The library coughed up the Doctor Who - Lost In Time compilation with partial serials from the William Hartnell years. It was packaged as a three disc set in the UK but broken into 2 seperate units based on the Doctor in the stories. The first 29 serials starred the First Doctor who was played by William Hartnell.
Serial 14 is a 4 parter called The Crusade and it aired from March 27 to April 17 1965. It's 12th century Palestine during the 3rd Crusade and the Doctor and gang get involved with Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. It's slow moving and episodes 2 and 4 are audio only. I'm not big fan of the Crusades and seeing shows like this when I was a kid would have helped shape that opinion. Julian Glover plays Richard the Lionheart and the man is still acting. He was in Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back, in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets he was the voice of Aragog and he's got a part in the Game Of Thrones series. Jean Marsh plays Richard's sister Lady Joanna and she's only in the show a bit. She was married to Jon Pertwee from 1955 to 1960. He would go on to play a Doctor in Whoville. I found the show kind of dull and that feeling was helped by the audio only episodes. The original idea was the have the show be a bit of an education for the viewer but the science fiction episodes proved to be the ones that the viewers really took too.
Serial 21 is The Daleks' Master Plan and it was first broadcast from November 13 1965 to January 29 1966. It must have been a good plan since it took the Doctor 12 episodes to kick the Daleks shiny metal asses. At least I think that's what happened. Only episodes 2, 5 and 10 exist so we can't see the actual destruction the Daleks bring on themselves. There is a CD of the collected audio of the whole serial but I find the audio only versions less compelling. I had to make due with the huge synopsis on the Wikipedia. It could have been something interesting maybe. There's a whole planet destroyed at the end of the serial. Oh, well, huh. Two of the Doctor's female companions get killed in this serial. One of them was Jean Marsh playing a different character than Lady Joanna. Peter Butterworth, who I had been seeing in many of the Carry On movies, shows up in the serial as a monk. The episodes that had video weren't too bad. The had a much more ambitious story and the sets were more interesting. There are plenty of bad guys and that might have helped keep things interesting. Some of the costumes and makeup for the alien races are still pretty silly stuff. The members of the Universal Council reminds me of the council in the Japanese Starman series. Sometimes you almost forget DW is supposed to be a kids show. You'd think they'd try to do better for the kids, don't you. In reality it had to have been watched by all ages. the number of viewers for the serial started at 9.1 million, peaked with 10.3 million and ended with 8.6 million. The United Kingdom was just under 55 million citizens in 1965. That's a popular show. Only really popular shows on American tv today get 8-10 million viewers and that's with over 300 million potential buts in seats. If you use a percentage it would be like 60 million Americans watched the same show. That doesn't happen that often.
Serial 24 is The Celestial Toymaker and the 4 episodes aired from April 2-23 1966. Michael Grough plays the Toymaker. The last episode is the only one that exists. The synopsis makes the first 3 episodes sound like they might have been a bit weird, maybe fun to watch. The audio version exists on a CD. The library doesn't seem to have any of the audio cd's and I just can't see looking for them. Especially if there's money involved. The Toymaker and the Doctor are old enemies. The TM kidnaps everyone and forces them to play some games. The companions, Dodo and Stephen, have to play a deadly game of hopscotch against an annoying ass. He tries to trick them and falls into one of his own traps. It's a pretty funny scene but not from anyone writing jokes. Sometimes the story seems to work better than others. Occasionally there's a dumb accident or bit of business that could have been handled better if anyone had just thought about it for a while.
There's a commetary which I didn't listen to. The other extras are made up of surviving clips from missing episodes. Most of them are about a minute. I liked the flame throwing Daleks. That makes them seem less goofy. They might be losers but they can do some damage before they get put down. At least the BBC tries to collect as much as they can of the lost material. It will have to do until we get into space far enough to catch up to the tv waves of those shows we didn't keep. Hopefully aliens are doing that now. Hope they're friendly.
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