Doctor Who - The Movie (2001)

Commentary Highlights:

To be honest, I didn’t last very long with the commentary- Geoffrey Sax’s speaking voice has a slightly Peter Cook-style nasal drone to it and he isn’t the most exciting speaker. With nobody else to play off against, most of what I did manage to get through was along the lines of "this is what I was trying to do here" and "we did that in post-production with CGI".

I Didn’t Know That Until I Read The Information Text:

The operating theatre where the Seventh Doctor dies crops up in an X-Files episode. Also, the record that the Doctor listens to on his gramophone is stock music which isn’t commercially available.

Extras:

Some isolated music tracks, the Fox network promo (presumably run as filler material in the run-up to the original transmission) and some rather odd interviews which were presumably recorded to provide soundbites for promotional purposes. They’re constructed in 30-second bursts with the interviewer off screen and unheard, so the actors and crew seem to be volunteering information unprompted (particularly in the case of Sylvester McCoy, who must have felt responsible for informing the viewers about the series’ history, and so starts rambling in an attempt to cram in as much information as possible). Paul McGann is interviewed on location on what was clearly a freezing night and speaks in his normal Scouse accent rather than his "acting" voice, which makes things interesting, while one bonus is a five-minute 2001 interview with Philip Segal which looks as the movie with hindsight. There’s also a collection of behind-the-scenes footage (which if nothing else shows some of the heavy rain in which some of the motorway scenes were filmed) and a photo gallery. One little treasure is Philip Segal’s tour of the console room set, which includes a lot of set dressing which we never saw in the finished movie- there are also a couple of alternate scenes which don’t really add much to the story.

Forget all the talk of season box sets- there was a time when you could get hold of an entire Doctor’s era on one disc...but to be less flippant for a moment, releasing the five-year-old movie as one of the early DVD releases makes a certain amount of sense, the production values of 1996 and 2001 being more or less comparable and following BBC Worldwide’s policy of releasing an initial one story per Doctor. It’s also (by comparison) blessed with readily available extras, as by 1996 it was becoming standard industry practice to shoot promotional material and supplementary interviews alongside the main production, so there are interviews with both Doctors, Geoffrey Sax, Philip Segal (in 1996 and 2001), Daphne Ashbrook and Eric Roberts. The slightly unfortunate thing, however, is that the way that the movie was made and shown in America means that there’s quite a large number of interested parties, which also means that it’s sometimes difficult for an objective account of the making and reception of the movie to be told. While Philip Segal’s interviews give a concise version of events and the information text adds more detail, it’s difficult not to feel that there are more stories to be told about the movie, and 2001 was probably a little too early in the day to be telling them- I suppose it comes down to what rights Universal and Fox have over the use of their material, although according to Segal the different arms of the BBC had their own agendas as well. One day it’d be interesting to hear a comprehensive and objective account of what all the different parties wanted from the movie, and why it didn’t quite turn out as the finished article, but until then it has to be said that the 2001 release does a good job of adding to your appreciation of the movie, and the addition of a specially-shot interview (presumably the money could be found as little or no restoration or research work was required) shows the way forward.