Huh?

Isolated music tracks (although this being the Special Edition, it’s hard not to think of it as the wrong music). There’s also a multilingual option, which in the interests of investigation I attempted to operate (one of the advantages of DVD being that you can’t actually erase anything if you do happen to press the wrong button) but all this does is provide the menu and subtitles in Italian, Dutch, Portuguese etc- the dialogue isn’t dubbed.

When it comes to the original DVD release of ‘The Five Doctors’, I think it’s probably fair to say that the BBC didn’t know what they were doing. Along with the likes of Fawlty Towers and the Black Adder series, it was released in an initial batch of old favourites, and to be fair it’s a fairly obvious choice for the first DVD release, if only because it’s such a collection of Doctors, monsters and companions from the series’ first twenty years (i.e. before everything started going down the pan). Unfortunately it’s also fairly clear that at the time the DVD was put together, nobody really had much sense of the target audience or indeed what the selling points of the DVD format would become. The original Special Edition had only been released a few years previously, together with ‘The King’s Demons’ and (if memory serves) some kind of postcard album, so the DVD had to have selling points which would persuade somebody to buy it again, and went with picture quality and the isolated soundtrack option. While these are nice, the subsequent re-release has shown that there’s a wealth of background material relating to ‘The Five Doctors’ and the twentieth anniversary out there, and the failure to make use of that material can only be put down to a lack of foresight, which essentially reduces the selling point of the story down to the novelty of having Doctor Who on DVD.

That said, it’s not a bad try- once you get past the rather brash Dolby Stereo advert, the TARDIS console menu is a good idea and it’s really a shame that they never used this again as it would have been interesting to see it reconfigured for subsequent stories (with the correct model console, of course). I’d never seen the Special Edition until this release and even now struggle to see the point at times- oh, look, another establishing shot of a corridor- particularly when, to fans in my age group, the story is so well-known from off-air recordings that any change in the incidental music or the pacing of a scene jars badly. When a release has something as detailed as the console menus, you can hardly accuse it of being rushed, but at the same time it’s difficult not to see it as a victim of the need to establish the BBC brand on DVD as quickly as possible. It’s also worth taking a moment to realise that in 1999-2000 it was acceptable for a recent film to be issued on DVD with no extras whatsoever, and I’d argue that ‘The Five Doctors’ is packaged to complete in a general marketplace along with that kind of competition, much as the early VHS releases were made into compilations because nobody at the BBC expected anybody except the most dedicated to care about cliffhangers.