDIS and meeting with Steven and Dodo.
They try to leave in the TARDIS, but cannot.
The Doctor must finish the game, but there is a problem.
The Toymaker is a sore loser.
While technically honoring his agreement to let them go, there is a wrinkle.
When the Toymaker loses to the Doctor, the Celestial Toyroom will be destroyed, including everything and everyone in it.
The Toymaker will live on and create a new Toyroom, but the Doctor will have a Pyrrhic victory in that they will be destroyed too.
Setting the TARDIS for automatic dematerialization, the Doctor, from inside the TARDIS, imitates the Toymaker's voice, commanding the game to complete the final move.
Simultaneously, the TARDIS dematerializes, and the Celestial Toy Room is destroyed.
The Doctor cautions Dodo and Steven about their success.
The Toymaker will be back someday when another writer is bankrupt for ideas.
All right. Animated, we should say. 3D animated. And we will, I'm sure, talk a lot about the 3D animation as we go. I believe by the exact same team that did the one part of Web of Fear.
Correct.
All right. Well, what did you think of the Celestial Toymaker?
It was the TV stories with the Celestial Toymaker in.
No, no.
Hit rate. Huffage.
No.
no and that and that thing has i i've got like tons of background information on why that's so
awful but uh yeah uh it's it's not a great story is it i mean it's not much of a story it is it is
filler yes yeah i mean i i can kind of see the potential there and um yeah we're not not going
of preempt your account of the production issue the original story went through and i'll go that
the kind of limitations that that puts on it but by the time it actually gets made regardless of
what we see on screen you know this is where the soundtrack that we're listening to comes from
All those kind of limitations are in place.
And it's a bit of a mess.
The games that they play feel a bit unconnected and disjointed.
And I think that just contributes to the sense that it is a filler episode.
I don't know what's going on with the whole making Hartnell invisible and intangible.
but i assume that's giving hartnell a couple of episodes off oh it's that and more yeah and then
steven and dodo have to carry quite a lot of it and for my money they're not the most
charismatic companion team ever yeah um they don't come off well in this story as a team no
i don't think yeah well let's let's just uh let's talk a little bit i'll i'll run through what i've
got here story was originally it was not intended to be a filler episode let's just start right
there this was not intended to be a filler episode this was a story by brian hales and halls hales
um i'm gonna go with hales um and it was apparently very dark and i my yeah i have a suspicion that
it had a lot to do with the fact that the toys were people or had been people once i suspect
but I'm I don't know I've been able to find that out because it is kind of odd how it's not it is
but it's not there there is there is a sort of are they aren't they like Stephen doesn't believe
they are Dodo does believe they are and I don't know that it's and at one point the toy maker says
you will stay here forever and become my toys but there's no explicit all of these people are people
who came here and played toys but i think that is absolutely true to the original intent because
they lightened it up because i thought it was too dark all right so we'll we'll go uh we we have to
say that the producer was it says ennis lloyd but the producer was not it was john wills and um
the script editor was um what's his first name's last name's tosh uh donald tosh those are not the
names you'll see on the credits and that is because well first off everybody hated wills
particularly hartnell and hartnell hated and wills hated hartnell and uh they did not get along
at all according to peter purvis nobody got along with wills the the producer he it was not a happy
crew uh with him and he wanted to get rid of hartnell and this was him getting rid of hartnell
So Hardenall was having a mental decline, as we know later wrote him out of the show.
But they gave him two weeks off, and the plan, his contract was up at the end of this story.
Will's plan was, when he became corporeal again at the end, to be a different actor.
That something the toy maker did when he brought him back as part of the game was that he would be a different person.
and that was the person who would go on being the doctor from that point forward and the people
upstairs overrode that and gave gave hartnell another contract and so both tosh and wills
quit and didn't give wills a contract well i don't know no they said they resigned i i don't know okay
they they said he resigned in protest as from the things i saw which is why it got handed over to the
script editor and the story editor uh let's see jerry davis and uh ennis lloyd on the credits so
they got handed this thing that was set up but tosh had already rewritten it to try to reduce the
to reduce the cost and the darkness uh and do things and then uh wills apparently or wiles
probably wiles actually wiles uh apparently out of spite ran the budget on the arc over
so there wouldn't be any money so a real jerkwad all around so then when they came in um jerry
davis had to rewrite it again and according to the according to the things the script was still
the tosh version with jerry davis's stuff handwritten in it to redo it to make it even
cheaper they had uh the original intent was instead of hunt the key there was a maze some
sort of diabolical maze that that got removed uh the there were supposed to be two characters in
it called george and margaret they were the the opposition they were going to be the opposition
throughout the whole thing it is an homage to a play from the 30s called george and margaret
which I know nothing about except that apparently George and Margaret never appear in the play.
It's all about people waiting for George and Margaret.
And Hales, when he wrote this, thought it would be kind of amusing if George and Margaret were the two characters in it.
And he had permission from the playwright to do this.
A.T.?
He did.
But then later the playwright withdrew permission after they'd already cast the actors.
So they rewrote this as part of the last minute rewrites.
They rewrite the script so that George and Margaret were broken up into the two clowns, the card people and rug and wigs.
And of course, they're all played by the same actors because those are the actors they hired to play George and Margaret.
So there's another background problem that they had on this thing.
I hadn't realised that they had had originally, or that Brian Hales had had permission from Gerald Savory to use the characters, because as I understood it, he became some senior producer in the BBC, across whose desk this script came, which was the point at which those characters were taken out of it.
because obviously they he knew they were his and he didn't want them in there i i can't say that i
have that authoritatively i found that on two different history of the toy maker i you have to
go yeah yeah it could be um there's another one of these things that you might be thinking about
and that's billy or cyril billy bunter billy bunter right uh they wrote this school boy
character cyril and i guess as they were building out the episode they decided from a costuming
acting standpoint they decided to have him dress and act like billy bunter who i have never heard
of before looking this up there is nothing in the script there is nothing in the script about billy
bunter the line that cyril says where he says uh my name's cyril my friends call me billy is an ad
lib and to yaru is that an ad lib that i don't know that i don't know and is that a thing billy
bunter says or is that i just assume that was a thing old british people said like from eaton or
something so i mean i that i don't know because because i'm not familiar with that character but
the bit about Billy absolutely an ad lib and they just didn't couldn't remove it and so when that
episode aired the estate or the author of the Billy Bunter books got in contact with him and said ah
we're gonna sue you and so at the end of episode four there was a continuity announcement that said
the character of Cyril is not Billy Bunter he just was dressing like him because he liked him
or something to that effect to try to ameliorate the threat of a lawsuit over this.
Let's see.
We should put in here that basically Lloyd and Davis felt that this episode should have been dropped,
but it wasn't in their hands.
And then Tosh, who had written the second version of the script, hated what Davis had done to it.
So, you know, all around, nobody's happy with this with this story, except apparently Peter Purvis, who was like, hey, I get the lead.
And then, just for one more, you will not see it in the Blu-ray version of this.
If you listen very, very carefully, you can tell where it is.
But there's a line that says the queen tells the king to pick one at random.
And the script apparently says, pick one by using the eeny-meeny.
and he does and he clearly apparently says eeny meeny miny moe catch a n-word by the toe
which is how it aired and went out in this version what you hear is pick one around
this one all right so they just they mumble him out uh in there you can you can get the flow of
the eeny meeny miny
but the words aren't there.
So did you check the recons?
No, I did not.
I was just curious
whether they had
done the same thing there.
I mean, obviously
the animations are
in a sense a new production.
They've got the opportunity
as we've discussed
on some of the previous animations
to edit the soundtrack.
And so clearly
they've taken the opportunity
to do that.
I wonder if they'd have done it
on the recons
just for, you know,
they're not going to release
something with the N-word
and slightly audible i like the way they did it i'm going to say that a lot of things in this
this reproduction i like the way they did it instead of doing the eeny meeny miny moe
catcha and then have somebody else say tiger by the toe uh which is you know i i can honestly say
when i was a kid you know was during the transition period from the older version to the tiger version
both were used uh somewhat interchangeably when i was a kid in the early 70s so i you know then um
but you know doing that would be awful the other thing of just dropping it out catch up by the
would be terrible but the fact that they just took the whole line which is really irrelevant
and kind of turned it into a
works really well they do actually still run a subtitle that says eeny meeny miney
and then even though he really isn't saying that at that point he's just sort of mumbling it but
so yeah all sorts of production problems on this on this thing no money third time rewritten script
uh lawsuits drama behind the camera uh an actor they're trying to fire uh yeah it was all kicking
this one it's it's amazing it's as passable as it is and it's not very passable but it's amazing
uh to be and and also and i learned this white literally today and well late last night so it
actually was probably today and i verified this with my wife uh who is ethnically chinese uh
apparently in the 19th century the word celestial was a racial slur for chinese i've never heard
for see i i did i did not know that i did not know that so the celestial toy maker i mean obviously
it's the title of this serial but the toy maker has referred to in the giggle i assume was only
referred to as the toy maker they did not use the word celestial yes my ignorance made this whole
thing seem less racist than it is but also i i was expecting it to be worse it has a certain
reputation but also doctor who has done worse and i i was you know they've got the the toy maker
done up in these in this chinese costume which i believe again comes down to cost savings they're
just it's from marco using marco polo yeah you know he's not putting on the he's not putting
on yellow face and he's not you know trying to do the accent or or something like that this is just
But this is what I was expecting from the reputation for it.
I was expecting there to be yellow face.
And, you know, because I have watched the Talens of Wang Chiang.
That's worse.
I know.
Well, yeah, that was the kind of level I was expecting.
So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.
There are still issues around cultural appropriation in this.
And obviously, the Celestial Toymaker is, you know, if it's a historical racial slur, and clearly coupled with the costumes that he used in it, there is an intention to use it in that way.
That's unacceptable either, but it's just, I thought it was going to be worse.
Not much of an excuse, but still.
I should say, when I say I verified with this with my wife, what I verified with my wife is that she had no clue that this was in any way a slur.
I've never heard that in my life.
I have in no way.
And I've heard a lot of slurs about various ethnic groups.
And that is not one for Chinese or anyone that I've ever heard.
And so I did a little bit of digging on it.
And I'm giving this one a pass.
I'm not giving anyone who is using it as a slur as a pass.
OK, but that word is not a slur anymore.
And it is only that word because that's the Chinese word for themselves.
Now, they have a they have a different word now.
But back in the 19th century, they referred to themselves and I dug it up and I showed it to my wife.
And she's like, OK, that's basically what that means.
This is what they called themselves.
They basically had came from the heavenly empire and they were the they were the heavenly people who lived in it.
So I can totally see how if somebody came over, if somebody walked into your house and said, I'm from the heavenly empire and I'm one of the heavenly people.
I can totally see people picking that up as a smart ass way to sneer at them, because that's the kind of egotistical thing.
you can't walk into a room and do and not deserve to get called out on should not be used as a slur
but i can totally see where it comes from and i can totally see why it's not one anymore because
i i asked quite a few people what the celestial mean and it all none of it came back to this
it's all to do with the heavens or with the stars or with you know not necessarily the astronomical
stars but the mythical astrological kind of stuff it's like it's kind of a cool word but it's not
it had that context is gone but that was that was that was the it without without that the
celestial toy maker was i thought it the fact that he is somehow on another plane you know what we're
getting in season 40 or whatever we're calling it with the idea of there being these fantasy gods
you know this this was the way in which i think it was suggested that's the toy maker and he is
he is incredibly powerful in this so you know and it is it is fantasy it is fantasy so i thought that
was why it was the celestial toy maker all this time nevertheless if you look in miriam webster
it will give you a definition of celestial that says old name for china of or relating to china
or the chinese that's when you know that right but that's their own it's a it's not saying it's a
slur okay it's still a problem i think because when you know that the celestial toy maker coupled
with the fact that he is wearing the marco polo costume is saying the chinese toy maker right
it could be i i have i have a very hard time divorcing celestial from the context that i
have it in which is sure me too and that fits perfectly with this thing there's nothing chinese
about it at all right except for the costume the toy makers were absolutely nothing about it yeah
is anything other than the other way yeah without the costume i think it becomes much less of a
problem and it's interesting that they have kept the costume you know we we were speculating on
whether they would turn some of this stuff down in the animation but he's still wearing a costume
that is recognizably marco polo style costume you compare it to the to the publicity photos and it's
pretty similar i would say yeah i mean i i don't know i i honestly don't know how the the chinese
people and that's awfully broad category as to whether or not that is a thing that that bothers
them because i can tell you i can find a picture of me dressed just like that and uh and they did
it to me so uh in my wedding chinese people yes the taiwanese but yeah you know republic of china
uh my wedding photos they do these elaborate albums where they put you in tuxedos and they
put you in all sorts of different the particularly the women my wife went through i don't know 10 12
costume changes i went through about four black tux mouth dinner jacket white dinner jacket and
then a red and a yellow mandarin outfit but it's context isn't it it is yeah one is not you know
it's not the same as a so and i'm i'm not saying that the chinese be i'm not expecting there to be
edicts from the um chinese communist party saying that you know we we decry the west and
it's 1966 episode of doctor who the celestial toy maker without but without context and of course
that's the problem with this world is that people act on without context uh if somebody saw the
picture of me they would immediately go oh cultural misappropriation yeah it was it was
their culture doing this to me quite literally so i i don't know i mean do they care some some
people care some people don't care as a whole i don't know i i do like the way they handle it in
the giggle because it's not cultural misappropriation if you just make fun of the germans
so it's okay to be racist to them there right that's exactly what they did right they just
demonstrated actually in a way they were worse no i'm gonna go out they were worse in the giggle
because in the giggle he did the accent i thought the giggle was offensive obviously
not considered as offensive it would never have got through if it was but i considered it to be
offensive so i mean if you're gonna if you're gonna say you can't ever put somebody who is
not a culture in anything else of another culture because it's cultural misappropriation then you
have to deem that as offensive too i just consider it would i don't but because i just you know are
we differentiating between the english and the germans i'm not um but yeah but because he was
doing the accent then he's definitely putting on german face if there is indeed such a i mean
apart from he didn't have the mustache i mean i think i think they're not directly comparable but
I think the issue for me is that that kind of anti-German sentiment and anti-German discrimination is not long forgotten.
Or maybe it's not forgotten by people.
I mean, it's not forgotten by people.
I still remember it.
I hope that it is something that is kind of no longer around.
but I don't see the value in adding it into a popular TV show
for some cheap laughs in 2020, or 2023.
I don't think he did it for cheap laughs.
I think he did it to kind of soften this.
Like, this is what the Toymaker does.
We only have one example of what the Toymaker does
in the Celestial Toymaker,
And that's his, he wears, he wears Chinese clothes and he's not Chinese.
And so in the giggle, he's demonstrating that he likes to put on other, I don't know.
He looked a little French when he was dancing around the chaos.
Maybe it's my imagination.
That's the way the French dress, but that, that might be a stereotype.
I'm not a hundred percent sure, but you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the
just a uh just a way of showing that like the next time the toymaker shows up he'll probably
be dressed as um i don't know we're rapidly running out of other white people that he can
play i don't i don't i'm not i'm not i'm not gonna buy that you know he wasn't american he
made fun of americans too well obviously that's right yeah like well yeah because he is one
but but i'm not i'm not necessarily buying that the rtt's agenda was driven by wanting to sanitize
the the original cereal and i don't think that that any of the kind of big finish stories
or you know the nightmare affair which was based on a an unmade script but solitaire or magic
mousetrap attempted to do anything related to that either they took other aspects of
the toymaker's personality that are established in this story, including, incidentally, the idea
that he traps people through his games and built, frankly, Nightmare Fair accepted, rather better
stories around it than either this or The Giggle. So I don't think it adds anything. I mean,
to what you might say, but I don't think the kind of cultural appropriation aspects add anything.
Certainly don't think the use of racist ethic adds anything.
And just before we move on from all of the kind of production stuff,
I'm just going to comment on, thank goodness they didn't replace Arnold.
And I'm not saying that because I'm the biggest Arnold fan, right?
He's fairly low down my list of favourite Doctors.
But if this were the story that established there being a change of actor in the lead in Doctor Who,
that would have been instead of regeneration.
And regeneration is such a great concept,
and I have absolute confidence that that is why the show is still going to stay.
Especially since the next episode would have been the gunfighters,
as you can imagine.
I do want to say one of the things that I don't know,
again, I would love to be able to find the original Brian Hill script,
and I haven't found any evidence that the script still exists.
there is definitely talk there that big finish will probably if if they have it if it exists
big finish will make it uh there is some indication that the toy maker the reason the toy maker the
doctor of menace because the toy maker is a time lord or one of the doctor's race as they put it
in that in that framework because they haven't invented time lords yeah basically like a menacing
month yeah yeah i mean actually the the the comparison and it's interesting it hadn't occurred
to me all the way through the season 40 you know or shooty season one however we want to call it
the the list of these kind of equivalent um powers um beings shall we call them including
obviously the toy maker but also uh maestro the trickster i forget who else uh and i'm not going
to mention one in case people are listening to this out of order but the mind robber what about
the mind robber what about the master of the land of fiction because in terms of comparisons to this
story and obviously i'm i've seen the mind robber i first saw that is one of the first doctor who
serials I saw I think it was one of the ones that was repeated in BBC on BBC 2 in the early 90s
I watched it then I thought wow this you know this is brilliant and this show is brilliant
but in a way it's doing a lot of similar things to what the Celestial Toymaker is doing and I heard
I think probably at the time or soon afterwards those comparisons to this story but it kind of
slipped out of my mind but that that i think is an example of how you do this thing of saying
right there are these incredibly powerful beings and we are going to expand you know already we're
a sci-fi show where you can travel anywhere in time and space but we're going to expand beyond
that into an a realm of fantasy that goes beyond the kind of mere physical and that is so much
better than the way they've done it here yeah including of course writing out one of the
characters temporarily but anyway we don't need to go the mind robber just now so i'll i don't know
that i have a lot about this story i'm gonna say that this one raises a lot of conflicting emotions
in me about this story it's a terrible story i don't like the toy maker character i don't like
the just wasted time of them playing those stupid games i i do not like this story if i watched this
doctor who story i'd go yeah this is another one that if it stayed lost it could stay lost forever
i don't you know i'm happy to have it back there are still many others i'd rather have
this is certainly not like uh enemy of the world which everyone thought would be not worth having
but then they got it back and they go actually not bad uh kind of thing uh and then bleeding
over just a little bit i think the animation is hideous sorry animators i appreciate what you're
doing and yet at the same time i think they did a brilliant job with it i just don't like the art
style huh okay right i mean i i i i think the fact that they just went whole hog and said let's
make the celestial toy room freaking weird let's let's go with it that you know that's this story
this story is pretty bad let's give it all we can to to flesh it out so that it has some scope
and you know we have we have had this discussion about the animations whether or not they should
remain 100 faithful or whether they should go out on a limb and i don't think i've ever been on the
You should go way out on the limb edge.
But for this one, go.
Like, go and keep going.
Take that limb out there as far as you want.
I think that was the best solution they could come up with for trying to polish a sow's ear.
Mixing my metaphors.
Well, I mean, okay.
I'm happy that this is finally the example I needed to prove my point about this, I think.
Because Big Finish have been pushing on the let's actually do what's possible now,
rather than stay within the constraints of trying to recreate what would have been on screen at the time
because of sets and budgets and all the other limitations.
So, you know, the Reign of Terror, they got reined in on that one because they were going to anime on it.
And I, you know, listeners can go back to our discussion if they've forgotten, but I'm pretty sure I said at the time, go more anime on it.
Let's, you know, let's make these animations new productions because they are new productions.
You can't pretend they are the originals and they still don't look like the originals.
So I'm going to agree with you on that.
I'm going to agree with you on the art changes.
I'm just going to have some caveats about some of the particular changes that they made.
But generally speaking, I am pretty happy that what they did with the toy room was take something that was a pretty, you know, it's a high concept thing.
This kind of fantasy world in which things can be essentially created out of pure thought.
But in a TV studio, they can't be created out of pure thought.
You've probably got to make them out of wood and nails and bits of paper.
and what they've done in the animation is take that and go beyond what you could do
on a 1966 budget but not only that they have gone beyond what you can do within the constraints of
physics like yeah you could have thrown as much money as you liked at this you would have needed
cgi to have steven kind of jump off one block and land on another block at 90 degrees and just still
be balancing on it and to walk across a plank that's twisted and have gravity twist around
with him as he walks but that that kind of warping your mind sense of it is i think what
the story was trying to get across in the first place so the animators are taking the the concept
okay it's not there in the soundtrack because the soundtrack obviously had to be performed
in the context of doing this in a TV studio as it was in 1966.
But they're taking that idea and in ways which don't contradict that soundtrack,
they are realizing it in a much more fantastical way.
And I do think that adds to the story.
Yeah, I think this is bound to be much better than the original in that respect.
It is much more consistent with The Giggle as well.
And it does kind of make these two seem like they are interrelated in their nature.
So, yeah.
And, you know, there's a making of the animation, and I feel really bad when I'm watching the making of the animation.
They're talking about how, you know, they're having a lot of fun with it.
That's cool, and it's great, and now they're going to do the artwork.
And I'm like, I do not like the artwork.
I appreciate the artwork a little bit more after watching the making of,
simply because in the making of,
they say that they are going for a portrait painting style on the characters.
And I watched the episodes.
I look at it and I go,
this is not good computer animation for a couple of reasons.
One of which is just the people just do not look right.
Listen to the making of,
they talk about how what they've done is they've gone for trying.
Well,
I didn't,
they didn't say oil painting,
but in other words,
They're trying to make them look like paintings rather than realistic.
And then you watch it again.
And I have watched bits of it again.
And you look at the faces and you go, yeah, all right, I can see it.
It is not intended to look like Steven's face.
It's meant to look like an oil painting of Steven's face.
And when you get to that, then it's a little, all right, I'm not sure that works in my mind.
Right?
Because you're trying to bring it out.
You're trying to make it pop.
Once they make animation pop in 3D, once they go to 3D animation, my brain wants it to go realistic.
I don't like that halfway ground between animation and not realistic.
It's not quite the Uncanny Valley.
Well, that says they're already venturing into the Uncanny Valley, I think.
I don't think you can get away from the fact that...
So if you compare this, which is a collaboration between Big Finish and Shapeshifter, I think you mentioned that it was the same people doing the single episode of Web of Fear.
Yeah, that we got reanimated a few years back now.
And so they were using the 3D techniques that they're using for this.
Not exactly the same techniques.
They've adapted them in certain ways, but essentially the same principles.
They're doing motion capture.
They're getting real actors to recreate certain scenes.
They're capturing that motion and they're using that in order to animate their 3D models.
But the art style from The Web of Fear is not a million miles from the art style of other big Finnish 2D animations like Fury from the Deep or The Abominable Snowman.
Right. It's not like this, right? If this is supposed to be a kind of artistic rather than photorealistic, it's still compared to what we have been used to much more realistic than we have had.
And that's why I much, much prefer the Web of Fear animation, because it's much more like sketch drawing than it is, if you want to call this oil painting.
All right, we'll call it oil painting. I'm not sure I see it myself, but it's more in that direction.
And I find that I'm not getting that kind of cognitive dissonance.
Because I agree with you.
I think you notice things like the faces aren't quite right much more
when everything else is getting so much closer.
It's a good rendering of what the studio would have looked like.
It's a very good rendering of some of the elaborate elements of the set,
like the big house.
It's a reasonable rendering of the bodies,
and the motion is obviously based on motion capture.
But the faces are still looking pretty weird.
Oddly enough, they're looking better in color, I think, than they are in black and white, which is a shame because...
You don't paint in black and white.
Not oil painting, no.
Well, again, they said painting.
They didn't say oil painting.
So it could be watercolor.
I don't know.
She said they were going for this painting like they were doing.
Because you can't do it realistically, so they've opted to artistically go that.
Yeah.
I will say you brought this up a couple of times there, and this is my other point.
Do you remember what my complaint about the animation in the Web of Fear was?
You found it very distracting.
They kept moving all the time.
The motion capture sucks.
I'll go that far, and I'll say it still sucks in this.
It has the same problem.
It's like they've hired theater actors, and they said, now, when you're doing this motion capture, remember, the audience is 100 feet away.
So you gotta really keep moving and you gotta make it big or no one will notice, which is
not true because you are not a hundred feet away.
You're right in their face.
And so their movements do not look, they still do not look natural.
I did not even realize this was motion capture until I watched that document and I thought,
eh, this is just more of that CGI stuff.
It's not as bad as the motion capture was in the 2D, but I think that's because the
2D have a different expectation.
They don't expect motion capture 2D animation.
Although that's not technically true because when I was a kid,
they used to rotoscope a lot of stuff on Saturday morning.
Have they used 2D?
Have they used motion capture for 2D?
Sure.
Well, they did for Web of Fear.
They used motion capture for it.
I didn't think it was 3D, was it?
I mean, if you think about Fury from the Deep, for example,
I mean, I don't remember a lot about the animation in that,
but I'm pretty sure one of the things we commented on
was the way in which the movement of their arms was extremely bad and quite distracting.
So I think in some respects, this is better.
And I think the reason for going big in the movement,
I agree there was something about the way in which the web of fear,
the motion was slightly over the top,
which I think was partly in contrast to the way that they were drawn.
But I think you can't play this as naturalistic as you would if it were live action when you're doing the motion capture, because only so much gets captured.
It's not like you've got an actual camera pointed at you and it's not like the facial expressions or whatever are going to be anything like as subtle or detailed as the facial expressions would be if it were live action.
Now, I know the word you're going to throw out here at me when I say this, but that is not true.
They can motion capture it so damn good that you can't tell.
You just have to look at any of the new Planet of the Apes films or...
What's the word going to be? Budget.
Budget, that's the word. That's exactly the word.
But there's my question is how exactly, where is the piece of the budget that comes into it?
are they not allowed to have as many sensors on the costume could do they not have as big a hard
drive to put the motion capture data in where where does the budget cut down on the quality
i don't know i you know many many more animators to do it wouldn't they because it's not like
that it's not like they they get this stuff from the motion capture and they just render that
directly into a finished animation there's an awful lot of work that goes on in between
and the more detail that you try and do within that I think the more difficult it's going to be
I'd also add to that that I think you're going to have to how can I put this you'll
try to avoid using the word better you're going to have to hire different actors because the more
that the motion capture captures those nuances and those kind of facial expressions and everything
the more you're actually going to have to match the quality of the actors that you originally had
So, you know, you're not going to just hire some circus performer having a day off from some local show.
You're going to have to hire someone who has experience in television, has the kind of caliber that I guess, you know, is going to match our expectations for this.
So I do think there is a budget element to it.
Yes.
Yeah, I just, I'm curious as to where it falls when it comes to the, it's one thing on the face, but when it comes to the motion of the arms and the legs, it still feels like it's all.
And here's a specific example, the clown, the motion capture for the clown, the male clown, Joey, I think it was, was somebody with actual clown experience training.
And so watching him, and I did watch him again after learning that, I can totally see it.
He does have that sort of oddly exaggerated clowny kind of movement to him.
And yet it still seems up one step too many again, just like everything else.
It's right, but it's right in a wrong way.
But he's a clown clown.
He's not a TV clown.
Like, I don't, I think probably you're talking about a fairly small niche when you're into TV clowns.
Most clowns are going to be people whose audience is 100 feet away.
Yeah, I'm not even sure he actually was a clown.
He'd just been to clown school.
So he had some clown training.
Yeah, but what they're teaching is how you do it.
And it's in Australia.
So, you know, you're out in the outback.
the audience is a bunch of dingo people straight out yeah that kind of thing um
it's just i don't know they look drunk i think that's part of it they look drunk to me
they they sort of yeah sway and uh you know when they and i'm sure i probably said this
ages ago because this is this comes to mind every time i think of this if you look oddly enough we're
talking the planet of the apes films again but we talk about the original planet of the apes films
which had that amazing makeup that they did that won them an academy award looks very real but what
the actors had learned was that it does not look real if you don't keep moving it is it so they
all had to develop these they just they just subtly be moving their faces at all times and
as long as you do that the mask looks alive if you stop moving the mask looks like a mask does it and
i wonder if that's part of the if that's part of the remit to these people don't stop moving if you
stop moving it looks like we stopped animating or something possibly it does we don't you know we
don't know how much worse it looks the other way it's not it's not perfect yet and i would say the
quality of the animation is actually a lot better than it was for web of fear but and i i realize
i'm in a minority of probably about one with this because i love the web of fear animation the the
kind of the reason that the swaying in that wasn't so much of a problem was because it looked much
more stylized again because the drawings were not anything like as kind of close to to being
photorealistic as they are you know them again you know they're okay they look like paintings
they're moving in that direction so yeah and with web of fear you looked at it and you didn't get
any sense that it was intended to be in any way realistic and so to some degree the motion is
part of the style that the drawing the the the art is also a part of so from that point of view
The animation may not have been as good, but it didn't need to be for me.
Here's what I would have liked them to have done.
I do think this is the perfect episode for them to recreate with what they've done here,
because I think the 3D animation looks surreal, not real.
I kind of would have really liked if they're going to go hog in and say,
we're, you know, we're mounting a new production.
I would have liked to have seen that scene in the TARDIS at the beginning, maybe at the end, done in the style of Web of Fear.
And as they step out into the toy room, transition into this.
Because, like I say, it's the perfect episode for this surreal look because it's a surreal world.
And they could have, I don't know.
That might have made it to a point where people who do not like the computer graphics would go,
well you know that's part of the surrealism of this story and and and maybe be a little more
forgiving because i can't i can't help but believe that there won't be people who do not like this
recreation just like people who really hated the web of fear how much of that first scene is part of
the cliffhanger to the arc i'm not sure enough of it i was just thinking because i think the
Doctor Disappearing was. Yeah. Right. The ideal thing would obviously be if you had enough of the original footage to do that, because it's a great idea. I think you're right about it. I think the problem would be that the Web of Fear, rather, animation style, it's not naturalistic. So it's not going from naturalism into this fantasy realm. It's going from one fantasy into another fantasy. And I think that might be confusing, but it's a great idea.
Yeah, it would have, it might have, you know, just like changing actors for Hartnell.
This would be their way to move all the animation into 3D from this point forward.
It's like just sort of a transition.
I mean, I don't dislike the 3D animation because there are various episodes kind of dabbled,
various other animations have dabbled with kind of more 3D than 2D or mixed 3D and 2D.
I mean, you know, thinking about the power of the Daleks, for example, it had been very 2D before that.
I still kind of feel like the invasions is the best animation.
Very, very 2D.
About 18 years of animation technology advancement since then.
But, you know, still the best because I think a lot of it comes down to the art style.
I'm not ruling out the 3D because I liked the Web of Fear.
I agree it did look good with this, but I think there were,
well, I think you're saying the artwork was problematic.
The change I disliked with this was the art style from the Web of Fear,
but also a lot of the BBC Studios animations.
So, you know, maybe not Power of the Daleks,
but certainly Macro Terror, certainly Faceless Wands,
even as a Dalek, that kind of run,
they were winning me over to watching them in colour
because I'd been kind of, I guess it's the mindset of,
well, this was originally black and white.
Let's watch something that's close to the original,
despite me sort of going a bit gung-ho with my,
go on BF, get your anime,
kind of test the limits of the world you're creating.
I thought the reason I was kind of enjoying those in colour was because the artwork and the colour hues and the choices and the depth that added to it.
I was even going to the lengths of saying, oh, yeah, you know, all right, let's have this in widescreen.
It's not, it wasn't originally in widescreen.
All right.
But, you know, it's a different thing.
Colour widescreen is fair enough.
And this is presented in colour widescreen and black and white Academy ratio.
And the black and white, for those who are following these things, is what is supplied on disc one.
So I think that's their kind of, this is the recommended version.
The colour version is kind of horrible, I think.
I dislike the kind of technicalness of it.
It's too bright. It's garish almost.
I guess you're going to say that's part of the fantasy universe.
i think it was probably was probably was fairly garish on screen too based on the this is the
only time i have ever it was black and white on screen uh okay in the studio this is the only
time the studio is colored time or black and white film the the extra that's the uh photos
and in this one when the photo one came up and i go actually considering what they've done
with with recreating this bizarre thing i really want to see as much as i can of the behind the
scenes shots and you know things like like the turns out the trilogic game was blue no white
they did it in white here for the animation to match the room that it was in but it was apparently
it was a blue prop um there you know the clowns are in color the there is there is color in the
set so you know and you know the school boy outfits got a certain style and color it would
have been so they they've these are not unrealistic they're a bit bright perhaps but they're not i i
don't look at it and go now that should be black and white because the cheap because the studio
limited day we're black and white so it's black and white um but yeah again and and that's that's
because of this fantasy well yeah there's not the reason i'm preferring the black and white here it's
because i think the color is hideous so i prefer it in black and white because i think the black
and white looks better but there is an exception to that which is that i think if you look at the
faces the drawings have been done with the intention of them being seen in color and they
don't quite look right in black and white it's like the lighting is wrong there's something about
the faces that just seems worse in black and white so there isn't a there isn't a perfect
recommendation for which version to watch this there's no evidence of this and as far as i can
tell in the in the making of the animation but i can't help thinking again back to that painting
design this was intended to be in color it doesn't matter what they put on disc one
the animators animated color you know and i'm just i'm pushing my prejudice i i think they
say i mean i think the power of the daleks was the last one that was animated for black and white i
think since then they've all been done for color and then made black and white here's here's my
thing about black and white and i know you know there's the whole debate about colorizing films
and i in in general i'm not in favor of colorizing films it doesn't bother me to watch a film in
black and white in any way shape and form but black and white was a budgetary restriction
for a lot of the time when films but you you had to go your budget had to go way up to get
and it you can go about it two different ways you can shoot it in black and white because black and
white's what i've got or you can be the type cinematographer and director that look at it and
say, I am painting a picture in black and white. And so you make it unrealistic for the color world
to create the look. And there are a lot of black and white films out there that have done that.
And they are, I can truly say that they are made for black and white in an artistic way. And,
and they can look great in black and white, but there's an awful lot of black and white films
that are just shot in black and white pedestrianly because that's what they had to work with.
And I think Doctor Who was generally pedestrian.
Pedestrian lighting, pedestrian directing.
And that was Doctor Who for the most part.
The reality is if you're making black and white television,
the colors that you choose as a costume designer, as an art designer,
when you're lighting it all the rest is based on that you know this is going to be in black and
white so if you could restore the color from black and white it would not look right and even those
publicity photos taken on the set will reflect the fact that they were creating sets that were
intended to be shot in black and white i i saw an interview with raymond burr who was a star of
perry mason shot in film in hollywood in the in the 60s and he one of the things he said was you
know because we shoot in black and white our makeup is green dude we wear green makeup there's a green
tip to our faces because he gives a more realistic look on in black and white on on the tv and his
his comment was you know it's pretty tough when you walk into your scene is to say what dela you
lovely tonight when she looks green and uh so you know yes okay if you were able to magically go
back to that film and somebody came up with a process that could exactly recreate the original
color with absolute brilliant green they're close i think they can on video but not not necessarily
in film but who knows but they would be green i mean probably not like a ryan slave girl green
but they would be uh you know they were bulk and green yeah like i was 20 before i realized spock
was actually not the same color as everyone else in the on the enterprise so it's like oh he just
kind of i just thought he was just didn't have a suntan kind of thing but yeah they've they've
done something to their faces to make it so there are lots of things you can do that the the use of
dark and light can be much more contrasty on black and white and for that noir effect and
yeah no i'm not saying it isn't but doctor who does not strike me as very often as something
that was anything other than just point the camera throw a lot of light at it and let's get
this done with and so um i don't know why they would try to artistically make it black and white
in the future in the now in the now yeah but i think i think that's yeah that's fair enough
color would be color would be good if it was good which is no you know and i watched there's uh
there's commentary on the on the episodes uh some of the episodes have commentary from peter purvis
and played steven and uh i was particularly interested in listening to him looking at himself
and seeing what his opinion because i would if if they were not wearing those ridiculously iconic
outfits i mean if you think of steven and dodo yeah you can't blame the animators for that but
if you think of steven and dodo those are kind of the costumes that pop to mind because they are so
awful um but but you know it is what it is but it's there's there's a there's a bunch of color
pictures of those two that circulate around and of course the mystique of the toy maker and
whatnot so you see a lot of those pictures but if it weren't for those costumes and somebody said
pointed those to me and said which doctor companions of those i'd go i ian and zoe i don't
know i don't recall anybody who had a nose that big honking big and hooked over and i haven't had
chance to go back and look at peter purvis's nose in profile to see if it's that awful but
sorry ian uh steven uh no ian you know ian from earlier doctor who oh in test in barbara
ian yeah i mean he's just he's just a square-jawed guy with dark hair i mean that doesn't look okay
more like peter purvis than it does look like ian chess or why would he even be with russell
he would well no i said if you showed me those pictures just their face separately right separately
and i got identify this one i go that could be zoe i don't know uh dark haired short short dark
care uh and i wouldn't think of dodo because nobody thinks of dodo um but sorry dodo i couldn't
identify their faces and i look at them and my thought my first thought was wow they look dour
all the time that they they there is with the exception of the scene where they're supposed
be laughing they looked our those are just two grumpy face people and that is almost the first
thing that purvis said watching that and i think the expressions are a little sterner than uh
uh perhaps but he was generally complimentary of the whole thing i i didn't think he was going to
be busting on it because that would probably they'd probably make him do the commentary again
but or they just use it yeah maybe they did so his comments were basically in line with ours is
that you know he's glad that they went and they they went big because they couldn't do it in the
studio in it and it's great to have it back and he's never seen the celestial toy maker
except for episode four because he didn't watch them when they went out so um but yeah the you
know the faces they were like he he said he could identify them i'm thinking that might be pushing
a little bit but he commented on that and the fact that they were they were kind of sternish
looking um let's see what else do i have if anything i don't know did you notice what the
hood ornament was on the uh the car that the clown and dodo were in nope it was the toy maker
a gold toy maker standing there with his hands out and back like um is it a ben's that has that
or is it a no uh roller rolls there it is like a rolls it's a gold toy maker doing that on the
front of the oh it's just a nice touch um i didn't see that till i was watching through it on the
second time uh the last touch so i mean this this relates to one of my biggest gripes with the
anime i mean this so the these are this not kind of global issue with the animation these are the
particular things where we've talked we've talked about how kind of they use the freedom that
animation gives you to do some kind of quite cool things and interestingly since the recon
actually includes animation to it is also 3d animation for certain sequences and they are
the the sequences where steven is playing against the clowns but they're they're animated without
that expansiveness without the the kind of twisted physics and everything and so you can i mean
obviously i don't know the the kind of prominence of those recons i i'm sure they don't have the
same resource but it certainly not only is that the animation in the fully animated version better
but that those artistic choices improve it i i wondered if so there's one area where i think
they could have gone further and there's one area where i think they went too far one area as an
example where i think they could have gone further is those playing cards the playing cards those
are weird a bit like the clown look non-human the playing cards look non-human they look sort of
playing cardish but they could have been actual playing cards more or less because it's animation
what's to stop you so i didn't know why they didn't go further with that they also strobed
their movements strobed yeah like they were phasing in and out of reality choice yeah so
that was pretty weird on the other hand the car that you just mentioned i found having having a
car was very confusing like the sound effect sounds like the car horn but it's not meant to
be the car horn it's it seems much more straightforward to have a booth that they're in
Okay, if you want to move it around, you can move it around.
But making it look like a car, to me, is more distracting than adding anything.
Yeah, okay.
Was it a booth in the recons?
Yes.
I mean, at that point, I think the recons are just the telesnaps or publicity snaps or whatever they had.
But to me, it looked like, you know, a fish tank or a very simple telephone box.
It was nothing like a sort of toy car scooting around all over the place.
In three dimensions, yeah.
It was there in order to isolate the two of them,
the Dodo and the female clown, from Stephen
so that it would be obvious that they could not hear each other
and the only way they could communicate would be by tooting the tutor.
But with the car, it didn't seem to me that obvious
that they were sonically isolated and it felt like every time there was a toot it was the horn
of the car so i just felt that whatever that was the horn of the car though wasn't it i mean she
was pushing the was though because there wasn't a car you know oh in the original yeah well but
in the 3d animation she is hogging the horn on the steering wheel isn't she well the button may be in
place of the horn on the car so yeah it's kind of like that but then that feels like it's there for
the purpose of being a horn on the car not for the purpose of being a means of communicating with
steven as part of the game so it detracted it distracted from what the game was about more than
it added in terms of visual amusement i guess here's where i'm gonna i didn't like any of those
sequences so i mean but that's because i don't like what they're doing i mean i'm not talking
about the animation i'm just like okay this is just this is just dull um this is just filler
is what it it it feels like i think that the obstacle course even when they converted it
to three dimensions is still probably really visually dull and so they put dodo in the car
and ran her around so that they would have an excuse to move the camera uh have some motion
on the screen uh look like something was happening uh just to make it more animated it it feels like
they're just trying to cover up they're trying to patch over a bad story yeah so it it didn't
bother me because it was this i guess it in a way it is distracting but the whole thing is like i
distract me from the game i don't care so just like he he's and you know i'm not it doesn't
really the the directional system that they have isn't very good right when dodo says turn left
steven turns does he turn left 90 degrees does he turn left 100 degrees because he doesn't really
seem to be doing this like what dodo tells him to do and the way they've got it animated in the
real one maybe he did i would if i were in that situation and i was someone was giving me
instructions with you know with the beeps like that i would be very very precise in my motions
i would be absolutely dead still if they say turn right i'm going to do absolutely everything i can
to turn exactly 90 degrees to the right without moving on my spot and then gingerly stepping
forward when they tell me to step forward i i would be very um precise about it because all
i've got is very low quality data coming from dodo not saying dodo's wrong just you know it's
it's low bit rate and that's not what steven's doing steven's just all kind of waving around
Yeah, but also I think having the car dashing around all the time, also it creates that kind of sense of frenetic activity rather than what you should have, which is Dodo concentrating on exactly where Stephen is stepping and Stephen concentrating on exactly what Dodo is tooting.
Now, they do kind of give the illusion, and I don't know what the dialogue was, or maybe it was just a scream or something.
I don't know why.
There is one point when the car zips around really quickly, and I think Dodo screams.
And we could make the argument that they've put the car movements around as an effort to throw Dodo off.
Oh, yes.
I think that is the...
I don't know how they would have done that in the mood.
Well, I don't say that. I think that's an addition to the story. Like I say, I don't have a problem with the idea that you add things to the story or you change the nature of the story because you are looking at a different production.
It's just that I think the way they've done this particular aspect of it is actually unhelpful to understanding what's going on in the story, even the kind of alternative version of the story that they are now telling.
Let's see. I just have a few catch up items here that are in no logical order that we haven't hit.
How does jumping ahead in the Trilogic game work?
Is it my understanding that a perfect game of Trilogic is exactly 1,023 moves, and the
doctor must make a perfect game in 1,023 moves?
If he makes any mistake or misstep, he will not get there in 1,023 moves, and he will
lose.
That's kind of how I think it is, because it's just Towers of Hanoi.
Hanoi here.
Hanoi.
Towers of Hanoi.
Maybe that's it.
Hanoi.
I should do.
yeah it's it's hunnily so the doctor is making a bunch of moves and then the toy maker says okay
gotta move 738 and the thing zips around and uh does that mean that it makes perfect moves
when it's skipping forward it doesn't seem to me it doesn't seem to me a terribly
i mean it's a little bit like penalty shootout in a football match it's it too often seems like
in a penalty shootout that you lose the game
rather than winning it
because it's as soon as you miss a penalty
that there is a problem.
It's not necessarily exactly like that.
I'm not as ignorant as the rules of football
as that makes me sound,
but I only do cricket.
I'm pretty ignorant as the rules of football,
but I did that.
I do know that depending on where you are
in the penalty shootout,
yeah, the other side could still miss.
That, of course, makes it even worse
as a kind of dramatic element to this storyline,
because it's not like the Toymaker is playing too.
It's not like they're playing against each other
and when one of them makes a mistake, you know,
and they should be up against the same kind of pressures.
And actually, the problem with the setup is that the Doctor has to complete this,
but he has to complete it perfectly,
and Dodo and Stephen have to do their bit before he completes it.
That creates, rather than there being competing factors for the Doctor,
that creates two reasons why the Doctor should just go as slow as he could.
Because he can think through every move in great detail the longer he takes to think about it.
Not only is he going to have a better chance of getting it right and not making that fatal mistake,
but also he's giving Stephen and Dodo a longer time to complete their bit.
That seems to me the reason why they have to have this, or the Toymaker has to have this,
you're going too slowly.
I'm going to move you through so many moves.
But again, it's not clear to me
whether or not that is to the doctor's advantage
because when he moves him through however many moves,
he can't make a mistake.
He gets all those moves correct.
Yeah, the doctor can't make a mistake.
So maybe he should just hang around and hang around
until the toymaker gets so bored that he moves it on.
Yeah.
You know, it makes it very difficult to work out
what the doctor's strategy should be,
let alone what it is.
With regards to the story, again, Stephen and Dodo aren't the most well-represented companions in the remaining.
But Stephen has absolutely no sympathy for these creatures.
And Dodo has way too much in this episode.
It just, it feels like they've created an artificial polarization in the two of them.
for and you know would it be different if we were absolutely certain that these are real people who
had been condemned there because of course they're all killed at the end when the toy room is destroyed
uh when the doctor and and crew disappear in the tardis and destroy the toy room um i don't know
it it just or i mean i feel like something's still before the end yes he is and when and when when
you kind of say that the the darkness of the original hail script was kind of excised through
changes that were made i still think that's pretty horrific the the animation is even more horrific
i think because you sort of see all his skin has blistered red which is dreadful but you know even
because that occurs in the surviving episode even the original on film version is pretty awful i i
um this is another one where you know typically speaking when we come to these animations i watch
the color one oh and then i'm done uh and uh i actually watched the surviving episode first
i watched the surviving i watched the first three color episodes uh and then i watched the surviving
episode and then i went and watched the third color episode because you know i have no clue
what they're missing in the first three episodes and and i should point out they they also point
out that the surviving photos like that's in that photo gallery are not behind the scene shots
they're publicity shots so there's a lot of those pictures are not of things that actually happen
in the episode they are staged for the purposes of putting in magazines or whatever it happens to be
so what you can get from them is is the colors of the costumes and the look and maybe the sets
but you don't you can't draw anything from those that help the animation you know going on with
what uh was happening yeah so i wanted to i wanted to see having watched the three episodes
and thought wow this is amazing expansive world that's really twisted and bizarre how bad does
it look in a studio and then you cut to the studio episode you go yeah it's bad it's pretty bad uh
it's pretty bad and i wonder how wild they're gonna take it and then i watch the color episode
and it's like all right yeah yeah it's not nearly as kind of freaky weird as the the clown sequence
or the the toy maker expanding large and vomiting cards out of his mouth and his twirly pattern or
all of those uh strange strange things going on there but that's all right it's definitely better
the animation is definitely better i'd still rather have the original yes but but uh i'll i
will i will accept this as they've really taken a terrible episode and they've done about as good as
they could uh as they in remaking this one go out and buy it show the bbc that we want more of these
i think that's their usual appeal i well it is it is and so um because we have reached a point
once again where there are no future animations announced i'm going to ask you the standard
question of do you think there will be more i think it's going to depend on whether doctor
who survives next year or not um um i'm not 100 convinced it will but uh uh i i i don't know i i
i believe that with russell t davies of all the things that i can say good bad or indifferent
about Russell T Davies I would be willing to bet that he is in the background pushing for it oh yeah
I'm sure he always has been um and I think he's probably got some clout to accomplish that now
whether or not they're going to turn that over to Disney too um suddenly I'm seeing Bambi style
animation I don't I mean I we obviously had that um that big gap we've had two big gaps now we had
the big gap after was it the moon base before power of the daleks came along and then the
abominable snowman was going to be the last one before the underwater menace has come along and
then we've had the celestial toymaker hot on its heels so it seems odd that we're just having two
but even if even if we are those those long gaps or those long gaps that felt like long gaps at the
time were never more than sort of i know a couple of years two and a half years i get between the
moon base when you're getting old almost almost three years between the moon base and power of
the darlings i i'm gonna i'm gonna say i think we'll get another one within a year i think you're
probably right and i think it cannot be a coincidence that it's the celestial toy maker
no and the giggle so we have to ask ourselves does series 2025 of doctor who contain any
callbacks to any missing episodes and if it does that's what we're gonna get well i i wouldn't be
surprised because rtd has gone full you know rtd1 he went he you know there was that moment when the
Macra appeared in gridlock and that was like oh my god he's he's he's actually acknowledging the
show existed before 2005 I mean not that he wasn't but it was very much it was it was there
for you to spot as the as the kind of dedicated fan whereas now it's like and we're going to do
we're going to info dump this aspect of the old show and we're now going to info dump that aspect
of the old show and we're now going to have a big reveal that is only going to mean anything to
people who have watched the show for 49 years and i think that he that's just that's what he's doing
now so yeah answers are we are like we did with the toy maker we are going to get more stuff
that he he is excited about and which has its mystique because it's from lost episodes and he
wants to you know not only bring back and expand those elements but also to to yeah push for the
push for interest in in the originals he has he has though uh without going into the spoiler
not everything that he has brought back in rtd2 era is from a lost episode no no no so i mean
you know absolutely i'm no i wasn't suggesting that he was purely motivated by digging out the
the lost episodes i think most of what he's brought back hasn't had anything to do with
lost episodes but i think the appeal of something like the toy maker is that it gives him the
opportunity to do something with a fairly sort of legendary character in a legendary story i mean
it's well known even if it's not great yeah that no one else has done anything with on television
in the intervening time.
I know what it's going to be.
Go on then.
Next season, because he's still alive,
Frasier Hines is coming back somehow.
He'll, I don't know,
Unit will have picked him up somehow by accident
through their time experiments.
And then we'll have to have the Highlanders
animated to introduce the character.
See, there are two, you've got my vote there.
There are two reasons for that.
Firstly, I love Jamie,
So bring back Jamie.
And secondly, because I love Jamie,
I would really like to see his introduction story.
And we know it's a tough one to animate.
So if this gives them a reason to do the difficult thing,
bring it on.
Yeah.
So.
Do you have anything else about this episode?
I think that's it for me.
I think we've killed this one.
I think we've recorded as long as the episode is.
I'll try to cut some out somewhere.
Well, we will definitely next week be, from where you're hearing this, next week we will definitely be talking about the two-part finale of Doctor Who 2024.
So, Simon, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure, as always.
Listeners, go out and buy the Celestial Toymaker on Blu-ray.
And we hope you'll join us all again next time on Fusion Patrol.
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