It is a serious treat to learn they recently recovered 11 old Doctor Who episodes from a storage closet in Nigeria, 9 of which have not been seen since they originally aired! And now we can watch the first few.
They have already digitally remastered two of them and made them available for download on iTunes, both Patrick Troughton stories. The Web of Fear previously existed only as a rumor except for episode 1, usually mentioned when talking about how Pertwee’s end as The Doctor came at the mandibles of his old spider foes, who we had never seen before. Every so often someone mentions that was also the episode where we were introduced to Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, later to be promoted, and mostly referred to as The Brigadier. Episode 3 is still MIA, but they have the original audio track and 11 stills to use to reconstruct it, so the story will be intact. How nice to have the rest of them back for the first time in forever, and the missing episode partially reconstructed!
The Enemy of the World has Patrick Troughton being both the Doctor and the bad guy, the first time that had happened (Tom Baker was later to reprise that in The Mind Of Evil). This one they only had episode 3 of previously, with this discovery they now have all 6. Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) are in both of these stories, and while we have seen a lot of Jamie, most of Victoria’s stories were lost, so I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about who she was and what she brought to the role of a Companion.
I also have to mention that the link to download them from iTunes didn’t work for me. The link did launch my iTunes app, but then I had to search for each title before I could find the correct link to buy and download it from. A bit of a pain, but I am willing to go through a lot more than that to get Doctor Who episodes I have not already watched dozens of times each!
My apologies for posting the moral equivalent of commercials this time,but the on-screen words pretty much matched up to my attitude on each episode, so I just posted them as is.