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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 Victoria. Written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, Produced by Peter Bryant, Directed by Morris Barry.

Originally transmitted from 2 September 1967 to 23 September 1967 on BBC1.
 

DVD features:

- Graphical menus, episode selection features, and scene selection features.

- Commentary track by actors Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Deborah Watling (Victoria)

- 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 UK where many of the surviving cast and crew were

   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

   Davis.”  Lower down on this same cover the correct writers are credited.  This error crept in as someone in production borrowed the cover from a Robert

   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 UK recently.  We’ll see more of this effect when we catch up to those releases in North America.  NOTE:  If you are watching this DVD on a computer monitor, you will not see this effect.  Computer monitors do not display interlaced video…they use full frames, like a film projector, and so the fluid motion effect this creates is lost through the way it displays the image.  The in-built converters in multi-region DVD players outputting to NTSC TV sets also lose the interlacing effect.

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.