On September 14th, the lost classic Doctor Who serial Fury from the Deep will be commercially released as a full colour animation using the surviving audio soundtrack. Fury from the Deep will be the latest in a growing number of missing Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s, which were deleted by the BBC, to receive the animation treatment. As with recent releases, the story will be made available as both a black-and-white and a full colour HD animation, with a host of special features. 

Margot Hayhoe was an Assistant Floor Manager on Fury from the Deep

But why are some Doctor Who adventures from the 1960s missing from the archives today? 50 years ago, television was a very different industry to the one it is today. Television programmes were viewed similarly to theatre productions that were broadcast once and then were never seen again. The long-term commercial potential of old programmes was not realised in the pre-internet age. It would have been impossible for broadcasters to store and archive the amassed, expensive videotapes of all of their previous television productions in any physical space, as they would have needed somewhere the size of the Royal Albert Hall.

And so, after being copied on 16mm black-and-white film recordings and sold abroad  (and thanks to this, many lost episodes have been found over the decades since), videotapes were often wiped and reused to make new shows. This resulted in the deletion of tens of thousands of BBC and other British broadcaster programmes, including episodes of Morecambe & Wise, Dad’s Army and Hancock’s Half Hour, the BBC’s own copies of the moon landings and some Beatles concerts. Unfortunately, Doctor Who was one of the heaviest casualties of the purge. Today, there are sadly 97 episodes of 1960s Doctor Who (starring William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) still missing from the BBC archives. A very sorry state indeed. Unfortunately, this is the case for many other children’s TV programmes from the 1960s.

The deletions also affected the Jon Pertwee era of the 1970s, meaning that some Doctor Who adventures with the Third Doctor were only available in black-and-white for decades. But thanks to the Chroma Dot colour recovery method, fans can now go back and watch the entirety of the restored Pertwee era remastered in colour, the way it was originally broadcast back in the early 1970s. This is also the case for some classic episodes of Dad’s Army etc.

It will therefore take a significant amount of time before all of the missing episodes of 1960s Doctor Who are recreated using animation (married to the surviving audio soundtracks), even at the current rate. The BBC had been releasing animated reconstructions of partially missing 1960s Doctor Who serials on DVD on-and-off since the release of The Invasion in 2006, with animation used to plug the gaps of say two missing episodes in a six-part story, like The Reign of Terror or The Ice Warriors. Other classic shows with missing episodes have also successfully employed the animation technique to bring some of their adventures back to life. For example, the missing Dad’s Army episode A Stripe for Frazer which was animated in 2016. The other missing episodes of Dad’s Army were later animated in 2023.

But everything changed in 2016, when the BBC dropped a trailer for a full colour animation of the entirety of the six-part missing serial The Power of the Daleks. Since then, the BBC have been releasing full colour and black & white animations of entire missing stories, animating even the one or two surviving orphaned episodes from several adventures, such as The Faceless Ones. In recent years, the production of these releases has gone into overdrive. This is because animation has gradually become more affordable for the classic Doctor Who DVD range producers. But despite the wait, the appetite for new iterations of missing classic Doctor Who episodes persists. At a 2023 Doctor Who convention in Aldbourne (where The Dæmons was filmed), a middle aged couple very kindly said that I should give a lecture on the missing 1960s Doctor Who episodes because they thought that I was really good at talking to Michael Troughton etc about the missing episodes and about his dad, Patrick Troughton. They said that I was knowledgeable and articulate on this subject.

Another reason why it is crucial to find the missing 1960s Doctor Who episodes is because it allows those stories to have a huge reappraisal now that fans can actually watch them (again)! The Enemy of the World is the best example of this. This story saw a spike in popularity shortly after its recovery in 2013 and it leapt in Doctor Who Magazine polls.

Fans can now appreciate The Enemy of the World (a James Bond-esque spy thriller showcasing character actor Patrick Troughton at his best) for what it is: a bona fide Doctor Who classic. The 2013 iTunes (that is now called Apple TV) release of the recovered and restored stories The Enemy of the World (1967-8) and The Web of Fear (1968). outsold the final season of AMC’s acclaimed drama Breaking Bad, proving that an audience for 1960s Doctor Who adventures still exists today. Upon learning the news of the recovery of The Web of Fear in 2013, my immediate reaction was so joyful that it prompted my then girlfriend to warn me that I “had better be this happy when our first child is born”. I also ran around my university halls of residence whooping and jumping with joy at night! Below I have calculated how long it will take for all of the missing Doctor Who serials to be animated, based on the current rate.  

Predicted Doctor Who Animation Release Schedule based on Current Rate of up to 12 Missing Episodes (or 2 stories) Animated Per Year (note: I will update this as releases are timetabled):

2020

• 4 – The Faceless Ones (6)
• 4 – The Power of the Daleks (Special Edition) (6)
• 5 – Fury from the Deep (6)

2021

• 5 – The Web of Fear (1)
• 4 – The Evil of the Daleks (7)
• 3 – Galaxy 4 (4)

2022

• 5 – The Abominable Snowmen (6)

2023

• 4 – The Underwater Menace (4)

2024

• 3 – The Celestial Toymaker (4)
• 4 – The Smugglers (4)

2025

• 5 – The Wheel in Space (6)
• 3 – The Savages (4)

2026

• 6 – The Space Pirates (6)

2027

• 3 – The Myth Makers (4)
• 3 – The Massacre (4)

2028

• 3 – Mission to the Unknown (1)
• 3 – The Daleks’ Master Plan (12)

2029

• 4 – The Highlanders (4)
• 1 – Marco Polo (7)
• 2 – The Crusade (4)

2030

• 1 – Marco Polo (7)

The above list shows that at the current rate, all missing 1960s episodes of Doctor Who will be animated by 2028 at the latest. So we still have a long wait ahead of us before all of the missing stories are sitting on our shelves.

Meanwhile, the hugely popular Doctor Who: The Collection Blu-Ray Box Sets will probably continue to be released as follows:

26 – 5 = 21 seasons left

2020: 2

2021: 2

2022: 2

2023: 3

2024: 3

2025: 3

2026: 3

2027: 3

Provided that Marco Polo, The Crusade and The Space Pirates are animated sooner rather than later, then the missing episode animations should not delay the release of the classic seasons 1, 2 and 6 on Doctor Who: The Collection Blu-Ray. Paul Hembury, the executive producer for BBC Studios, has suggested that the animated versions of lost stories would eventually appear on the Blu-Ray sets of the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton seasons “because the fans are, rightly so, completists.” The Blu Rays contain lots of optional updated CGI extras, which could also be applied to 60s episodes as they are released on the Collection Box Sets.

So, having estimated how long it will roughly take for all of the missing episodes to be animated and released on DVD, Blu Ray, Steelbook and digital (stream on BritBox etc), we can now speculate as to which stories will be released next. How will the DVD producers prioritise which stories should be given the animation treatment sooner rather than later? In the video below, YouTuber and Doctor Who fan Josh Snares deduces which classic adventures are likely to be animated next, based on the audio quality of and the number of episodes and characters in each (partially or completely) missing serial.

Charles Norton, the animation producer/director on these reconstructions, has said that “I don’t think [1965 historical] The Crusade is terribly likely to have its missing episodes animated,” given that “in episodes two and four, there’s something like 26 speaking characters, and most of them have three different changes of clothes, and [those characters] aren’t in episodes one and three!”. Sadly, this therefore makes it unlikely that several ‘pure historical’ stories (aimed at educating children about the past), like The Crusade, The Massacre and Marco Polo, will be animated any time soon, if ever. “I do wonder whether or not they would be doable,” Norton said. “That still leaves a huge number of stories that are doable, but I don’t think we could say that every Doctor Who story is going to be animated, at least not any time soon.”

Norton added that “In the ’60s, particularly the Hartnell era, they used to do historical epics and they were great because the BBC had the resources to do that… you’d have hordes of extras and ornate costumes from the massive BBC costume store… When you’ve actually got to draw it, particularly on a budget, and you’ve maybe only got a year to do it, it does get a little bit tricky!”

Another consideration to be made when making these reconstructions is the quality of the audio soundtracks available to the animators. Paul Hembury noted that “For all 97 missing episodes, we’re blessed with recordings made by fans [at the time], but the truth is that some of them are not great quality… which means we will never be able to animate if we’re going to use the original soundtrack,” he said. “Some of those stories just can’t be done.”

At the moment, it would appear that the animation team are prioritising the Patrick Troughton era because more of his episodes are missing than William Hartnell’s. Troughton’s first season is notorious for having less than a quarter of its episodes still in existence today. So, it is unsurprising that recent years have seen the release of animations of Season 4 stories such as The Macra Terror and The Faceless Ones.

An animated clip from the Troughton story The Wheel in Space was included on the DVD release of The Macra Terror, however this may have been for investment purposes rather than an indication of it being an imminent release. Another Season 4 serial, The Power of the Daleks, will soon be re-released as a special edition DVD with improvements made to the previous 2016 animation.

The animations so far have varied in quality and some have been more well-received than others. This is often due to the experimental nature of some of the animations (i.e. 3D animations can produce more mixed results than 2D animations). The animation teams are clearly torn between whether they should stay fiercely loyal to the telesnap reconstructions that are already available or whether they should take a certain amount of artistic license with these productions, the latter of which I am fine with. As we saw with The Macra Terror animation, a moderate level of artistic license is no bad thing and can even improve the final result. Doctor Who‘s production in general has long tried to push boundaries and to innovate the world of television making. A bad animation is better than a still recon.

If money was no object and the number of episodes, characters, costume changes and scenes in every story were immaterial to the budget for each animation, then I would prefer my favourite missing adventures to be released sooner rather than later. I would expect that some of my top picks, i.e. The Evil of the Daleks and The Daleks’ Master Plan, are likely to be favourites amongst most Doctor Who fans.

Doctor Who Missing Episodes Animation Personal Priority Order (after 2020)

2nd Doctor:

– The Evil of the Daleks

– The Abominable Snowmen

– The Web of Fear (Ep. 3)

– The Wheel in Space

– The Highlanders

– The Underwater Menace

– The Space Pirates

1st Doctor:

– The Daleks’ Master Plan

– Marco Polo

– The Celestial Toymaker

– Mission to the Unknown

– The Myth Makers

– The Crusade

– The Savages

– The Massacre

– Galaxy 4

– The Smugglers

Overall:

1. The Evil of the Daleks
2. The Daleks’ Master Plan
3. Marco Polo
4. The Abominable Snowmen
5. The Web of Fear (Ep. 3)
6. The Celestial Toymaker
7. Mission to the Unknown
8. The Wheel in Space
9. The Myth Makers
10. The Crusade
11. The Savages
12. The Massacre
13. Galaxy 4
14. The Highlanders
15. The Smugglers
16. The Underwater Menace
17. The Space Pirates 

In the near future, we may also get some further recreations of lost episodes (using new actors), such as UCLAN’s production of Mission to the Unknown in 2019. Re-staging the original episodes with new actors is a technique that was successfully employed when the 3 missing episodes of Dad’s Army were also recreated in 2019. Who knows? Perhaps at some point over the coming decade, as the animations are released, Philip Morris or another missing episode archive hunter will find some more exciting adventures from the William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton eras of Doctor Who. Surely some private collectors possess a number of missing episodes? There must be some more out there!