Pyramids Of Mars is the 82nd serial and it was first broadcast October 25 to November 15 1975. Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sleden are the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. Something interrupts their flight in the Tardis and they land in a room full of Egyptian Artifacts. It's 1911 and the house belongs to an archologist who's away on a dig. The archologist opens a tomb and gets taken over by Sutekh. The Doctor has a good fight on his hands 'cause that Sutekh is a real evil bastard. He wants to destroy everything but that's how he was made. Because he has these destructive tendencies Sutekh was cursed by Horus and stuck in a tomb. We were safe for thousands of years until the Englishmen came with their shovels and picks.
Sarah Jane wears a frilly dress for the whole serial. I still find her to be less interesting than some of the other companions. There were some nice Egyptian props, maybe not accurate, but colorful. The house they used for the archologist's home was owned by Mick Jagger at that time. They blow it up at the end but the model doesn't look that good. They blow up the pyramid launch pad, see below, and that doesn't look that good either. The mummies are really robots. They unwrap a mummy at one point and they have a neat empty wire frame with pipes inside it. The Doc uses the wrappings to sneak a bomb into the white pyramid rocket launch site. He's a tricky guy.
That's Sutekh's mummy robots and the evil one himself on the right. Once he gets free from the curse of Horus he's all world destruction, blah, blah, blah. These guys are all the same, huh. The Doctor will eventually kick his ass and things are back to normal. The new normal would see the end of the Doctor working for UNIT. We won't see the Brigadier for 7 years. I thought parts were pretty good but I have to complain that they don't get to Mars until the last episode. The effects were pretty silly looking. Here's the episodes on Dailymotion. Part 1, 2, 3, 4. Here's some of the action figures that turned up when I did a Google search. I enjoyed the multiple Doctors.
There were the usual featurettes. Director Paddy Russell turns out to be a lady and she talks about her work on the show. She says the BBC still didn't allow a larger budget for the show, they funded it the same as any half hour drama. I liked the Then and Now featurette about the locations. I usually like those. I didn't listen to the commentaries on this one either. I have been busy and they take up a good chunk of time.
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