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DVD: Doctor Who - The Tomb of the Cybermen
BBC America Home Video
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Sometime in the 1970s, somebody at the BBC decided it would be a good housekeeping move to destroy a bunch of old Doctor Who footage from the 60s. Bad idea, actually. A tragedy, in fact, because it took away the majority of the work of the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, who had brought a wonderful sense of humor and compassion to the role. I picture that BBC exec being chased out of town by angry Who fans with torches and pitchforks. The good news is several complete series were discovered not too long ago and, thanks to the mind-boggling magic performed by the Doctor Who Restoration Team, they look radically better today than they did on those old TV screens when they first ran. The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) is one of these lost series, now available in its entirety on one extras-packed DVD.
The story involves an archeological expedition on the planet Taros, home of the extinct race of villainous creatures known as the Cyberman. The Doctor, along with his companions, Victoria (played by the lovely Deborah Watling) and Jamie (the nearly as lovely Fraser Hines), arrive just in time to join the explorers as they enter the fortress of the Cybermen. Some are there for the love of science, but of course some have ulterior motives, and as soon as these begin to materialize, that's when the real fun begins. On the usual BBC-imposed Whostring budget a near miracle was pulled off, as producer Peter Bryant and director Morris Barry created an underworld of frozen Cybermen and endless combinations of levers and switches of sinister consequence. After the impressive work by the Restoration Team, the image of the multi-tiered chambers filled with iced Cybermen is once again stunning, like something out of Metropolis, huge and foreboding. Naturally they cannot remain in their cells or we don't have an adventure, and a megalomaniac human by the name of Kleeg, who doesn't ever seem to learn his lessons, sees to that. The Doctor doesn't dominate the story, but he's the go-to guy, as always, and that's good news for the short-skirted Victoria and the slightly less short-skirted Jamie. Well, he's Scottish and partial to kilts. It's not his fault if he'd look feminine in a football uniform.
As with all the Doctor Who DVDs I've seen thus far, the bonus features are actually worth watching. The Who's Who feature gives you the lowdown on where each cast member is now, if they are anywhere now. Troughton, alas, is not. There's an unused piece of film made during an earlier adventure, one I don't want to call a "film clip" because that implies it was part of something else. This appears to have been some strange stand-alone piece of film one could call Daleks Gone Wild. Other bonus features include an optional audio commentary track by Watling and Hines, video of an interesting panel discussion by many surviving cast and crew members at a Doctor Who convention many years later (I don't have info on when), title screen tests, pop-up production notes, a photo gallery and a TV segment that looks behind the scenes at the BBC's special effects department where the models were created. All of this is a lot of fun, but the star is the show, and this gem is one of the finest in the entire series. To think it was lost for a quarter of a century, only to surface in Hong Kong, of all places. Hopefully most of Patrick Troughton's episodes will resurface over time, because he gave us a most interesting and loveable Doctor, and he deserves full recognition for that.
© 2004 - DJ Johnson