Time-Machine? Yeah!

November 14, 2011

"Doctor Who is ageless, light-on-his-feet, athletic, witty, wise, admirable while not perfect, and imminently replaceable. Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor, Hugh Grant and Hugh Jackman could all fit the profile."

—

This bullshit article.

Can I just…

(via knightsandblueboxes)

..this is not acceptable.

(via sunflowers-and-feathers)

RED telephone booth. No.

(via melloncholera)

While I want David Yates to touch nothing I love, here are the reasons I am at least morbidly excited about this:

1) The reactions of fandom, as above, will be snarky and witty and beautiful

2) I like watching metaphorical trainwrecks.

3) Again, I do not doubt the wonderful levels fandom will go to make fun of this and ruin any prospects of success. It will be fascinating to watch.

I mean, what an all-around, no-good, quite-terrible idea.

(via panasonicyouth)

But, um, Hugh Grant has already played the Doctor.

(starting at 15:21)

P.S., this really doesn’t seem like a good idea. And not for the reasons you’d think, to me anyway. Not because I don’t want to see Doctor Who on the big screen (I do! It’d look lovely there!), not because I don’t think another team of creatives couldn’t also do a good job (it’s Doctor Who, change is okay), not because I don’t think Doctor Who should have two different continuities running simultaneously (lol, that already happens with all of the expanded universe ALL THE TIME)

But rather I just don’t think it’s a format very well suited to film. It is the perfect format for serial storytelling that allows a serialized story to never grow stagnant. When people ask you what Doctor Who is about, you tell them it’s about a time-travelling alien who can change his face, but in individual episodes that’s not ever really what those episodes are about. The real answer to “What is Doctor Who about?” is “Whatever the fuck it wants to be about, because it can do literally ANYTHING and GO ON FOREVER.” And individual episode of Doctor Who might be about Charles Dickens or it might be about black holes or it might be about tourism gone awry or it might be about small town British family drama or it might be about anything.

Which is why the ongoing storytelling medium of television is perfect for it. Television has the time to explore the scope of it, the possibilities.

A single Doctor Who movie would either just be, like, a two-part episode made with a really exceptional budget, which wouldn’t get the overall premise across to the audience very well at all, and so you may just as well skip all the bits that make it Doctor Who and make a movie about whatever you were going to make this particular Doctor Who movie about and just make it an original movie instead

OR it would be so continuity and exposition heavy, with such a complicated plot in order to necessitate all of the bits about Time Lords and Regeneration so that we can introduce them all that it would just be kind of silly and overly complicated.

The only way I could see this working is if, instead of trying to create a new Movie Continuity that is derivative and not as good as the TV one (RED PHONE BOOTH?!?!?), you pulled a Star Trek and set it in the TV continuity but as an origin story. And I might actually watch a Doctor Who origin story movie that follows Teenage/Young Adult William Hartnell Doctor as he steals a time machine and runs away from the Time Lords. Maybe. And you would have YEARS of time before he become Grandfather to Susan to play with there, while still starting out somewhere where new viewers can jump in.

Except that I don’t know that they’d do a good job of it. Because the tone of the thing is tricky, and people who don’t know Doctor Who might not get what we’re watching the origin story OF, or why we care, or why those Time Lord people are wearing such ridiculous robes.

(Source: cloysterbell, via panasonicyouth)

3:09pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMbepxBxORqJ

(Notes: 78)