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WATCH ALONG | CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO | 11x10 | Invasion of the Dinosaurs: Part 6
🕑 Added 2024-09-20 20:26:45 +0000 UTCA Few Notes:
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Comments
Steven Cooper
Growing up in Australia in the 1970s and early 80s, Doctor Who was a constant early-evening presence on the ABC network in reruns on weekdays -- long before we got our first video recorder, I'd seen the Pertwee-era stories multiple times. But this story was always missing from the sequence, and I never got to see it until much later. When the BBC sold the Season 11 stories to foreign TV stations in 1975, "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" was not included, apparently due to corporate embarrassment at how badly the dinosaur effects had turned out. Unlike most of the show's effects, they were not done in-house at the BBC, but were farmed out to an external company -- whose delivered results didn't quite live up to the sales pitch. (Oddly enough, the company in question went out of business shortly afterwards...) I think the BBC overreacted -- sure, the T-Rex is atrociously bad, and the tiny pterodactyl is ridiculous, but the others are mostly acceptable for the time, particularly since the dinosaurs themselves are only a minor part of the story. Regarding Mike Yates, Malcolm Hulke's novelisation of the story does a much better job of making it clear how, following his brainwashing experience in "The Green Death", he was placed on extended leave to recover. Finding himself at a loose end, he wandered into a meeting of Charles Grover's "Save Planet Earth" society, and gradually became sympathethic to their expressed ideals. On television, there's just a fleeting reference in Part Two to "that business with the giant maggots in Wales" before Yates is revealed to be part of the conspiracy -- and since the Doctor and the Brigadier don't learn the truth until Part Six, he never has a chance to explain himself. It was very unusual for any show of the time, let alone Doctor Who, to create such a character arc for one of its long-running regulars, but I just wish the handling of it had been a little more in-depth.
