DOCTOR WHO: SHADA DVD Release Compleated With Animated Segments

Don't get me wrong, I love Tom Baker's Doctor, in fact, he IS the Doctor as far as I'm concerned, but I never understood the intrigue and fascination behind Shada. From all the reviews of the the novelizations and audio stuff I've read, it's just an okay Dr. Who story.

Yeah, but it was the one that we never got to see. :) At least until it was released on VHS tape some years ago. I guess it is somewhat human nature to be obsessed with something that you can't have. Fans act the same way with the unreleased Beatles' song "Carnival of Light", which everyone who has heard it say that it is rubbish.
 
The other night my DVR recorded Doctor Who on BBC America. I took a quick look at it this morning and it turned out to be Shada. There went three hours. As Tom Baker is my Doctor I enjoyed it. And I loved the ending.

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After watching Shada last week on BBC America and seeing all the live footage that was actually completed makes me wonder why they never completed it. It seemed like maybe 80 percent of it was done and just scenes that required a lot of special effects needed to be done. I know there was some sort of strike at the time they originally shot the episode and they decided to scrap it but it really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
 
I agree. It was hard to know how much was missing with the previous version that had Tom explaining what you weren't seeing, but with this, i was surprised at how little animation there really was. The animated cast was a whopping 6 people. Was it really that hard to get them all together over the next couple years when two were still with the show? They could have edited out the professer and the other two and just gotten Skagra back to complete filming.
 
Fun to read through the old thread -- how much has changed and happened since 2011!

I bought the blu-ray disc from Amazon.uk (it's region free) and have enjoyed the show very much. It certainly plays much better with the animation than with the connecting narration. I think my biggest problem with the episode is Skagra's costume, lol. That horrible, horrible, laughable, floppy hat and cape of universal domination.
 
This is one of the most turgid,laughable attempts at drama ever. Plan 9 makes more sense and would appear to have the same production values. It's just so..........I can't even............it's drek. Baker needed serious slapping down on this one.
 
necro post with random thoughts!

Finally saw this. Nice to finally scratch a 39-year old itch.

But MAN is this bloated. SO much walking and biking around campus. Brought to you by the Cambridge Tourism Board! ;)

I only have the movie version to see---was it also available broken up into episodes? It would be interesting to see how long those episodes would be, because had it been completed back in the day, I suspect a lot of fat would have been lost in cutting them to broadcast length. But I get it: for this reconstruction I'm sure they wanted to use every possible bit of what was shot and scripted without second-guessing what might have happened in the editing room in 1979.

But I suspect it could be cut down to a much more watchable four episodes.

I used to wonder what would've been so hard about remounting it in 1980. But now I see that what remained to be shot were two elaborate spaceship interiors with corridors. I don't know how far along in construction those were when production was stopped, but I doubt they were stored, or if they were, were faring well by the time they were thinking about it during the next series.

I assume the shots of characters walking up the invisible ramp were newly shot with stand-ins? Were they wearing fan-made costumes, or originals? When was that coda with Tom shot? Is there a making-of video or article about this reconstruction out there?

Poor Lalla Ward, she spent quite a bit of time being dragged around or held fast by bad guys, without much to do or say.

I can understand why Douglas Adams wasn't too keen about this work--it shows that it was rushed. Still, his professor character is a lot of fun, and there's still plenty of engaging Adams dialogue.

With some verbal instructions to a computer, The Doctor converts a spaceship into a TARDIS. Hell, if it's that easy, why did he need to steal one in the first place?

Anyway, a good reconstruction, obviously done with love. The animation is better than Power of the Daleks, despite being by the same people, I think.
 
There is a special that was done a few years ago that explains why they didn't finish the episode in 1980. The biggest reasons were that John Nathan Turner didn't want anything to do with the previous producers work and all the sets that had been constructed for the episode had already been broken down and the BBC wasn't too chuffed about spending any extra money on the show.

As for the scenes of them walking up the ramp those were actually filmed back in 1979 before the strike with the original actors. They actually did a bunch of the space ship scenes and it was really the heavy special effects scenes and about half the space ships scenes that still needed to be done when the final strike hit as strikes were part of doing business in those days.
 
It also occurs to me that the accounting dept might have had trouble categorizing a remount, as the original was probably written off or claimed as an insurance loss.
 
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