The Eighth Doctor Movie Wouldn't Be Hated If It Came Out Now
Doctor Who Am I is a new documentary exploring the production of the Eighth Doctor’s 1996 TV movie, and how it found a community of fans after years of being the underdog.
A hail mary chucked into the void, the Doctor Who movie was meant to be the life jacket to keep a dying franchise afloat after its slow death and cancellation seven years earlier. Its later years were marred by controversy, including accusations of too much violence, weak scripts, and the infamous mistreatment of Sixth Doctor actor Colin Baker to the point that he refused to return for his own regeneration. Yet looking back, this movie is less an attempt to grab at what came before, and more a sign of things yet to come, and I don’t think the fans were ready for it. Maybe they are now.
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Effortlessly played by Paul McGann, the Eighth Doctor was a cheesy romantic who fell for his companion, swaggering and monologuing to his villains in a grand diplomatic fashion. He was all about being theatrical, disarming his enemies with his charm and wit before cutting them down. In many ways, Eight was the proto-Ten, with McGann being the David Tennant before Tennant. Except, at the time, that’s not what the Doctor was, nor what its fans expected. They wanted a scientific and bizarre alien who was intellectual but unusual, disconnected from humans and treating them more like friends and assistants than equals. The idea of the Doctor forming romantic attachments or being flirty felt at odds with the kind of show it was.
The movie started by reintroducing us to Sylvester McCoy’s colder, more manipulative Seventh Doctor, before a rogue gang gunfight forced him to regenerate not only into a new actor but a whole
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