Daleks in Technicolour!
It was officially the first day of the school holidays today, and Jem was in daycare, so Raeli and I walked up the hill to Godiyeva's place to share a double matinee of Daleks with her three boys. I haven't really watched the Peter Cushing movies since I was a kid, but it was less than $10 for both of them together on Fishpond (billed just as Dr Who and the Daleks if you're looking, and yes they actually spelled Dr that way).
I was hoping the movies would appeal to the kids, as I don't have any hope of getting Raeli to pay attention to any black and white Who any time soon (though she loves Jon Pertwee). It worked far better than I expected! The kids were riveted to Dr Who and the Daleks – and I don't blame them. Damn, but that movie holds up. Once you get over the fact that it's set in a parallel universe where a human professor who calls himself Dr Who has two granddaughters named Barbara and Susan, etc (and the kids adored picking the differences between TV Who and Movie Who, listening to them analyse the whole thing was pure gold) it is a splendid way to spend lazy day.
I remember hating little girl Susan (Roberta Tovey) when I was younger, but I liked her a lot viewing the movie as an adult, and a mother of a six-year-old. Susan is plucky and cool, she uses her brain constantly, and her Grandfather treats her as a peer in science rather than a child, which is very sweet. The scene in which she is sent from the city to return to "TARDIS" herself through the petrified jungle is very compelling, and we all liked how brave she was. Barbara isn't too bad either, despite the trailer describing her as 'Dr Who's frightened granddaughter', her pink slacks and her astoundingly high hair. Sure, she has a boyfriend and isn't quite as heroic as her much younger sister, her role mostly being to kiss Roy Castle and look scared, but she is also spotted reading a science book early on, and has several semi-hero moments throughout the story.
Roy Castle as Ian was brilliant – he's very likeable, and the kids adored his bumbling slapstick acting, all the bumping into things and causing disasters, while the adults sipped their tea and noted the various times that Ian is blamed for some calamity that wasn't actually his fault. His transition from nervous boyfriend dragged into the family shed and whisked off for an adventure by accident all the way through to jungle adventurer and soldier is quite entertaining, and even if he and Jennie Linden have a fraction of the chemistry of the real Ian and Barbara, they still make a good team.
There's a domesticity to this TARDIS team which is completely different to their TV selves, but I'm okay with that – this works well for a film, and certainly made it very appealing to the kids. Family friendly indeed! If you're going to replace the actors, as was necessary for many reasons, much better to overhaul the characters from scratch rather than create some pale versions of the originals. Peter Cushing's Doctor is sweet and bumbling, and the whole adventure is about as scary as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (in fact, Wonka might be a bit scarier in places) but I was quite okay with that.
The TARDIS design is fabulous, and you can see why the modern production team have stolen so many elements of Cushing's TARDIS – namely the size, the feeling of it being a scientist's shed, the outline of the windows in the door being visible from inside (the white inner doors comes from the second movie) and the put-together-by-a-crazy-person artistry of the console and surrounding giant computers.
I love the giant computers in this movie. They should mate withe Graeme Garden's computer from The Goodies and have babies. Laptop babies.
The absolute star of the film is the Daleks – not just their gloriously colourful selves, but the fact that they have so much more personality than in the TV show, and their world makes more sense. I was amazed by the design of the Dalek city, and the thought that had gone into Dalek architecture (though Godiyeva and I amused ourselves for sometime imagining what the Dalek version of Grand Designs would be like). Eyestalks on the walls as cc-tv were particularly brilliant, as were the spiky sculptures, the lifts without doors, and of course the smooth surfaces which end suddenly on cliff faces all around.
While I've always been attached to the Dalek design, etc., I've never been particularly interested in them as characters – the comic strips that were all Daleks, no people, for instance, bored me senseless. I was surprised at how strongly I enjoyed watching them in this story, possibly because it is the beginning of the history, when they're at their most intriguing, but I have to say I think it was largely because they looked so cool.
The colour also makes a difference – the kids loved the fact that they could tell the Daleks apart, and the scenes which are just Dalek talking to each other were surprisingly animated. We were also fascinated to see how the designs had changed – there were no sink plungers here, but elongated claw arms. The scene in which a Dalek actually frisks Peter Cushing was highly amusing! The guns were also interesting – mostly using 'gas' ie smoke machines, because of course it was a cheap but effective special effect to use, but the gas ranged from something that paralysed humans to something that was capable of blowing things up. Then there was the Welding Dalek with his flamethrower gun, capable of cutting through walls. Did they pitch that one as merchandise?
Speaking of merchandising, we came up with all kinds of merchandise concepts while watching this. I wondered aloud why no one has ever done graphic novels of Classic Who – it would be a great way of making those stories accessible to a new generation in a way that audios and even the existing filmed episodes can't quite manage it. We also want security cameras attached to eyestalks, please.
Oh, and the Dalek control room? Had lava lamps. Yes, really.
I don't know if the film would have been quite so enjoyable if not for the four children (aged between three and eight) loving the hell out of it, but I was quite buoyed by the whole experience, not least because they spent the lunch break afterwards all pretending to be Daleks, in a highly entertaining fashion.
Because yeah, there's the other thing. They sympathised deeply with the Daleks, especially towards the end where the humans turned on them. They were disappointed when their favourites got killed, and very mournful when the whole lot of them were wiped out.
We'll always have Skaro.
The second movie, Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 (sponsored by Sugar Puffs! with gratuitous product placement in post-apocalyptic England) was not quite as well received by the kids, which goes to show that they are indistinguishable from 1960′s cinema audiences. I can see why, for many reasons. The story is grittier, and just plain less fun. Susan and the Dr are as good as ever, though separated for most of the film. Susan is again allowed to be very clever, while her Grandfather bumbles around on dumb luck. "Niece" Louise, the Barbara substitute, is given absolutely nothing to do (I suspect casting her was similar to the logic behind casting the underwear model in the recent Transformers film – Jill Curzon's primary role seems to have been to take lots of bikini pics with Daleks to promote the movie) though she does wear an intriguing jacket that's very steampunk by way of Mary Quant. That's basically it.
Bernard Cribbins, playing PC Tom Campbell (though we mostly called him Bernard, and Wilf) is by far the most appealing character in the movie. Like Roy Castle, his physical humour was much appreciated by the kids, and is pretty much an oasis in an otherwise humourless film. The scene in which he is pretending to be a Roboman (twelve years between 'a little short for a stormtrooper,' please note!) by eating with them but constantly falling out of sync was hilarious. I also really enjoyed the early scene which was basically him and Peter Cushing exploring a warehouse – it's a shame that the plot structure, taken as it it straight from the TV story, meant that he was mostly separated from the rest of the regular cast, without actually getting a chance to forge a relationship with any of them. The set up from the first movie with its pre-set relationship dynamic worked better in this regard.
If the Dalek architecture was the star of the first film, the star of 2150 AD was the gorgeous model work, especially the spaceship/flying saucer which is regularly seen soaring over London. It's just beautiful, and the final scenes in which it was destroyed put almost as much of a lump in my throat as the destruction of the original Enterprise. I wish they still used real model work in TV these days. CGI is amazing, but there's something about good models that feels more real.
The whole film in fact looks great, including the spaceship interiors, the grim remains of a post-invasion London, and the mine at Bedfordshire, even if it's stretching credibility that this film is set twenty years in the future of the 1960′s, let alone two hundred years.
And basically the whole thing is entirely worth it for the scene in which Philip Madoc in his trenchcoat is set upon by a horde of lavender Daleks. With a shed.
So yes, if you're prepared to click your heels and say "I don't care about canon, I don't care about canon," these movies make the perfect popcorn matinees for family viewing – and are a good introduction for small fans into the wonderful world of "look what they did there."
We struggled to get through the Dalekmania documentary that came with the movies – largely because the kids were so over the DVD by this point and busily setting off every remote control Doctor Who creature in the house (quite a lot, as it happens), staging an epic battle between K9 and a Gold Dalek, and generally creating a lot of noise. My favourite bit though was the interview with the actors who played Alydon and Dioni, the gilded and heavily mascara'd Thals from the first movie. Their sense of humour and memories of that time were great fun, and the anecdote about all the manly muscle men getting paid extra to shave their chests and arms (damages!) is worth listening to in the actor's own highly amused voice.
There's bonus footage of Terry Nation, too, with a gratuitous bookshelf of goodies behind him (whoa Terry, you had a LOT of copies of that book about Avon) and while I'm a little cynical about him at times, I did like hearing how hard he worked to protect the image of the Daleks from being figures of fun. Not sure how successful he was, but the fact that it meant so much to him was very sweet.
