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Post by ianphillips on Sept 12, 2016 22:46:35 GMT
Most just check labels but I think the BBC did check their own content for content. In that case we could have missed multiple episodes during searches because they were mislabeled. For all we know the entirety of Marco Polo could be mislabeled in NZTV where the empty film can for episode 7 was found. Maybe all twelve episodes of Snowmen and Wheel were mislabeled in the very TV studio that Web and Enemy were found in. We would never know.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 12, 2016 22:16:22 GMT
Also a question about searching archives: When looking for tapes do people only read the label on the can or do they also look inside other film cans to see if anything is mislabeled?
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 12, 2016 21:54:47 GMT
Personally, I'd be surprised if it wasn't extremely unlikely at best, nonsense at worst, but as with the Yeti - Cinema rumour, you never really know for sure unless it was proven to be rubbish rather than just dismissed out of hand because it sounds so unlikely. Here is a quote from BroaDWcast on the topic: "In late 1992, it was reported in DWB (issues #105 and #107) that The Power of the Daleks had been shown in Ghana in 1986, but that the Ghana TV film library had been destroyed in a fire in 1989. Although the report of the screening of that serial was later revealed to have been a hoax (the perpetrators had chosen Ghana as it was the most obscure place they could think of!), the fire that destroyed the film library was an actual event."
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 12, 2016 19:55:50 GMT
I thought I'd remembered a story about Power supposedly being broadcast in Africa in 1986 and then lost in an archive fire. Anyway, here it is for a bit of light relief / morbid interest, cut & pasted from www.mevagissey.net/Missing.htm . "One such rumor was that "Power of the Daleks" was reportedly seen in Ghana in 1986, but sadly when contacted years later, the television station informed the inquiring party that their entire television archive had burned to the ground in 1988". I'm almost certain that particular rumor was confirmed to be a hoax.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 11, 2016 21:11:06 GMT
I think MaxB is on the same wavelength as me. Power ticked a lot of boxes to be animated. And as you say, the big problem with animating any Troughton story is dear old Patrick himself. He was a truly great but underrated actor. He could say so much with subtle facial expressions and body movements. My recollection of his early stories was that he appeared to almost be overacting at times. As he matured into the role his performance changed. This is why any animations are most welcome but the actual broadcast episodes tell the true story. I sincerely hope more animations follow. But it won't be Savages, Highlanders or Fury. I don't know about Fury. That would have been one of the ones I would put as most likely to be animated. I do, however agree about the Savages and the Highlanders not getting animated and would add The Space Pirates and the Smugglers. In fact I don't think that any of the historicals with the possible exceptions of The Crusade and maybe Marco Polo (to complete their respective seasons (also the fact that the Crusade is only missing two episodes)) would get animated. We also probably won't get the Underwater Menace due to the DVD release, or Web of Fear (hopefully we won't need one for it soon). Mission would get animated if Master Plan was, but Master Plan probably won't due to its length (Also Mission is already animated). I don't know why, but I think that the Celestial Toymaker actually has a good chance of being animated (possibly due to the fact that the sets were very small and non-detailed so they would not be super expensive to produce as an animation). There are three that I'm not sure about and they are Galaxy 4, The Faceless Ones, and The Abominable Snowmen. That leaves The Macra Terror, Evil of the Daleks, Fury from the Deep, The Wheel in Space, The Celestial Toymaker, and The Crusade as the episodes that I think will get animated. So in conclusion: Getting animated: The Crusade, The Celestial Toymaker, The Macra Terror, The Evil of the Daleks, Fury from the Deep, and The Wheel in Space. Not getting animated: Marco Polo, Galaxy 4, Mission to the Unknown, the Myth Makers, The Daleks' Master Plan, The Massacre, The Savages, The Smugglers, The Highlanders, The Underwater Menace, The Web of Fear, and The Space Pirates. Possibly getting animated: The Faceless Ones and The Abominable Snowmen. But that's just my opinion, I hope that they all get animated.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 11, 2016 13:44:12 GMT
I think that Max B makes a very good case for not getting carried away though I appreciate that we are all using educated guesswork and only Time will tell :-) And I'm also hoping that Philip Morris pulls a few rabbits out of the hat (or dump site) so that we don't have to make do with animated versions. Part of me would just as happily reread the novelisation of Power (which is one of the best) than watch an animated interpretation. You simply cannot reproduce Patrick Troughton with a cartoon character. I shall still buy the product but .... That's exactly the reason why I think it is more important to find the Trughtons than the Hartnells. It's all action vs. dialogue. A lot of Troughton's humor came from his movements and expressions while almost all of Hartnell's humor was based around what he said which means that his stuff would still be funny with an animation while Troughton's would not. It would be like watching a Tom Baker episode where you could never see him crack his big toothy grin. In fact, the Hartnell episodes as a whole tend to work much better as reconstructions than the Troughtons with a only few exceptions like the Macra Terror and the Celestial Toymaker. It's why we can still fully enjoy the Massacre while getting bored by the Highlanders for the exact reason that the Highlanders had much more action in it. When I first watched the Macra Terror reconstruction and saw the 8 mm clip where the Doctor jokingly says "Whoever wrote that ought to be sent to the danger gang, not us." And then starts laughing was what really made me realize how much weaker an animated version of Troughton would be.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 10, 2016 20:08:30 GMT
By the way, the reason that I chose Fury for this theory is because it was the only gap in an otherwise consecutive shipment of episodes to Nigeria so when Singapore was told to ship Enemy, Web, Snowmen, and Wheel they could easily have grabbed every episode from Snowmen 1 to Wheel 6 never realizing that they weren't supposed to send Fury with the other 4, or maybe they did notice that Fury wasn't included and thought it had been left off of the list by mistake. As many people have said over the years, communication was really, really bad on the bicycling chains so something like this happening isn't that far fetched.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 10, 2016 20:01:22 GMT
Anyone remember the dusty reaction in some quarters when I suggested a concise animation for Faceless Ones and Wheel to keep the costs down to meet the 2 X 20 min episode requirements? The consensus was that it couldn't / wouldn't happen. Then along came Air Lock & the subsequent Galaxy 4 animation. My point is circumstances change and I guess we should be grateful they do. I still have high hopes that, barring any further recoveries, Wheel in particular would be a good option for this sort of reconstruction because of the spacing of the surviving episodes. Let's hope that Power is a raging success and generates plenty of new interest to make this sort of project viable. Galaxy 4 was just a reconstruction, not an animation. They did animate the chumblies though and I think that is what he's referring too.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 10, 2016 12:04:17 GMT
This is probably a stupid question, but it's one that has bothered me for a while. All film frames can be translated into pixels and pixels are dots of color, so why doesn't anyone recreate missing frames? Sure it would take a lot of time, skill, and hard work, but a determined fan could do it. If I printed out a telesnap of any episode and gave it to you and told you to recreate it perfectly on gimp or photoshop or whatever then you would probably be able to do it. What is the difference between making that and creating a frame from scratch? So my question is, why haven't any fans ever recreated a single frame of a missing episode ever?
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 10, 2016 11:50:33 GMT
Was the Yeti story reportedly shown in the cinema in Nigeria Snowmen or Web? Phil M mentioned it at Starburst, but he didn't say which story (unless I wasn't paying attention) I would assume Snowmen. They have no way of knowing though. It was a few decades ago so besides "Yeti" the guy may not have known what it was. From what was said at Starburst he doesn't seem to know what happened to Snowmen, quite the mystery. Assuming it was Snowmen that played, could it still be at the cinema?
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 9, 2016 19:09:46 GMT
People are reading far too much into the commission of the animation!!! Re Peter Purves & The Massacre ... Steve Roberts made a good point about how the omnirumour gains credibility via Chinese Whispers. He gave the example of how, at a convention, someone may say to Deborah Watling "I've heard that one of your episodes has been found." So she'll say to someone else "I've heard that one of my episodes has been found" ... and suddenly it is seen to come from a credible source. As I've said before, the only thing we can read into it is that they don't have it back yet. That's immensely different from saying it's been verified as no longer existing as some seem to think. As for The Massacre, it is true... that there was a rumour. When it's something not too nice like that one though, it's a bit easier to give it a bit more consideration of "what if". The worst case is that it actually does turn out to be true. It's a bit ironic when you think about it considering that many more of the good rumors have turned out to be true than the bad rumors.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 9, 2016 18:22:23 GMT
So with all of the talk of the Power of the Daleks animation, many people are considering what will be animated next. I was thinking about that and I mentioned on another thread how I doubted they would do The Abominable Snowmen or The Wheel in Space (at least initially) because both episodes had been sent to Nigeria with Enemy and Web and thus stand a good chance of still existing. If we did find both of those serials complete and Phil Morris recovers Web three then the only missing episode from season 5 (Barring the two Ice Warrior episodes) would be Fury from the Deep. It's known that Nigeria never bought Fury from the Deep because of complications with New Zealand, but Snowmen, Enemy, Web, Fury, and Wheel were all in Singapore. Could it be possible that Singapore accidentally included Fury in the shipment and sent it to Singapore? Then, realizing their mistake too late, Singapore took the nearest empty cans, labelled them Fury from the Deep and put a random film inside to cover their tracks, hoping that the BBC wouldn't look inside when they got them back. It evidently worked and no one from the BBC looked inside the cans to ensure that Fury really was in there and sent them straight to the junkings. But they didn't get away totally clean as a BBC employee rescued four episodes of the Ice Warriors and one of the cans for Fury from the Deep and stashed them in the Villiers' House for ten years before someone cleaned it out and found the cans.
I know that I totally made up this scenario, but it could have happened and it would explain the mystery of the Fury 6 film can. What do you all think is the actual likelihood of this happening?
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 9, 2016 17:19:48 GMT
I'd suspect Evil is the obvious candidate. Certainly off fan interest it is up there. DWM has it second top in the unanimated stories now Power is gone (I think we can assume Web isn't being touched). Once you look past that it gets interesting. I'm thinking the monster series would be an interesting project on a slightly bigger scale, particularly if Web 3 comes back. As a broadcaster it seems like the obvious publicity magnet for Doctor Who fans. I agree that Evil would probably be the next animation. I'm not sure what would come next after that, but I think it would be from season 4 (Faceless Ones or Macra Terror). They wouldn't choose the Space Pirates, and I think the BBC would leave season 5 alone, at least for a while. With the recovery of Web and Enemy it is entirely possible that Wheel and Snowmen could show up, and even Fury if Singapore accidentally shipped it with the other four (You know because it was right in between Web and Wheel so they may have just stuck it in the shipment not realizing they didn't need to).
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 9, 2016 11:43:15 GMT
According to Gallifreybase, the 4 film cans of The Ice Warriors, and the empty (blast the luck) film can of Fury from the Deep 6 may have been returns from Singapore... So, in that case, RTS may well have returned all their non-bicycled films to the BBC, and that could well be some sort of evidence that the last known copy of The Power of the Daleks was indeed returned to the UK and... destroyed. I'm still holding out hope that at some point Fury 6 got put in the wrong can and something else got put in the Fury from the Deep can which was then sent to the BBC which would mean that Fury 6 could still be sitting in the Singapore archives in a mislabeled can. I suppose it's possible that they threw out the film and just reused the can, but I don't think they would have done that as (I think) only New Zealand and Australia ever junked episodes themselves. All other countries just sent their prints back to the BBC. Singapore may not have even known that the BBC intended to destroy them upon return and that they didn't have some other use for the films when they were returned.
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Post by ianphillips on Sept 9, 2016 0:41:36 GMT
So the upcoming Power animation is coming and looking like it will be a commercial success. So what next? Animations of Evil? Masterplan? Possible but in truth unlikely. Power had strong reasons to exist in some visual form because:- 1.the first regeneration 2. A Dalek story 3. It plugs a hole in the continuing Story of Doctor Who. It is unique for those reasons. Now it will be possible to make programmes telling a "full" story of the programme. So what next? What other missing stories make them vital to the story? Sadly none. Marco would complete series 1 but in hard commercial reality that probably won't be enough. Evil is an exciting Dalek story that temporarily marked an end to the metallic monsters. This may be a possibility. Masterplan is another Dalek story but at 12 + 1 episodes would be a huge challenge. Above and beyond that I would not be overly optimistic. But then the world of Doctor Who is a strange old thing. I personally expect the unexpected and just keep wishing... You're forgetting one thing. Companions. There are many missing episodes that include companion entrances or departures and I think those are very important to the show's story. The Myth Makers, Masterplan, The Massacre, The Savages, The Highlanders, The Faceless Ones, Evil of the Daleks, The Web of Fear, Fury from the Deep, and the Wheel in Space all include companions entrances and/or departures. That would leave only eight stories unreleased, nine if you count Menace.
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