The Celestial Toymaker The Nightmare Fair Divided Loyalties |
BBC The Celestial Toymaker DVD animated version |
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| Episodes | 4 |  |
| Story No# | 24 | |
| Production Code | Y | |
| Season | 3 | |
| Dates | Apr. 2, 1966 - Apr. 23. 1966 |
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With William Hartnell, Peter Purves, Jackie Lane.
Written by Brian Hayles. Script-edited by Gerry Davis. Directed by Bill Sellars. Produced by Innes Lloyd. |
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Synopsis: The Doctor, Steven, and Dodo are trapped by the Toymaker in his
world of deadly games. Only if the three win their assigned games will they
be allowed leave. And the Toymaker refuses to lose...
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A Review by Andrew McCaffrey 28/10/24
There are two main schools of thought when it comes to what the Doctor Who animated reconstructions should look like. Should the production attempt to re-create the look and feel for what would have been made at the time and what we would be looking at had the BBC not junked the episodes. Or should the producers realize that they are free from any constraints (either budgetary or technology-wise) and attempt to make the visuals "from scratch"?
When these releases began, I was firmly a traditionalist. Yes, it's possible to make visuals far outside the scope of what could have been done at the time of original broadcast, but I wanted to see a version of the story as close to what was made as possible. I liked that style of television and saw no reason to go above and beyond what would have been technically possible at the time.
In the years since, my mind has changed. The problem is that live action TV and animation are two different mediums, and what works in one does not always work in another. If you were storyboarding an animated story from scratch, you would never in a million years limit yourself to what was possible in a 1960s BBC TV studio where the action was filmed very close to a live TV production. It's too static and too limiting for animation.
Forget a whole episode, let's just imagine one scene. A typical scene of this era was filmed "as live" and could have two or three actors standing on a minimal set with a small number of cameras. For the middle length shots, there would be one, maybe two, cameras; as the scene progressed, the director could cut between them while also potentially switching to one or two other cameras in close ups to highlight which particular character was speaking.
This works perfectly well on TV because you have human faces to look at. Holding a single shot for 15 or 30 seconds is fine for a viewer. If the performers are charismatic and giving compelling performances, that's all you need.
But that same staging absolutely will not work if you replace the two or three living, breathing performers with stilted and stiffly moving animations. You simply cannot hold a shot on 2D images of faces for 30 seconds or more at a time without most viewers' attention beginning to wander. It doesn't mean animation can't do amazing things; it just means you can't do a shot for shot remake of something in one medium and expect it to translate to another.
Now, The Celestial Toymaker more than any other story really lends itself to having completely over-the-top visuals, and the animation team really went for it. I recently watched the animated reconstruction for two episodes of The Reign Of Terror, which in comparison as a purely historical drama does not lend itself to having anything but very straightforward visuals.
The Celestial Toymaker, with its surreal games and unnerving characters, looks really remarkable with the imagery turned up to 11. A lot of it looks genuinely creepy, and I found the new character models of the supporting characters, the clowns and the playing cards to be unsettling and --- more importantly --- visually engaging.
That said, it's possible to do a comparison between the animated Episode 4 and the surviving, existing Episode 4 and... in my view the "real" episode is the superior interpretation. This is not a slight against the animators or anyone involved in the reconstruction. They did a fantastic job. But to me nothing animated is going to be as much fun as watching William Hartnell, Michael Gough, Peter Purves and Jackie Lane giving their in-person performances. (It is interesting to note that stage and TV acting is a different kettle of fish from voice-over animated acting, and surely nobody at the time ever dreamed that the audio of their performance would be recycled for another production. I have to imagine that if they had, the vocal performances would have been altered accordingly.)
The biggest takeaway I had from the reconstruction is that The Celestial Toymaker is a good story but not a great story. It's a lot of fun; it's enjoyable to watch. But it sets up its premise in the middle of episode one --- the Doctor and companions must survive a series of child-like but deadly games --- and then just plays it out for episodes two, three and four. It never deviates from the premise; it doesn't subvert its premise; it just keeps going until it stops. This reconstruction didn't move The Celestial Toymaker episodes 1-3 to the top of the list of lost episodes I most hope are re-discovered but I would certainly jump to see them if they did all turn up again.