I do tend to run in more accepting Whovian circles.
I'd always taken all Who-dom at face value when I was originally watching in high school. I'm not sure if the discovery of internet fandom has really been good for me in that regard--not that I want to be a blind viewer, or anything, but digging too deep can make you too critical, which can take a lot of the fun out of it (which is why I stopped posting my own thoughts on Series 2 in my journal--it stopped being fun, which seemed counterproductive).
I do remember a Tom Baker blooper reel, one of which included the Doctor asking K-9 if he knew the answer to some question. K-9 said no, and Tom burst out with something like "Dammit, K-9, you never know the fucking answer when it's important!" After I got over the initial shock, I was quite amused. I could imagine working with a character like K-9 would have been trying at times.
New Earth was fun, I can't deny. I was just disappointed that it couldn't have been New Mars or New Venus or something. It's not so much that I think an individual story is unoriginal if it's set on Earth, it's that this fabulous machine is supposed to move through space as well as time, and we almost never ever see the space part. Even on the shoestring budget of the classic series, we were frequently on space stations, ships, other planets, whatever. I just don't think the budget should be THAT much of an issue in making that work--we don't need fancy aliens or sets. I think of something like "The Sunmakers," where there was one visibly non-human character and the only "alien" set you needed was two suns in the sky, or "Kinda"/"Snakedance" where you were on another planet but it mostly looked like earth, and so did the natives, and you had some funky dream sequences, but otherwise, didn't really need special effects at all. Certainly not anything on the scale of, say, "Tooth and Claw," which really had quite a bit of CGI even though we never left Earth.
I know modern audiences have modern expectations re: effects, but I guess my point is that the effects aren't the important part of the story--a good story may not even need them at all. I just feel like we're largely trapped on Earth, and have been itching to go somewhere else, where you'd have a different culture if not radically different creatures, and stretch the imagination through space as well as time. Earth just starts to feel old after a while when it's not balanced out with trips elsewhere. I mean, wouldn't you want to take a few trips to see what's outside the solar system when you weren't popping back to see ABBA at Wembley in 1979? :)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 10:42 pm (UTC)I'd always taken all Who-dom at face value when I was originally watching in high school. I'm not sure if the discovery of internet fandom has really been good for me in that regard--not that I want to be a blind viewer, or anything, but digging too deep can make you too critical, which can take a lot of the fun out of it (which is why I stopped posting my own thoughts on Series 2 in my journal--it stopped being fun, which seemed counterproductive).
I do remember a Tom Baker blooper reel, one of which included the Doctor asking K-9 if he knew the answer to some question. K-9 said no, and Tom burst out with something like "Dammit, K-9, you never know the fucking answer when it's important!" After I got over the initial shock, I was quite amused. I could imagine working with a character like K-9 would have been trying at times.
New Earth was fun, I can't deny. I was just disappointed that it couldn't have been New Mars or New Venus or something. It's not so much that I think an individual story is unoriginal if it's set on Earth, it's that this fabulous machine is supposed to move through space as well as time, and we almost never ever see the space part. Even on the shoestring budget of the classic series, we were frequently on space stations, ships, other planets, whatever. I just don't think the budget should be THAT much of an issue in making that work--we don't need fancy aliens or sets. I think of something like "The Sunmakers," where there was one visibly non-human character and the only "alien" set you needed was two suns in the sky, or "Kinda"/"Snakedance" where you were on another planet but it mostly looked like earth, and so did the natives, and you had some funky dream sequences, but otherwise, didn't really need special effects at all. Certainly not anything on the scale of, say, "Tooth and Claw," which really had quite a bit of CGI even though we never left Earth.
I know modern audiences have modern expectations re: effects, but I guess my point is that the effects aren't the important part of the story--a good story may not even need them at all. I just feel like we're largely trapped on Earth, and have been itching to go somewhere else, where you'd have a different culture if not radically different creatures, and stretch the imagination through space as well as time. Earth just starts to feel old after a while when it's not balanced out with trips elsewhere. I mean, wouldn't you want to take a few trips to see what's outside the solar system when you weren't popping back to see ABBA at Wembley in 1979? :)