Here's a few images of wrappers from the Who Nestle chocolate bar promotion from 1971. There's not much info about these online - the images originally came from the Cuttings Archive, which has sadly vanished off the net.
I've also seen images of a purple coloured wrapper. There's a sort of "missing" Who story on the back - 'Doctor Who Fights Masterplan Q' - each wrapper with an image and paragraph of text, with 15 'episodes' to collect (shown are numbers 8, 12 and 15). It even features the Master, as seen on the third wrapper above. I haven't seen the details of this story anywhere.
Here's the display card from the box (can't remember where this came from, sorry). Notice how the artwork is obviously taken from the same promotional photographs as the Sugar Smacks promotion badges, here. The artwork here is good, with Pertwee's likeness being better than the one used on the actual wrappers.
These are obviously highly collectable, and rarely found for sale. I guess there's a few serious collectors out there who may have a complete set, or near complete. Wouldn't it be great to have all these online, or at least the text and images from the story. I know there's a few collectors on the Richard Who site who have wrappers - come on guys, get it together!
About time we did this one - the 1975 board game, War of the Daleks, produced by Strawberry Fayre.
War of the Daleks is a kind of sci-fi Space-Ludo with Daleks - the game involves moving card figures around a circular playing area aiming to get to the 'control center' whilst avoiding the Daleks. The Daleks themselves are faithful plastic renditions about three quarters of an inch tall, inserted into concentric slots cut into the board. When the pale blue control centre hub in the middle of the board is rotated, the card disc underpinning these concentric slots also rotate, causing the Daleks to move around the board and 'capture' hapless players.
If a player makes it to the central hub, they have a chance to destroy the control centre by lifting it up. Doing so reveals four panels one of which depicts the 'King Dalek'. If he's next to you he exterminates you and you start again!
The Daleks (four red & silver and four blue & gold) stand around 5cm high and have revolving domes.
And here's the TV advert - well, sort of. Here's the sound to the TV advert with reconstructed images. Yep, that's right, a reconstructed Who toy advert. Watch it on YouTube here (for some reason they've disabled embedding, so I can't show it here).
There's quite a few of these around, on ebay and the like, usually for between 50 to 100 quid, but there's one on ebay at the moment for 150!
Here's a Who promotion from 1971. Kellogg's 'Sugar Smacks' (sound nice and healthy hey) promoting third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, and the UNIT crew and "The timeless energy of Dr. Who" (which presumably comes from all the sugar). Free inside each pack of Sugar Smacks was one of six metal badges: the Third Doctor, The Master, Bessie, Joe Grant, the Brigadier & Unit Symbol.
The badges still pop up on ebay for reasonable prices, and the ceral box itself is highly sought after, although extremely rare. The image above shows the back, side and front of the box. The artwork is, what shall we say, dissapointing.
Pertwee was apparently very self-concious of the size of his nose, and you can imagine he must have been particularly happy with the artists rendition of him in the advert accompanying the promotion...
And the badge artwork is just as poor...
I'm missing a good pic of the Doctor and Unit logo badges.
Here's something I recently found which I hadn't seen before - scans of the complete series of promotional strips produced by Golden Wonder in 1986.
There are a total of six mini 'comics' that were released: 1 "Revelation", 2 "Fun House", 3 "War Game", 4 "Once Upon a Time Lord", 5 "The Shape Shifter" and 6 "Voyager-Dreams of Eternity". The comics themselves were colourised reprints of Doctor Who Magazine's comic strips from the time, featuring the Sixth Doctor and his shape shifting companion Frobisher (and minus Peri).
Here's the first TV advertising appearence for a Doctor Who associated commercial product - the 1967 Walls Sky Ray ice lollys... featuring, of course, the Daleks, and the Doctor (sort of!) and a very dodgy looking TARDIS control room.
Thanks again to Combom who picked this up in his blog last year. Now to you lucky yongsters who have grown up in this technological revolution called the internet, this might seam a bit tame. But to a Who fan growning up in the 1970s/80s, you honestly never imagined you would ever get to see this sort of stuff ever again.
No matter that the 'second Doctor' isn't in fact the Doctor at all (now there's a quiz question... name the actor?). It's presumably linked to the Daleks appearance in Troughton's first story, Power of the Daleks, broadcast in December 1966, as 'the Doctor' wears a similar hat in this story, and they even look like offical Beeb Daleks. Did you spot the recorder in is hands? Troughton wasn't really one for all this promotional stuff, and this is a rare example of merchandising during his reign.
The promotion was based around a set of 36 cards given away with Walls 'Sky Ray' ice lollys. The cards featured a somewhat long-haired doctor based on Patrick Troughton joining forces with the 'Sky Ray Space Raiders' to battle the Daleks. The cards were collected in an album, Dr Who's Space Adventure Book, which also included games and other features.
I got these images from the Cutting Archive, which has sadly dissapeared off the net - a great shame as it had so much Who info that I didn't get a chance to get to grips with. Anyway, as it's now gone, here are a few more images for those who are not lucky enough to own one of these. The artwork's not great, but that hardly matters - this is a classic bit of collectors Who!
And the cards themselves:
You can find odd cards for sale on ebay for a couple of pounds each, and I've seen mint sets go for £60. The album goes for between £50 and £100, depending on condition - usually with some, but not all the cards glued in - most prized would be without the the cards!
Now one thing I haven't found is an image of the wrapper for these lollys, other than that which appears in the ad, or the sales packaging/boxes. I guess the wrappers are rare and quite collectable.
Not to be confused with the 1970's Walls Dalek Death Ray lolly, which will no doubt pop up in a post soon...
In 1976 TyPhoo Tea ran one of the best Who promotional offers ever, featuring the work of the great Chris Achilleos on the boxes, 12 photographic collectors cards, and a supporting hardback annual style album called ´The Amazing World of Doctor Who´, with an outstanding cover, again produced by Achilleos. Apparently there´s a wallchart to go with this, although I have yet to find a photo of this. Just a shame the cards are photographs rather than original artwork, but hey, you can´t have everything (not that us power crazed megalomanics listen to such sweeping statements).
You can still pick up the cards for a reasonable price on ebay and the like, and the album is also occasionally found. However the promotional boxes themselves are probably the most sought after and few and far between, after all, who keeps old tea boxes?!
I used a picture of the album on my post about Chris´s work (here), and should again plug Chris´s website where you can order limited edition prints of the cover artwork, and a great Tom Baker portrait, again used in the promotion. You can visit his website here.
Unfortuantely we were a PG Tips family (probably my fault as I was also an addicted collector of the free collectors cards which appeared in these, so my poor mum probably had no choice but to buy PG!) and I have never had the disposable income to buy the stuff second hand since. But as soon as I win that lottery...
When I originally posted this I had lost the source of these images, which I have now rediscovered. Who collector Mike Hall has an excellent site called Dalek-mania which contains a wealth of information on all things Dalek and beyond, including original props. He has marked these images as his own copyright, which we respect, but wonder if the artist and manufacturer (and designer!) also have copyright claims. As the images are in the public domain, and refer to a once publicially available item, we think it´s OK to reproduce them here in this context. However, please respect this copyright if you copy these images for your own use by at least crediting Mike and his site.
More to the point, what's it all about? Me? Well no, not really. (OK, just a bit) But Who. Who? Doctor Who. What? No, not Doctor What, although he's here somewhere as well (or will be). Doctor Who, the typically British and uniquely odd BBC TV time-travelling series, which started way back in 1963 and is still going strong today. Blending the old and the new, aiming to bring you all the stuff you didn't know and even the stuff you didn't know you needed to know... and more! And me? A mad manic megalomaniac... with a dash of delusional paranoia, the ups and downs of a flip-flop, oh, and a constant headache...
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