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.