Home
I'm sure somewhere (either on the Season 12 Bu-Ray set or the BFI screening of Genesis), Philip Hinchcliffe said something about how at one time he was toying with the idea of editing some of his stories for cinematic presentation and putting them on the big screen to see if they sold tickets.
I think Hinchcliffe even lamented that he didn't go with this idea as it might've worked and boosted the reputation of the show within the BBC so that the higher-ups would find it harder to justify penalizing the show or subjecting it to shoddy treatment and reduced budgets.
There are a few later Doctor Who stories that I could see working strongly on the big screen, like Stones of Blood, Destiny of the Daleks, City of Death, State of Decay, Earthshock, Enlightenment and Remembrance of the Daleks.
At the same time Tom Baker had his plan to do the Doctor Who Meets Scratchman movie, and Douglas Adams was trying to do the Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen movie.
Indeed if the show made the transition (slowly or quickly) to a cinema series, would that have been one potential escape route from the damage done by the interference of Mary Whitehouse and, later, Michael Grade? Would the franchise indeed have thrived better as a film series, able to keep its popularity and anticipation going for longer and do its bigger ideas and depict interstellar Dalek wars that could compete with what Star Wars was doing?
Could that have worked? Could it have saved the show from the Wilderness years and the state the show's in now? What would a 1970's Doctor Who movie series have looked like, and would the Hinchcliffe era have been the rightest time for it to happen?
Or would it have failed the same way the AARU Dalek movies did in the 1960s? Would it have just become like many British sitcoms that tried to do the big cinema film and it either ends up just a one-off before reverting to a TV show again (like Til Death Us Do Part), or fails to make its money back entirely (League of Gentlemen)?
I think Hinchcliffe even lamented that he didn't go with this idea as it might've worked and boosted the reputation of the show within the BBC so that the higher-ups would find it harder to justify penalizing the show or subjecting it to shoddy treatment and reduced budgets.
There are a few later Doctor Who stories that I could see working strongly on the big screen, like Stones of Blood, Destiny of the Daleks, City of Death, State of Decay, Earthshock, Enlightenment and Remembrance of the Daleks.
At the same time Tom Baker had his plan to do the Doctor Who Meets Scratchman movie, and Douglas Adams was trying to do the Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen movie.
Indeed if the show made the transition (slowly or quickly) to a cinema series, would that have been one potential escape route from the damage done by the interference of Mary Whitehouse and, later, Michael Grade? Would the franchise indeed have thrived better as a film series, able to keep its popularity and anticipation going for longer and do its bigger ideas and depict interstellar Dalek wars that could compete with what Star Wars was doing?
Could that have worked? Could it have saved the show from the Wilderness years and the state the show's in now? What would a 1970's Doctor Who movie series have looked like, and would the Hinchcliffe era have been the rightest time for it to happen?
Or would it have failed the same way the AARU Dalek movies did in the 1960s? Would it have just become like many British sitcoms that tried to do the big cinema film and it either ends up just a one-off before reverting to a TV show again (like Til Death Us Do Part), or fails to make its money back entirely (League of Gentlemen)?
