I first recall my brother being deeply engrossed with Dr. Who back in the seventies, and years later watching the series from runs in the seventies. The inexpensive sets, focus on imagination over that of over the top production costs in set design were a unique element I admired, never truly grasping it all - but my brother was always there to fill me in on anything on the occasions I watched it with him.
Jon Pertwee especially, Tom Baker, and the dapper Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor. I recall watching some of those old episodes on I think, PBS stations, where the video quality was really bad with shadows and like, echoing of the video images - those were some of the most intruguing. Perhaps they were among some of the lost BBC archives that had been rescued or restored?
And then I didn’t hear much for a long time. Sure, there were reruns and stuff of the first few Doctors, and the evolutionary arc of the show’s quality and timbre with each distinct Doctor and they’re flairs, but it was no longer a big deal where it was “Leave me alone time” for my brother, as he shut the door to his bedroom not to be disturbed during viewing hours.
Then he got all excited about a reboot, maybe twenty years ago. I gort a little interested too coz there was this Rose Tyler hottie. Still, jut intermittent viewing on my part whenever I happened to be over when he was watching.
Then a I saw a few episodes with the thirteenth Doctor portrayed by Jodie Whitaker.
Perhaps I’ll be able to form a cohesive web of knowledge of the sagas, and I’m not sure where to begin, but I do want to cover the cosmography of the series, even though it’s vast - as vast as Star Trek and the various generations of that series.
Dr Who started off when I was two years old, a little too young to even grasp concepts of the show even if I had been exposed to it, which I wasn’t. For me, Batman, Lost in Space, the Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Outer Limits formed much of the foundation for my Sci-Fi/Fantasy introductions on Television, and even the color shows, for a while, were in black and white, because color TVs were quite a bit more than we could afford when I was a little kid.
Well, I’m thinking that maybe I could take a three pronged approach, and go back to the beginning of Pertwee and Baker, and perhaps something modern with Jodie Whitaker as the thirteenth doctor, focussing on watching those in alternation, and fanning out from there and maybe catching the very firt episodes with the First Doctor - I’m assuming the regeneration hadn’t been factored into the story until it became time to replace the First Doctor - Hartnell.
Access to videos might also be at issue, so I dunno, but one winter, living off-grid in complete isolation from other humans in the remote mountain wilderness of Humboldt, I actually watched all 8 seasons of Game of Thrones, from the first episode to the last, in about two weeks.
That’s not hard though, coz what are you gonna do except keep wood in the furnace, cook food, and sleep when you’re completely buried in snow? I think that there was actually two or three episodes that I actually don’t have of that.
Well, I’m open for suggestions, and just getting started here on the site so I’ll take it slow and steady as time permits - but there’s so much there. It’ll be hard to really grasp everything with the familiarity that my brother has enjoyed for the past few decades.
