Mar. 8th, 2008

gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (I think I have to lie down)
Argh, I woke up this morning and seem to have come down with some kind of sinus plague. And I thought I might make it through the whole winter without getting sick. D:

Originally plans for today were to go to [livejournal.com profile] lordtravis and [livejournal.com profile] teachingmusic's for their baby Liam's first birthday party, but revised plans are to lie in bed and attempt to not suffocate on my own mucus. D:

:O

Mar. 8th, 2008 02:35 pm
gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (What the hell?)
My older brother called me today with some interesting news.

That is, HOLY CRAP, MY THREE-YEARS-YOUNGER STEPBROTHER NICHOLAS IS HAVING A BABY

Both Nicholas and his girlfriend are gonna continue in school, though I'm not sure how that's gonna work (presumably someone's going to have to work to support them, I'd think). They're not getting married, as far as I know.

AUGH I'M TOO YOUNG TO BE AN UNCLE D:
gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (oh you public menace)
DOCTOR WHO MISSING EPISODE SOUNDTRACKS GET!

...Today I got several audio soundtracks to old Doctor Who episodes from Amazon.co.uk. If you're wondering why I'm so excited, these are soundtracks to some of the "missing episodes" - in the early 1970s, before the advent of consumer video, the BBC assumed it wouldn't ever really re-show its programs again and started wiping the master videos so they could reuse the videotape (in what's known as the "BBC Purge"). Doctor Who was one of the programs most affected, and a little under half of the episodes from the first six seasons of the show (1963-1969) just no longer exist. In the late 1970s the BBC realized what a mistake this was and stopped the purge (it probably helped that home VCRs were on the horizon, and so they realized there was marketability for old episodes), and they've been trying to find copies of the missing episodes ever since, mostly from other countries to whom they sent copies of these episodes to air. They recovered a decent amount (originally about 150 episodes were missing, now only 108 are), and new copies of episodes that had been sitting around in people's basements or that they'd bought in the British equivalent of garage sales are occasionally turning up; the only complete story in season 5 or 6, Tomb of the Cybermen, was found in Hong Kong in 1992, and an episode of the season 2 story The Crusade was found in, I think, 2004.

(Here's a link to more info on the missing episodes from Wikipedia, if anyone's interested. Interestingly, there's a possibility that more of these missing episodes may exist in the Zambian broadcasting archives; here's hoping they manage to raise the money to audit/preserve this, and hopefully find a few missing eps.)

HOWEVER, this still leaves us with a lot of episodes that are just gone. Fortunately, some young fans at the time used reel-to-reel audio recorders to record the soundtracks of these episodes when they first aired. It's a good thing they did, because now that the episodes themselves are gone this is the only way we can experience these older stories. They've been released on CD, so I now own audio recordings of six major missing serials; that's 37 episodes, of which exactly 4 survive in episodic form.

(The stories I got, in case any of you are at all wondering, are The Myth Makers, The Daleks' Master Plan [including its prequel episode Mission to the Unknown], The Massacre, The Highlanders, The Abominable Snowmen, and The Web of Fear; I also have The Evil of the Daleks coming, but it was on backorder and so had to be sent separately.)

Profile

gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (Default)
Eldrad must live

December 2012

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
910111213 1415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 06:41 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios