The
Frequently Asked Questions List for Doctor Who DVDs in
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Compiled by Steve Manfred, smanfred at
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the spaces to email me)
UPCOMING RELEASES
(4 25-minute episodes on disc 1, 50-minute special on disc 2)
Doctor Who: The Invasion of Time starring Tom Baker (6 25-minute episodes, 2 discs, $34.98)
Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord starring Colin Baker (14 25-minute episodes, 4 discs, $59.98) and
The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete First Season starring Elisabeth Sladen (1 60-minute episode and 10 30-minute episodes (6 stories), 4 discs, $49.98)
(13 50-minute episodes, 6 discs, $99.98)
Torchwood: The Complete Second Season in
Doctor Who: The Infinite Quest starring David Tennant (45-minute animated adventure, 1 disc, $9.98)
LATEST DVD RELEASES
Doctor Who: Black Orchid starring Peter Davison (2 25-minute episodes, 1 disc, $14.98), and
Doctor Who: The Five Doctors 25th Anniversary Edition starring Peter Davison, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, Richard Hurndall,
Tom Baker, and William Hartnell (90 minute special on disc 1, 100-minute special edition on disc 2, $34.98).
The three stories in this set are all of those that features the Silurians and/or their cousins, the Sea Devils.
They will also be made available separately. They are:
Doctor Who and the Silurians starring Jon Pertwee (2 discs, $34.98),
The Sea Devils starring Jon Pertwee (1 disc, $24.98), and
Warriors of the Deep starring Peter Davison (1 disc, $24.98).
April 1, 2008 The Time Warrior starring Jon Pertwee (1 disc, $24.98) and
Timelash starring Colin Baker (1 disc, $24.98)
Destiny of the Daleks starring Tom Baker (1 disc, $24.98)
RECENT DVD
RELEASES
January 22, 2008 Torchwood – The Complete First Season Box Set starring John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Burn Gorman, Naoko Mori, and
Gareth David-Lloyd (7 discs, $79.98)
(6 discs, $99.98)
Time-Flight starring Peter Davison (1 disc, $24.98)
Arc of Infinity starring Peter Davison (1 disc, $24.98)
***THE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS LIST***
1. Are Doctor
Who stories available on DVD? Who
makes them and where can I find them?
Yes. A limited number of Doctor Who stories are available now on DVD, and the number gradually increases every few months. Their content comes from BBC Worldwide Americas. The manufacturing and distribution is accomplished by Warner Home Video.
The Warner logo is not present on the most recent DVD releases, leading to the suspicion that Warner’s role was being reduced or done away with.
In fact, the two parties were in contract renegotiations at that time, and those have been recently completed, and things will continue in future as they have been
since 2000.
To find them, I would first try a brick and mortar video sales store in your area. If they don’t have any Doctor Who DVDs on the shelf, try asking them to special order titles for you. It’ll also help if you give them the catalog number of the title, which you’ll be able to find in the listings below. If you still can’t get them that way, then I’d try shopping online at places like amazon.com or bbcamericashop.com.
2. Will the new Doctor Who TV series affect the classic series
releases, and will it be released itself?
No, the new series has had no effect on the classic series releases.
3. I’m interested in perhaps buying some of these DVDs. What should I know?
You should be aware that most of the Doctor Who DVDs released so far have had extensive restoration work done on them prior to authoring and now look better than they ever have before. The only ones that had lighter restoration done didn’t need much in the first place. I’ve never seen Doctor Who look this good – it’s much better than PBS broadcasts. You should also know that to date, all of the DVDs have bonus materials on them that are not available on the VHS tapes.
You should also know the difference between "episode form" and "movie form". The natural format of most of the Doctor Who series is as a cliffhanger adventure serial. Each true "episode" of the classic series was usually 25 minutes long and ends in a cliffhanger and crashing theme music, with the original
viewers on the BBC having to wait usually a whole week before the next installment. The most common serial length was 4 such episodes, with 6-parters also
being heavily used in the first
half of the series' life with some other odd lengths mixed in here and
there. Most PBS outlets in the
series in this format, but instead showed what became known as "movie form," where all the episodes of each serial were edited together to form one long
movie. (4-parters usually came to about 90 minutes, 6-parters to 2 hours and 20 minutes.) The DVD releases all present the stories in episode form (when
applicable). The fans prefer this because it is the true format the series should be seen in, because the episodes were plotted and paced with only 25-minute
installments in mind, and because the cliffhangers themselves sometimes have differences between what's shown at the end of one episode versus the beginning
of the next, with altered shots and changes made to the music. In the "movie form" practice, one of those versions always has to be cut out.
The standard episode length of the classic series’ 22nd season and of the new series that began in 2005 is 45 minutes. Most of the new series episodes
are now stand-alones, but some are part of two-part stories. The season 22 stories were all at least two 45-minute episodes long.
4. Why are these DVDs so much higher-priced than most American TV series on DVD? And why don’t they release season box sets of the classic series?
As you might expect, Doctor
Who DVDs do the most business in the
erosion of TV DVDs that the
North American market has. Also,
multi-standard TVs and multi-region DVD players are very commonplace in the
BBC Worldwide and their
market is used to, then they
will see large numbers of
the price will still be lower
than what it would be if they bought the DVD off a
level only slightly lower than
the
for TV in the
Regarding season box sets... Doctor Who classic series DVD releases began in the
had been in use on VHS. Before season box sets started becoming the
norm in the
Were they to switch over to the season model, many consumers would be forced to re-buy some stories they already had. Just as importantly, production
budgets on single titles are higher than they would be for season sets, which means that each single title can be (and is) packed with special features. Were
they to switch to the season model, the special features would have to be reduced. They have instead adopted a compromise plan where they
release one 3-disc box set per year of stories that were linked together in some way (like a story arc) while continuing the single-story-at-a-time model
the rest of the year. (The
Key to Time season box set that was released in
and this will likely never be repeated.) The new series is another case entirely, as the extra features are being made concurrently with the series itself,
which allows those DVDs to be almost as full as the classic series ones and still be in a season box set (and, of course, the “rebuying” issue isn’t a problem
as these are all-new episodes).
5. Will Doctor Who be released in a
high-definition DVD format, i.e. on BluRay?
For now, no. The original series was predominantly shot on standard-definition videotape, and what you see on the standard-definition DVDs is the best
it can ever look. The only advantage there would be to issuing classic series DVDs on BluRay would be that you could fit many more episodes
on a single disc. This is unlikely to happen as putting 5-6 stories on one disc would undercut the marketing and financial models currently in use.
The new series has not yet been shot on high-definition either (including the episodes currently in production), and so the same answer holds true for that as well.
6. Will the
spinoff series Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures be released on
DVD? Might they see release in a
high-definition format?
The first season of Torchwood
is now available. The second season will
eventually get a release, probably soon after the
The Sarah Jane
Adventures was thought for a time to not be commercially viable as it
wouldn’t have had a
but the SciFi Channel has now decided to run it. Look for a release of this series as well sometime later in 2008.
Torchwood is being shot in high-definition, and it’s looking like it will see UK DVD release on both standard DVDs and on Blu-Ray.
BBC Worldwide Americas are still looking into whether
this would be commercially viable in
write them and encourage them to do so? Their address can be found below.) The Sarah Jane Adventures is not being shot in high-definition as of yet.
7.
Do any of the Doctor Who DVDs have edits? Have they cut anything out?
The answer to this one is a little complicated. Mostly, no. There have, however, been a few changes made to the original programs in a few instances. Here’s what they were and why:
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
This one is so small I would never have noticed it
myself, but some others have. Apparently
if you’re looking very carefully at the background in one of the
on-location chase sequences in the third episode, in the original version you
could see a contemporary truck parked on the street, but it was very small...
only a few pixels in fact. During
restoration, the engineers thought they’d see how easy it would be to
paint that out, never intending to leave it like that, but then a
miscommunication happened and the copy with the truck painted out got used on
the DVD master.
The Seeds of Death
A small mistake was made during the restoration process, where the VidFIRE video-look restoration tool was wrongly applied to a scene that was shot on film. The Restoration Team normally try to make the whole production look as it originally did, with the studio video scenes processed but film inserts left alone to keep looking like film. So, if you look carefully, near the end of episode 5 (and in the recap at the start of episode 6), you’ll see a scene of the Doctor trying to get into the Weather Control Bureau that has been VidFIREd when it shouldn’t have been.
Spearhead From Space
In episode 2, during the establishing shots of the plastics factory, some electric guitar music was used to accompany the shots. This music came from a track called “Oh Well (Part One)” by a band that was just up-and-coming in 1969/70, when Spearhead was made. They made it pretty big later on though… perhaps you’ve heard of Fleetwood Mac? Well, these days their management tends to ask for a lot of money for even a few bars of their songs to be used in anything that gets republished, such as a DVD release, and the BBC couldn’t justify the enormous expense to leave the track on here. So, as they did on the original VHS release, they’ve taken some of the background sound effects from the plastics factory and used those to replace the Fleetwood Mac track. The scene and the shots are all still there, just not the music. For similar reasons, they also had to change the music on one of the broadcast trailers that appears on the DVD as an extra.
The Stones of Blood
The DVD of this is the original broadcast version. There’s been nothing cut out. However, the original VHS release included a
deleted scene, and that scene is not present anywhere on the DVD. The scene in question was early in Part Two,
lasted 30 seconds, and showed the characters of De Vries and Martha panicking
over their failure at the sacrifice and arguing over running away to
The Five Doctors Special Edition
This DVD is not the original version of The Five Doctors, but rather a souped-up version that was originally made for a special VHS release in 1995. In this version, about 10 minutes of footage that was cut from the original was inserted back into the action, and as a result some of the original scenes got rearranged. Also, the sound was then remastered for Dolby Surround sound, and many of the special effects were redone using 1995’s computer technology. For this DVD, the sound was remastered again, this time for Dolby Digital 5.1, but this is otherwise the same version as was on that VHS release a few years ago.
The Caves of Androzani
In the original version of this story, the first few scenes on the surface of the alien planet weren’t as convincing as they could’ve been because of a shaking film image of the live action being married into a completely stationary matte painting glass shot of the planet’s surface. That original version is still to be found on this DVD, but to see it you need to select that you want to see that version from the DVD’s bonus menu. The DVD instead defaults to a new version of the scene where the shaking film image has been stabilized. Also, the smoke effects laid in over the action are slightly different from the original.
Remembrance of the Daleks
In the scenes set in Harry’s Café, some original Beatles music was to be heard on occasion being played on the café’s jukebox. One of the current co-owners of the rights to the original Beatles recordings would not permit them to be used at any price, and so it had to be replaced with other music tracks in the scenes in question. The original 1993 VHS release was not affected by this, as the co-ownership agreement of the Beatles catalog which is the problem took force in 1995.
The Complete Third Series Box Set
There is a caption missing in the episode Blink. At the start of the final scene in the DVD store, there was originally a caption which read “ONE YEAR LATER,” which is mysteriously absent from this DVD.
Also, the commentary track that was recorded for the UK edition of Last of the Time Lords which featured David Tennant, Freema Agyeman, and
John Barrowman, is not on the North American edition and is instead replaced by the one from the official Doctor Who website podcast with
Russell T. Davies, Phil Collinson, and Julie Gardner. This had to be done because David, Freema, and John frequently sing bits of songs during their
commentary as a running gag, which couldn’t be copyright cleared in time for the North American production deadlines.
8. Are the Doctor Who DVDs remastered for DVD, or did they just stick the old VHS masters on discs?
All of the Doctor
Who DVDs that were first released in the
The six DVDs comprising The Key to Time – The Complete Adventure box set received a much lighter restoration treatment, but the source material here didn’t need much work to start with. The only obvious “flaw” is you can hear a bit of tape hiss in the sound if you’re listening for it.
9. I saw some "Dr. Who" DVDs on the shelf that star Peter Cushing and Daleks... what are these?
The Daleks became so popular in the mid-1960s
that a British film producer named Milton Subotsky acquired the license to make
three films based on Terry Nation's Dalek stories for the TV series. Two
of these were produced and released and are currently available on DVD in
The first film was released in 1965 and is in DVD
release in
The second film was released in 1966 and is in
video release in
The films are also available in a box set, where they come with a third DVD called “Dalekmania”, a 1-hour documentary about the two films made in 1995. The catalog number for the whole box set is DV11958.
These films star Peter Cushing as "Dr. Who". "Who" is his actual last name, and here the character is an ordinary human scientist who has invented a TARDIS in his backyard. The first film's plot is a condensed version of the first Dalek television story, The Daleks, and the second film's plot is a condensed version of the second Dalek television story, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Both of those original television stories were available on VHS from BBC Video, as listed in the catalog in the VHS FAQ. The Dalek Invasion of Earth TV story has seen a DVD release on its own (see the table below). The Daleks TV story will be
released as part of The Beginning box set in March of 2006.
10. My favorite story hasn't been released yet! Would writing to Warner help to get it released soon?
BBC Worldwide Americas currently decide what to release based
on what's recently been released in the
or if it had Daleks in it. Box sets of any Doctor also tend to do very
well on DVD and generally get bumped to head of the line. Warner makes none of the
release decisions themselves. They only distribute. Your better
option is to write BBC Video in the
11. What are Warner's and BBC Video's mailing addresses?
Warner's is:
Warner Home Video
If you want to address the horse's mouth at BBC Video in
the
BBC Video (Doctor Who)
BBC Woodlands
80,
BBC Worldwide America’s address is:
BBC Worldwide Americas Inc.
747
12. Why hasn't the 1996 Fox TV Movie with Paul
McGann come out on DVD yet? It's been out since 2001 in the
This is a special case. Under the co-production deal between the Fox TV Network, Universal, and BBC Worldwide, the North American video release rights now seem to rest with Universal, and they have shown no interest in either releasing it themselves or in licensing it back to BBC Worldwide. The only hope
for this ever to be released in
title, trying to ride the coattails of such a success.
13. I'm sick of waiting for (insert title
here) to come out in the
There are two obstacles you first need to overcome
before you can play a UK-made DVD in
First, you must somehow defeat “region
coding.” Region coding is an instruction
written into most DVDs that the players all look for to see if it can play the
disc. This is not a legal restriction
but rather a voluntary restriction that was settled on by the international DVD
standards consortium.
company has what right to publish what show or movie in what territory.) It is possible, especially if you look on-line, to buy DVD players that are either
region-free, or can be programmed to become region-free and thus enable you to play the disc.
The second problem is the difference between the current
television technical standards in the two regions. The
Another option is to hack (er, program) the DVD player on your computer to be able to play Region 2 DVDs and watch them on your computer. Computers and their monitors already have a lot more resolution than either NTSC or PAL and can easily cope with either image system. The downside here is that computer monitors don’t use interlaced frames, whereas standard television does. This means that motion from a videotape source will look jerky when played on a monitor, and as most Doctor Who was predominantly shot on videotape, you’ll lose the smooth motion effect of video. (Interlaced frames work like this: a TV updates only half its image every 1/60th of a second by lighting up only the even-numbered lines of pixels in its screen in that 60th of a second. In the next 60th, it goes back up the screen and lights up all the odd-numbered lines of pixels, then in the next it does all the even-numbered ones again, etc. The result of this is terrific “temporal” resolution, and a live, smooth look much like real life. Computer monitors display rather like film images, where the entire image is updated at once, and like film projections, motion tends to look a lot more jerky. It’s the difference between watching a football game live (video) or watching it on an NFL Films highlight show (film). ) Some of those television DVD players that can be made multi-region can also be programmed to convert the PAL signal into an NTSC one that your TV can cope with. The downside of that is you’ll lose the extra resolution a PAL image would bring, and you’ll get some conversion artifacts in the images (little bits in the picture that shouldn’t be there). Also, most of these in-built PAL-to-NTSC converters leave out a lot of the interlaced video fields in the conversion process, and so the videotape look of most Doctor Who will be lost. This loss-of-fields on computer monitors and through converting DVD players especially affects the new VidFIRE video restoration tool being used on black and white stories...you won’t see any effect at all in either instance. However, a Region 1 NTSC discs played on a normal player and TV set will look as it should.
Also, there is another reason to hold back and continue
to buy North American DVDs, even if they do come out a lot later than the
is now usually only a few
months behind the
14. I live in the
Actually, it might. I hear that both DVD players and television sets in the UK are more versatile than are their commonly found counterparts in North America, and most (but not all) can be set to cope both with the region coding problem and the technical standards (NTSC vs PAL) problem.
15. I am hearing impaired, or I want to get
DVDs for someone who is. Are the videos closed captioned? Do they have subtitles?
The first 5 BBC DVDs to be released were closed captioned for the hearing impaired. They did not, however, include subtitles as a menu option in the DVD itself. Beginning with the two that came out in August 2002, The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Ark in Space, subtitles for the spoken text of the program itself became a menu option in the DVD as well. These subtitles and closed captions do not, unfortunately, cover the extra commentary tracks by the actors and production staff.
16. What DVDs are available, how much are they, and what extra features do they all contain?
There are at present 64 DVD releases of the Doctor Who TV series available, and also the two Peter Cushing Dalek movies, and now also some of the
spinoff series Torchwood.
Suggested retail prices are given in US dollars.
A quick summary of the TV titles is below, listed in the chronological order of the TV series.
Clicking on a
title will give a description of the story, and of all the DVD features.
|
Catalog # |
Story No. |
Title |
# of Episodes |
# of Discs |
b&w/color |
sound |
Captions |
Suggested Retail Price |
|
|
|
Starring WILLIAM HARTNELL |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
E2489 |
1-3 |
14 |
3 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
44.98 |
|
|
E1719 |
6 |
4 |
1 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E1813 |
10 |
6 |
2 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
29.98 |
|
|
E2666 |
13 |
6 |
1 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
1000029559 |
17 |
4 |
1 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
24.98 |
|
|
E2081 |
14,21,24 |
6 + 2 audio |
1 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
|
|
Starring PATRICK TROUGHTON |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
E2082 |
32,33,35, 36,38,40, 41,43,49 |
12 + 2 audio |
2 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
29.98 |
|
|
E2083 |
14,21,24, 32,33,35, 36,40,41, 43,49 |
Lost in Time – all 3 discs in one box set |
18 + 4 audio |
3 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
44.98 |
|
E1181 |
37 |
4 |
1 |
b&w |
mono |
Closed Caption |
19.98 |
|
|
E2316 |
45 |
5 |
1 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E2856 |
46 |
8 |
2 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
34.98 |
|
|
E1924 |
48 |
6 |
2 |
b&w |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
29.98 |
|
|
|
|
Starring JON PERTWEE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
E1163 |
51 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
Closed Caption |
19.98 |
|
|
1000037805 |
52 |
7 |
2 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
34.98 |
|
|
E2667 |
54 |
7 |
2 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
29.98 |
|
|
E2398 |
57 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
1000037740 |
62 |
6 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD subtitles |
24.98 |
|
|
E1925 |
65 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E1758 |
66 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E2156 |
69 |
6 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
1000035800 |
70 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
24.98 |
|
|
|
|
Starring TOM BAKER |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
E4112 |
75 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
24.98 |
|
|
E1162 |
76 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E2859 |
77 |
2 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
14.98 |
|
|
E2503 |
78 |
6 |
2 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
29.98 |
|
|
1000036283 |
81 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
24.98 |
|
|
E2023 |
82 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E2731 |
87 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E1120 |
90 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
Closed Caption |
19.98 |
|
|
E1814 |
91 |
6 |
2 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
29.98 |
|
|
E2317 |
92 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
1000040097 |
93 |
The Invisible Enemy (with K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend) |
4 + 50 min. special |
2 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
34.98 |
|
1000039686 |
97 |
6 |
2 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
34.98 |
|
|
E1336 |
98 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E1338 |
99 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |
DVD Subtitles |
19.98 |
|
|
E1314 |
100 |
4 |
1 |
Color |
mono |