DOCTOR WHO
- THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES

Doctor Who - The Complete First Series
Actors: David Tennant, Billie Piper, Christopher Eccleston, Camille
Coduri, Noel Clarke
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Widescreen, NTSC
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Number of discs: 5
Run Time: 545 minutes
DVD Features:
- Available Subtitles:
English
- Available Audio
Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
- 13 episodes on five
discs
- Commentary on all
episodes by combinations of writer Russell T. Davies, producer Phil
Collinson, actors Simon Callow, Billie Piper, and John Barrowman, and
other cast and crew
- Interview with
Christopher Eccleston on BBC Breakfast
- Destroying the Lair
- Making Doctor Who with
Russell T. Davies
- Waking the Dead: Mark
Gatiss video diary
- Laying Ghosts: the
origin of the unquiet dead
- Deconstructing Big Ben
- On set with Billie
Piper
- Mike Tucker's Mocks of
Balloons
- Designing Doctor Who
- The Adventures of
Captain Jack
- "Doctor Who
Confidential" - 165-minute collection of featurettes on the new series
narrated by Simon Pegg
- Backstage at
Christmas: an exclusive look behind the scenes of Doctor Who Christmas
Invasion
- Storyboard of opening
trailer
- Launch trailers
Movie:
   
Disc:
   
The subtitle The First
Series is a bit of a misnomer for a TV show which
has been around since the 1960s. When they mean First Series they of
course mean in the latest 2003 revival.
Doctor Who
- in case
you're living outside the UK
- is a
long-running sci-fi BBC show about an eccentric and meddlesome time traveler
simply known as the Doctor. The Doctor (who looks human but isn't)
travels through time and space in a time machine that looks like a blue
telephone booth, called the TARDIS. (Yes, that's where
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure got their
idea from.) Unlike Bill and Ted's time machine, the Doctor's TARDIS is
much bigger on the inside than on the outside for some reason.
While it ran for ages on the
BBC, it seemed as if the show was doomed when a
feature-length attempt at making the show more palatable to an American
audience (and audiences accustomed to better special effects and sets than
the incredibly cheapo ones in the BBC show) flopped in the mid-1990s.
The Doctor (by now having
been played by something like eight actors!) seemed truly dead, but a loyal
and dedicated fan base kept things alive until the BBC recently decided to
revamp the show with a much bigger budget, improved CGI effects and a
rethink.
THE DISCS: A neat
fold-out five-disc box set containing all thirteen forty-minute episodes of
the Season. The fifth disc contains several short making of features, but
it is best that you watch the entire series before checking them out since
they do contain spoilers. Whilst these making of features are interesting
enough, one wishes that they were a bit more in-depth and maybe took a more
historical approach to the show - how does the interior of the current TARDIS compare to previous ones? What did all the previous Doctors look
like? And so forth. Still, this is a minor kibble.
WORTH IT? Those same Doctor Who
obsessives who actually kept the franchise will probably find something to
gripe about in this new series.
In the original series the good Doctor was a
renegade Time Lord, not the last member of his race. The idea of the Doctor
also possibly being attracted to one of his female companions (called
assistants) may freak those accustomed to the sexless Boy's Own world of
Doctor Who.
But fanatical fan boys will
always find something to gripe about
- after all, you even get the types who
believe that the new Battlestar
Galactica revival is somehow inferior to the original kitschy 1970s
show. And here their case is as unfounded as with
Battlestar Galatica: this new Doctor
Who is one of the freshest and best sci-fi TV shows doing the rounds.
The writing is consistently
clever and original, and the acting more than adequate. The effects and
sets are much approved and more in line with what modern audiences expect
nowadays. (Hey, did those die-hard fans really like those old cardboard
sets that much?) In fact, some of the episodes in this new series are
pretty darn good and deserves every SF prize or award thrown at them.
The only complaint is that
the incorrectly named Second Series (now being broadcast on BBC) features a
new and much younger Doctor, and that is as soon as one has grown to like
the old (or is that new?) Doctor played by Christopher Eccleston.
RECOMMENDATION:
Highly recommended. This is one of the best sci-fi shows doing the rounds.
Hard SF types should check it out.
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