This is one of my absolute favourite third Doctor stories, I love the rubbish dinosaurs, the great cliffhanger with the spaceship, and the betrayal of Mike Yates was genuinely shocking the first time. Characters actually having arcs was so rare back in classic, Yates has probably the best one outside of the first Doctor himself. Him being manipulated by the bad guys makes sense as a consequence of what happened to him in Green Death, and then it pays off with his redemption in Spiders. Also the Brig ordering Benton to arrest himself makes me laugh every time.
Agree with your comment about four parts usually being enough. For a six-parter (or more) to work fully there needed to be a major shift in the narrative. Probably the best example of that is in the Fourth Doctor story 'The Seeds of Doom'. The Third Doctor story 'Inferno' also manages to pull that off by inserting with the parallel universe.
All Pertwee footage is now available in colour on iPlayer, due to a variety of colourisation techniques over the years, often postdating home video releases. This is why, for example, Planet of the Daleks Part 3 is in B&W on VHS, but colour on the later DVD.
It always made me laugh that for years this was written off by the fans due to the bad effects. I remember getting it on bootleg video back in the late 1980s and loving the hell out of it. Bad effects are part and parcel of the charm of old who - they shot for the moon with a spray painted washing up liquid bottle most of the time anyway!
This is why I'm always annoyed by people saying Doctor Who never used to be political or is going 'woke'. Maybe if these people were aware of all of Doctor Who because there's a lot of commentary in the classic series under all the camp and low budget.
this is unironically my favorite 3rd Doctor story, at least on my first viewing. I definitely fall into the "laugh about it" camp with the effects. I find the dinosaurs hilarious and iconic. I fully agree with how Sarah Smith was written, but I think this is one of the most rewarding stories for the UNIT squad. What might not come across if you grab this story out of sequence is just how far UNIT (the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton, etc) has come since the start of Pertwee's era. There is no Master, no alien threat that they have to merely ask the Doctor what to do and get their orders. The conspiracy has infiltrated the very military they are working with, and the way they can lean on each other, solve problems and avoid the pitfalls placed before them by working together, even without saying anything to each other, really shows that UNIT is a tight-knit family that trust each other now. It's a far cry from where they started, and it makes the betrayal of Yates much more gutting and personal than it would have been otherwise.
Episode is available in colour, but not fully in a palette. The can recover colour by decoding the artifacts the colour signal leaves on the black and white image. To be clear, this is not colourisation, it's colour recovery. In this case, episode one lacked the blue channel out of the RGB, meaning things blue heavy remained black and white/the wrong colour. They did hand colour some small parts of the image, for example the TARDIS. Because the results were less than satisfactory, they made it optional extra. As for the dinosaurs, they outsourced that work by people who assured them they could do a decent enough job for the budget, and by the time they found out it wasn't going to be good enough, they just had to go with it.
I love this story, it’s my favourite Pertwee story other than The Time Warrior. It’s just so charming, and the part 3 cliffhanger is an all time great. It’s also got Sarah using her journalism skills and organising a revolution, so it gets points for that compared to how she’s written sometimes in season 13
The jank is definitely something I find entertaining, and I love this story as a result. And it's also lovely seeing Sergeant Benton (one of my favourite Classic Who characters) getting a lot of amazing scenes; I still giggle everytime I see the one with his adorable dinosaur-coded map XD
I love this story so, so much! It was one of the stories our PBS station in Florida bought when I was 14, and I didn't realize on first watch that it wasn't all black-and-white, because I watched the first two episodes (they did 2/Saturday night) on a 6" black and white TV in my room with the antenna up. I do think the black and white for episode 1 helps set the atmosphere so much better. The bright orange T-Rex was a shock when I saw it in episode 3! I love the pterodactyl attack in episode 1 - the lack of color makes it harder to see the wires. But it's trying so hard, and it's evident in the final product. The story is fantastic - I'd seen some of Mike Yates before this one, so it was a gut punch to see him turn traitor - I only learned later that things in previous stories had made him susceptible to the Golden Age people. And I was happy to see him redeemed. This is also one of my favorite stories for the Brig. Last major "UNIT Family" story. Sarah Jane might have been mandated to be more upfront on paper, but blatant competence wasn't a feature for companions, sadly. It's part of why Liz Shaw was so amazing, and I was sad Caroline John only had 4 stories - she was clever, smart, and not a damsel. Sarah gets damseled more than she should, but Elisabeth Sladen's acting makes me forgive a lot of the bad writing for her character. She can sell it, and she knows her character so well. So did Katy Manning. Pertwee got 3 really strong companions, though Sarah's better with Tom Baker, IMO. I'm so glad you liked this, Vera, and took the jankiness in the spirit of its intent and fun, rather than marking it down for the dinosaurs.
The fact that the first episode was called simply Invasion is the reason the original colour version was scrapped as the people in the BBC archives thought it was the Patrick Troughton cyberman story The Invasion when they were junking the black and white episodes
Glad that you had fun with this one! I, too, enjoy it, it's a good mix of all the right elements of Classic Who. As for Sarah Jane, I don't exactly recall if she was "damseled" in Monster of Peladon (in fact I don't recall her being damseled here either so take that with a pinch of salt) but I feel like she was very active in that one. Maybe you will find that appearance of hers more to your taste!
Besides the janky as heck dinos, i remember this story was also the few stories that included the whomobile, which i feel was the major reason for the lower then usable dinosaur budget
The first episode was originally lost by the BBC but when it was recovered they decided to re-colour it so I believe the entire story is now available on DVD in colour
10:25 The difference is they didn’t feel called out when watching TV from decades past. When they watch TV _now_ , they realize they are being criticized and don’t like being told they’re the problem.
What do you mean? Why couldn’t a 1970s episode go missing the same way that many 1960s episodes did (which if I'm not mistaken is the BBC erasing them for tape space)?
All I’m gonna say. I love this story. Watched it for the first time in 2020 and was unbelievably surprised how no one talks about it. I just adored it. The atmosphere, the acting, the political nature of it and just the pure fun. The story I think is genuinely fantastic.
As a young kid in the 70s, my first sci-fi series were Doctor Who and Land of the Lost. There was lots of crossover in my headcanon. Also, yeah, I LOL when people talk about how Who used to be subtle back in the day. Instantly gets me wondering what classic Who they'd seen. Didn't the Rani have a dinosaur grow in her TARDIS as a form of sabotage? That was a riot! The recent trailers have me looking forward to more dinosaurs in the upcoming season
I read the target novelisation of this long before I sew it, it transfers to a story very well and I remember thinking gosh this sounds hard to film and indeed it is but I love any Sarah Jane Smith.
This story was 1 of 2 times in the Classic Era when the Makers were taken in by a designer/creator to use their creation in a story that proved to be,er,substandard...(The other was Kamelion in "The King's Demons in the 20th season)🎩
3rd Doctor is still a Classic Who blind spot of mine. This story I only know of by name/reputation. However I did recently hear the Big Finish 3rd Doctor Audio Novel, Scourge of the Cybermen. Which is (rightly) bleak. Also featuring Sarah Jane and her role within it is certainly more than a damsel in distress. Jon Culshaw also does a pretty good Pertwee.
The DVD special features never once mentioning Land of the Lost (which was being made at around the same time as this story) is one of the greatest mercies ever afforded to a classic Doctor Who story because I think everyone involved would have died of embarrassment since Land of the Lost’s budget was probably less than Pertwee era Who’s.
Oh, yeah, I always want to laugh when people say Doctor Who isn't political, or shouldn't be political. It always was. Especially Jon Pertwee's era. Have they never seen The Mutants? The Green Death? The Silurians, The Sea Devils, The Ambassadors of Death, The Curse of Peladon, The Monster of Peladon - environmentalism, sexism, racism, xenophobia, workers rights. Classic Who was woke as hell.
It's one thing for SJS or any compaion to get captured once when there snooping around, but i want to them try to escape. SJS can be crept up on by an alien, and she screams, hits them and run away.
Episode one has actually been passably colourised (with missing channel information). The main story of the treasonous utopian conspiracy is one of the best in the entire era and it would be a shame if the bad dinosaurs are enough to turn people off from that. This is I think one of the early signs of the writers realising that the key to success with a six parter is two connected stories running 2+4 or 4+2. Asterisk btw - Asterix is a cartoon Gaul.
My copy has the first episode in color, but it's obviously a colorized version of the B&W original, as the color quality is better in the later episodes. The dinosaurs are bad as you say. In Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography, she laments how bad they were for the cast to deal with. I love Sara Jane, but I do wish they would handle her role better, and they needed to pay more attention to her here! It's a good story with a solid message, great 3rd Doctor story!
It's kinda funny. Not so much in the TV show, but in the expanded universe, dinosaurs kinda become a running joke when UNIT is involved. (There's one story in particular I like. A dinosaur suddenly appears because of time stuff. After it gets fixed, & the Dino disappears, a new recruit is freaking out. One of the more seasoned soldiers chuckles & says, "Ah, you never forget your first dinosaur.")
It’s fun, but it’s also ludicrous. Captain Yates’ arc is also incredible, largely because for some reason he has an arc. The black & white suggestion is excellent - also can be applied to early Tim Burton films to great effect (not Pee Wee)
The sheer chutzpah of trying to do Jurassic Park 20 years too soon! And even with all of the Gumby-style dinosaurs, the story itself blew my mind. I just have a thing for time travel stories in this ridiculous time travel show. 😉
The funniest thing about the failure of the effects is that they apparently only did it because they got firm assurances that the person doing the dinosaur effects were able to make them look reasonable (by 1973 standards) on the budget (Though I forget what behind the scenes book or interview is the source of that one) The 6 parters that tend to work best for me in Classic Who are the ones that are structured as a four parter and a connected two parter, rather than written as a six parter. As for Sarah Jane... I think the character's enduring popularity is down to how well Elizabeth Sladen portrayed her, and how good her screen chemistry with both Pertwee and especially Baker I was. As you say, the writer's loved sidelining her either via having her kidnapped or - particularly in the Baker I period - hypnotizing her. Even in her final story for most of it she's possessed by the villain and chanting Eldrad Must Live. While dressed in perhaps the worst outfit any companion has ever worn.
It might have been one of the Howe-Stammers-Walker (or variant combination of the authors) books, because I remember that about the dinosaurs, too. Might be the Third Doctor Handbook or Doctor Who: The Seventies. Might also be Jon Pertwee's autobiography "I am the Doctor", or Nicholas Courtney's "Five Rounds Rapid!". Or it was in a DWM. I don't remember those as well as I do the books, because I reread them so many times in high school.
This is my go to episode for debunking fan claims like "Doctor Who didn't use to be woke!" or "the Canon is sacred and [current showrunner] has no respect for the shows history!"
I enjoyed Dinosaur Invasion when I first saw it in the early 1980s. Further, Doctor Who has been good "Woke" since Verity Lambert started it. Occasionally, it's been bad "Woke" too.
I encourage everyone to watch classic Who but only if you can tolerate child's plastic dinosaurs filmed on a miniature stage, superimposed shaking aluminum foil as a special effect, wanky non-moving alien faces, etc. Otherwise, don't bother. I have been watching DW since 1979 and to me the poor special effects are part of the charm. May the Doctor regenerate forever.
Yeah, 3rd Doctor was pretty woke before white people knew what that meant. Also before grifters obfuscated the meaning into some amorphous catch all for anything decent they want to rail against. Gotta love it for that alone. Kinda wish you'd seen this before Planet of Spiders though, as there is some subtle dialogue with Yates that should make more sense now, what with him having been discharged from UNIT.
For me the Dinosaurs themselves don't bother me too much. The main problem I have with this story is how they combine the supremacist stuff with Pro-Environment stuff for the villain motivation, especially when they did such a great job with Green Death. It makes me think they had some writers with conflicting views. Kind of like how they had Pro-Feminist moments and then they had stories like Time Monster where they were sort of mocking the lady scientist for her views.
The dinosaurs were the WORST effect this show has ever had. I usually absolutely ADORE the effects of Classic Who, they are so much fun, but I just couldn't get past this one.
And I thought I knew dr who, doctors two and three are the ones I have seen the least of. I saw the last season of the third dr up until doctor number 7 on PBS, but didn't know classic dr who did dinosaurs this much. And I kinda like low tech dr who, it's like low tech star trek. Funny enough, two science fiction shows that came out in the 60's and are still going strong, who would have thought that would be a thing. 👀 see you in 4 weeks. For both new star trek and new dr who. Together again, after all these years ❤😅❤
This is one of my absolute favourite third Doctor stories, I love the rubbish dinosaurs, the great cliffhanger with the spaceship, and the betrayal of Mike Yates was genuinely shocking the first time. Characters actually having arcs was so rare back in classic, Yates has probably the best one outside of the first Doctor himself. Him being manipulated by the bad guys makes sense as a consequence of what happened to him in Green Death, and then it pays off with his redemption in Spiders. Also the Brig ordering Benton to arrest himself makes me laugh every time.
Yates is not the only one with an arc, Benton also developed quite a bit, as did the Brig. Yates just had the most dramatic changes, I'd say.
Agree with your comment about four parts usually being enough. For a six-parter (or more) to work fully there needed to be a major shift in the narrative. Probably the best example of that is in the Fourth Doctor story 'The Seeds of Doom'. The Third Doctor story 'Inferno' also manages to pull that off by inserting with the parallel universe.
The actor who plays the villain general is the guy who played chang in the talons of weng-chiang......yeah...
I know him best for his guest role in Cadfael as the titular 'Leper of St. Giles'
All Pertwee footage is now available in colour on iPlayer, due to a variety of colourisation techniques over the years, often postdating home video releases. This is why, for example, Planet of the Daleks Part 3 is in B&W on VHS, but colour on the later DVD.
It always made me laugh that for years this was written off by the fans due to the bad effects. I remember getting it on bootleg video back in the late 1980s and loving the hell out of it. Bad effects are part and parcel of the charm of old who - they shot for the moon with a spray painted washing up liquid bottle most of the time anyway!
This is why I'm always annoyed by people saying Doctor Who never used to be political or is going 'woke'. Maybe if these people were aware of all of Doctor Who because there's a lot of commentary in the classic series under all the camp and low budget.
Exactly. Good story is paramount @@Tolstoy111
Just show those people The Green Death. Or The Sunmakers. Or Doctor Who and The Silurians. Or... yeah you get the point.
I think most of it comes down to not actually understanding what the word means, only that their masters have told them to hate it.
this is unironically my favorite 3rd Doctor story, at least on my first viewing. I definitely fall into the "laugh about it" camp with the effects. I find the dinosaurs hilarious and iconic.
I fully agree with how Sarah Smith was written, but I think this is one of the most rewarding stories for the UNIT squad.
What might not come across if you grab this story out of sequence is just how far UNIT (the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton, etc) has come since the start of Pertwee's era. There is no Master, no alien threat that they have to merely ask the Doctor what to do and get their orders. The conspiracy has infiltrated the very military they are working with, and the way they can lean on each other, solve problems and avoid the pitfalls placed before them by working together, even without saying anything to each other, really shows that UNIT is a tight-knit family that trust each other now. It's a far cry from where they started, and it makes the betrayal of Yates much more gutting and personal than it would have been otherwise.
Episode is available in colour, but not fully in a palette. The can recover colour by decoding the artifacts the colour signal leaves on the black and white image. To be clear, this is not colourisation, it's colour recovery. In this case, episode one lacked the blue channel out of the RGB, meaning things blue heavy remained black and white/the wrong colour. They did hand colour some small parts of the image, for example the TARDIS. Because the results were less than satisfactory, they made it optional extra.
As for the dinosaurs, they outsourced that work by people who assured them they could do a decent enough job for the budget, and by the time they found out it wasn't going to be good enough, they just had to go with it.
I love this story, it’s my favourite Pertwee story other than The Time Warrior. It’s just so charming, and the part 3 cliffhanger is an all time great. It’s also got Sarah using her journalism skills and organising a revolution, so it gets points for that compared to how she’s written sometimes in season 13
The jank is definitely something I find entertaining, and I love this story as a result. And it's also lovely seeing Sergeant Benton (one of my favourite Classic Who characters) getting a lot of amazing scenes; I still giggle everytime I see the one with his adorable dinosaur-coded map XD
Benton is the BEST!!!
@@citrinedragonfly Agreed! Such a lovely person!
And when he has to be "overpowered" by the Doctor
@@BulbasaurRepresent Such a classic scene!
I love this story so, so much! It was one of the stories our PBS station in Florida bought when I was 14, and I didn't realize on first watch that it wasn't all black-and-white, because I watched the first two episodes (they did 2/Saturday night) on a 6" black and white TV in my room with the antenna up. I do think the black and white for episode 1 helps set the atmosphere so much better. The bright orange T-Rex was a shock when I saw it in episode 3! I love the pterodactyl attack in episode 1 - the lack of color makes it harder to see the wires. But it's trying so hard, and it's evident in the final product. The story is fantastic - I'd seen some of Mike Yates before this one, so it was a gut punch to see him turn traitor - I only learned later that things in previous stories had made him susceptible to the Golden Age people. And I was happy to see him redeemed. This is also one of my favorite stories for the Brig. Last major "UNIT Family" story.
Sarah Jane might have been mandated to be more upfront on paper, but blatant competence wasn't a feature for companions, sadly. It's part of why Liz Shaw was so amazing, and I was sad Caroline John only had 4 stories - she was clever, smart, and not a damsel. Sarah gets damseled more than she should, but Elisabeth Sladen's acting makes me forgive a lot of the bad writing for her character. She can sell it, and she knows her character so well. So did Katy Manning. Pertwee got 3 really strong companions, though Sarah's better with Tom Baker, IMO.
I'm so glad you liked this, Vera, and took the jankiness in the spirit of its intent and fun, rather than marking it down for the dinosaurs.
The fact that the first episode was called simply Invasion is the reason the original colour version was scrapped as the people in the BBC archives thought it was the Patrick Troughton cyberman story The Invasion when they were junking the black and white episodes
Glad that you had fun with this one! I, too, enjoy it, it's a good mix of all the right elements of Classic Who.
As for Sarah Jane, I don't exactly recall if she was "damseled" in Monster of Peladon (in fact I don't recall her being damseled here either so take that with a pinch of salt) but I feel like she was very active in that one. Maybe you will find that appearance of hers more to your taste!
Dinosaurs! We haven't had dinosaurs in a while! They pop up intermittendly!
Besides the janky as heck dinos, i remember this story was also the few stories that included the whomobile, which i feel was the major reason for the lower then usable dinosaur budget
The first episode was originally lost by the BBC but when it was recovered they decided to re-colour it so I believe the entire story is now available on DVD in colour
I own the DVD of this serial and the first episode is colorized.
BBC IPlayer has the colourised version of Part 1 as well.
The episode was originally lost but once it was found they eventually got round to re-colouring it
@@lunaskies624 A similar situation happened with 'The Mind Of Evil'
10:25 The difference is they didn’t feel called out when watching TV from decades past.
When they watch TV _now_ , they realize they are being criticized and don’t like being told they’re the problem.
2:05 How did a 1970s episode go missing?
What do you mean? Why couldn’t a 1970s episode go missing the same way that many 1960s episodes did (which if I'm not mistaken is the BBC erasing them for tape space)?
All I’m gonna say. I love this story. Watched it for the first time in 2020 and was unbelievably surprised how no one talks about it.
I just adored it. The atmosphere, the acting, the political nature of it and just the pure fun. The story I think is genuinely fantastic.
As a young kid in the 70s, my first sci-fi series were Doctor Who and Land of the Lost. There was lots of crossover in my headcanon.
Also, yeah, I LOL when people talk about how Who used to be subtle back in the day. Instantly gets me wondering what classic Who they'd seen.
Didn't the Rani have a dinosaur grow in her TARDIS as a form of sabotage? That was a riot!
The recent trailers have me looking forward to more dinosaurs in the upcoming season
I love randomly finding out classic episode plots from Vera! 😂
I read the target novelisation of this long before I sew it, it transfers to a story very well and I remember thinking gosh this sounds hard to film and indeed it is but I love any Sarah Jane Smith.
This story was 1 of 2 times in the Classic Era when the Makers were taken in by a designer/creator to use their creation in a story that proved to be,er,substandard...(The other was Kamelion in "The King's Demons in the 20th season)🎩
This is one of my favourite Pertwee stories. Carnival of Monsters is top. Mind of Evil and this one are certainly my favourite Pertwee UNIT stories.
3rd Doctor is still a Classic Who blind spot of mine. This story I only know of by name/reputation. However I did recently hear the Big Finish 3rd Doctor Audio Novel, Scourge of the Cybermen. Which is (rightly) bleak. Also featuring Sarah Jane and her role within it is certainly more than a damsel in distress. Jon Culshaw also does a pretty good Pertwee.
The DVD special features never once mentioning Land of the Lost (which was being made at around the same time as this story) is one of the greatest mercies ever afforded to a classic Doctor Who story because I think everyone involved would have died of embarrassment since Land of the Lost’s budget was probably less than Pertwee era Who’s.
Would love to see you share your thoughts and memories on Sarah Jane Adventures :)
I think Vera would only review that if she was Patreon sponsored to review some episodes.
Oh, yeah, I always want to laugh when people say Doctor Who isn't political, or shouldn't be political. It always was. Especially Jon Pertwee's era. Have they never seen The Mutants? The Green Death? The Silurians, The Sea Devils, The Ambassadors of Death, The Curse of Peladon, The Monster of Peladon - environmentalism, sexism, racism, xenophobia, workers rights. Classic Who was woke as hell.
Sarah Jane is pretty good in Seeds of Doom I think.
That's also one of the Best paced 6-part stories in Tom Baker's era.
It's one thing for SJS or any compaion to get captured once when there snooping around, but i want to them try to escape.
SJS can be crept up on by an alien, and she screams, hits them and run away.
Episode one has actually been passably colourised (with missing channel information). The main story of the treasonous utopian conspiracy is one of the best in the entire era and it would be a shame if the bad dinosaurs are enough to turn people off from that. This is I think one of the early signs of the writers realising that the key to success with a six parter is two connected stories running 2+4 or 4+2.
Asterisk btw - Asterix is a cartoon Gaul.
The earlier 3rd Doc story The Green Death is much more on the nose on the environmental issues
And is a really rushed exit for Jo Grant (though her last scene with the 3rd Doctor is really well handled).
My copy has the first episode in color, but it's obviously a colorized version of the B&W original, as the color quality is better in the later episodes.
The dinosaurs are bad as you say. In Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography, she laments how bad they were for the cast to deal with.
I love Sara Jane, but I do wish they would handle her role better, and they needed to pay more attention to her here!
It's a good story with a solid message, great 3rd Doctor story!
It's kinda funny. Not so much in the TV show, but in the expanded universe, dinosaurs kinda become a running joke when UNIT is involved.
(There's one story in particular I like. A dinosaur suddenly appears because of time stuff. After it gets fixed, & the Dino disappears, a new recruit is freaking out. One of the more seasoned soldiers chuckles & says, "Ah, you never forget your first dinosaur.")
It’s fun, but it’s also ludicrous. Captain Yates’ arc is also incredible, largely because for some reason he has an arc.
The black & white suggestion is excellent - also can be applied to early Tim Burton films to great effect (not Pee Wee)
I wasnt bothered by the technical failures, but I do remember being disappointed in the way Sarah Jane was being written.
The sheer chutzpah of trying to do Jurassic Park 20 years too soon!
And even with all of the Gumby-style dinosaurs, the story itself blew my mind. I just have a thing for time travel stories in this ridiculous time travel show. 😉
The funniest thing about the failure of the effects is that they apparently only did it because they got firm assurances that the person doing the dinosaur effects were able to make them look reasonable (by 1973 standards) on the budget (Though I forget what behind the scenes book or interview is the source of that one)
The 6 parters that tend to work best for me in Classic Who are the ones that are structured as a four parter and a connected two parter, rather than written as a six parter.
As for Sarah Jane... I think the character's enduring popularity is down to how well Elizabeth Sladen portrayed her, and how good her screen chemistry with both Pertwee and especially Baker I was. As you say, the writer's loved sidelining her either via having her kidnapped or - particularly in the Baker I period - hypnotizing her. Even in her final story for most of it she's possessed by the villain and chanting Eldrad Must Live. While dressed in perhaps the worst outfit any companion has ever worn.
Aww, I thought her Andy Pandy suit was cute AF
It might have been one of the Howe-Stammers-Walker (or variant combination of the authors) books, because I remember that about the dinosaurs, too. Might be the Third Doctor Handbook or Doctor Who: The Seventies. Might also be Jon Pertwee's autobiography "I am the Doctor", or Nicholas Courtney's "Five Rounds Rapid!". Or it was in a DWM. I don't remember those as well as I do the books, because I reread them so many times in high school.
This is my go to episode for debunking fan claims like "Doctor Who didn't use to be woke!" or "the Canon is sacred and [current showrunner] has no respect for the shows history!"
They only even referenced the events of this story once in another story... even though everyone was kicked out of LONDON because of DINOSAURS!
This episode took place during Jackie Tyler’s lifetime. Do you think she ever told her daughter of the time dinosaurs showed up in London?
What do you mean the first episode is only available in black and white? I watched it on BBC iPlayer and it was all in colour
Apparently the iPlayer version has been colorized. Other platforms have the black and white.
Honestly this story is a fun one, mostly because of the jank being so janky to a beautifully camp degree, but the story is actually fairly sound too
Interesting that this was made before the whole dinosaur craze of the 80s and 90s.
I enjoyed Dinosaur Invasion when I first saw it in the early 1980s.
Further, Doctor Who has been good "Woke" since Verity Lambert started it. Occasionally, it's been bad "Woke" too.
Dinosaur for the dinosaur god!
Show us the jank!
I miss the classic jank...
Thanks Vera!
Invasion of the Clunky Model Dinosaurs.
There are no more lost colour stories and there haven't been for about a decade so you probably watched an older copy
Actually,there IS a colourised version of the first episode...but the colourists is not as good as in some other stories have been coloured 🎩
I encourage everyone to watch classic Who but only if you can tolerate child's plastic dinosaurs filmed on a miniature stage, superimposed shaking aluminum foil as a special effect, wanky non-moving alien faces, etc. Otherwise, don't bother. I have been watching DW since 1979 and to me the poor special effects are part of the charm. May the Doctor regenerate forever.
Yeah, 3rd Doctor was pretty woke before white people knew what that meant. Also before grifters obfuscated the meaning into some amorphous catch all for anything decent they want to rail against.
Gotta love it for that alone. Kinda wish you'd seen this before Planet of Spiders though, as there is some subtle dialogue with Yates that should make more sense now, what with him having been discharged from UNIT.
I like Invasion of the Dinosaurs
an interesting premise, mediocre execution (6 part syndrome, perhaps?), and of course awful effects
Huh, I thought I they re-colourised all the missing colour 3rd Doctor stories. Guess they didn't get to this one.
For me the Dinosaurs themselves don't bother me too much. The main problem I have with this story is how they combine the supremacist stuff with Pro-Environment stuff for the villain motivation, especially when they did such a great job with Green Death. It makes me think they had some writers with conflicting views. Kind of like how they had Pro-Feminist moments and then they had stories like Time Monster where they were sort of mocking the lady scientist for her views.
Eco-fascism is a thing, but that requires more nuance to discuss than most pop media has time to unpack.
The dinosaurs were the WORST effect this show has ever had. I usually absolutely ADORE the effects of Classic Who, they are so much fun, but I just couldn't get past this one.
The Third Doctor might look like an old Tory, but was progressive as hell!
And I thought I knew dr who, doctors two and three are the ones I have seen the least of. I saw the last season of the third dr up until doctor number 7 on PBS, but didn't know classic dr who did dinosaurs this much. And I kinda like low tech dr who, it's like low tech star trek. Funny enough, two science fiction shows that came out in the 60's and are still going strong, who would have thought that would be a thing. 👀 see you in 4 weeks. For both new star trek and new dr who. Together again, after all these years ❤😅❤