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Serial: MM Episode Nos. 170, 171, 172, and 173 Title: The Tomb of the Cybermen
Arriving on the planet Telos, the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria join an archaelogical expedition that seeks to uncover the last remains of the Cybermen, believed dead for centuries. There are, however, those among the expedition whose are determined to revive the Cybermen for their own evil ends, not knowing that the Cybermen themselves have anticipated this...
starring Patrick Troughton as Dr. Who, Frazer Hines
as Jamie, and Deborah Watling as
Originally transmitted from
DVD features:
- Graphical
menus, episode selection features, and scene selection features.
- Commentary track by actors Frazer Hines (Jamie) and
Deborah Watling (
- Production Notes Subtitles
- Original 4:3
aspect ratio
- Title Sequence Tests - selecting this will play 3 minutes of video effects that were used in the construction of the Patrick Troughton opening title sequence, to
the accompaniment of an extended edit of the 1967/70 version
of the title music
- Late Night Line-Up: ‘Special Effects’ - a color segment from a contemporaneous BBC2 program called Late Night Line-Up that went behind-the-scenes at
the BBC’s visual effects department
- Photo Gallery
- The Final End - a 3-minute segment of visual effects footage from the conclusion of the preceding, mostly-missing story, The Evil of the Daleks. It shows the
Dalek civil war, culminating in the Emperor Dalek’s destruction, and is accompanied by some of the actual soundtrack of the episode. A much-lower-quality
version of this same sequence was used on the VHS video The Missing Years
- Tombwatch - This selection plays a 30-minute
featurette from a 1992 convention-like event in the
reunited to see the story for the first time in 25 years (because the story had only just been rediscovered at that time after having been lost) and share their
memories with the audience.
- Remastering for DVD - This selection plays a featurette that uses before-and-after sequences and subtitles to show how the film prints were cleaned up for
this DVD release. (and man, did they need a _lot_ of cleaning!)
- Morris Barry Intro - This selection plays the few-minutes introduction that Director Morris Barry did for the 1992 VHS release of the story.
- Who’s Who - This option provides you with
biographies of seven of the principal actors in the story and one of the
Cybermen.
- Closed Captions allows you to turn on and off the
closed caption subtitles for the hearing impaired that are built in to the
disc.
- The only flaw found with this disc is on the back of the cover. At the top of it, it reads “by Robert Holmes” when it should read “by Kit Pedler and Gerry
Holmes-written
previous disc to use as a template and just forgot to change this bit.
- There are some “Easter Egg” hidden features built into this disc for you to hunt for. However, if you’re not much for hunting, use your mouse to highlight the
blank-looking area below and you’ll see how to find
them.
o There are three Easter Eggs to find. All three are the same ones that were hidden
on the UK Region 2 discs, and these are all in the same places as on those
discs.
o Egg 1: From the main
menu screen, press your up arrow and you will see that you can move up to the
top of the screen and highlight the Doctor
Who logo. If you click on the logo,
you will see the full-length Patrick Troughton opening title sequence, without
any captions over it.
o Egg 2: On the main
menu screen, again press your up arrow and highlight the Doctor Who logo. Now, if you
press your right arrow, your selector will skip over to the right and light up
a Cyber-symbol on the middle frame of the “filmstrip” at the top of
the screen. If you move right some more,
you can also light up symbols on the fourth and fifth frames. These are red herrings, however, and clicking
on any of the symbols will do nothing more than
restart the video montage playing on the main menu screen. The real trick is now that you’ve lit
up any of those Cyber-symbols, you can now light up a green circle on the
second frame in the strip with Patrick Troughton’s face on it. If you click on this, you will see a touching
scene from episode 3 of the story of the Doctor and Victoria discussing each
other’s families. What’s
different about it here, however, is that this copy of the scene has been
treated with a new computer process called VidFIRE that can take 16mm film
recordings of shows that were originally shot on videotape (such as Doctor Who), analyze the film frames,
and then via interpolation split them back up into approximations of the
separate video fields that were in the original video recording. The end result is that the program now looks
much like the original videotape again, with the fluid, “live” look
that videotape has that film doesn’t.
The effect is most noticeable when the camera pans or when there’s
a lot of motion in the frame. This was
the Doctor Who Restoration
Team’s first trial run with this process, and they’ve since been
using it on most of the other black and white Doctor Who film recordings that have been getting VHS or DVD
releases in the
o Egg 3: Go to page 2
of the Special Features menu and select Audio Options. In the Audio Options sub-menu, click either your left or right arrow, and the Doctor Who logo will become
highlighted. Click on the logo, and the Doctor Who title card will appear,
accompanied by the soundtrack of the broadcast trailer for the first episode of
The Abominable Snowmen, the story
which followed Tomb. This trailer was originally broadcast
immediately after Tomb episode 4
finished.

