Wednesday 11 January 2012

Monster rumours....

Towards the end of last year, Who producer Marcus Wilson revealed that a couple of classic Doctor Who monsters from the 60s and 70s are set to reappear in Series 7...

“We’ve got a couple of returning monsters, some old fan favourites, but we’re going to move them on a bit,” Wilson was quoted in Doctor Who Magazine. “‘That’s how they were done in the 60s or 70s. Here’s what we can do with them now.’

“Kids these days are really good at spotting bad CGI or prosthetics, so we can’t do anything substandard. One flick of the remote and you go from Doctor Who to Harry Potter. We’ve got to compete at that level, on a hundredth of the budget.”

Wilson also spoke about the Daleks multicoloured misstep: “I don’t think any of us would say that the multicoloured Daleks quite worked, but you’ve got to try new things. If you just repeat and repeat the show is in danger of stagnating.”

The early word is that one of them is in fact the Yeti... again.

This is not the first time the monsters have been rumoured to return. Back in 2010, a piece of Yeti artwork from concept artist Peter Mckinstry spread the net with many believing it to be for the Christmas special. But it turned out this was actually for the Doctor Who DVD Files magazine.


It's fair to say that a lot of traditional Who fans would welcome this, but, how exactly do your bring back the Yeti? Bring back the Great Intelligence, which controlled the Yeti robots, by all means, but the form of the Yeti was adopted for the particular setting of their first story, the Himalayas. A follow up story based in London was nicely fitted in (with a reactivated Yeti robot kicking it all off), but let's be honest, surely if the Great Intelligence was to return, it would shape a new form to do it's dirty work? All that time floating about in space with no physical form, you're bound to come up with something better than giant fluffy robots... surely? I like the idea of some crazed religious TV preacher in the States (you know, like Tom Cruse) getting possessed and becoming the GI figurehead... so I guess we could have an army of Sasquatch... or giant fluffy robots.

Other monsters often rumoured to return? Zygons? I'd love to see the Zygons done again, and they do make a nice change (of colour). And considering their success as a monster, and that they only appeared in one original TV series, they did quite well (I can still remember them being on the back of my (sadly thrown away) Wheetabix packet). I say bring back both... but please, get someone good to write the stories!

3 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I'd love Zygons too, but more likely, in my view, would be the return of the Ice Warriors... I just think there's so uch more potential with these guys in terms of theire development, and they are a fairly well established Who monster, appearing several times in the original TV seires (and matching the period quoted - 60's and 70's) as well as in various spin off media. But then it does also hint we might be looking at more than one type of monster returning, so lets hope for both!

      Delete
    2. Actually, I'm thinking that bringing back the Ice Warriors, or Yeti, would make a good Xmas special... so lets save them and have the Zygons for series 7!

      Delete