10 Ways Doctor Who Was Almost Completely Different

5. Ridley Scott Was Originally Meant To Design The Daleks

Michael Jackson Doctor Who
BBC

The Daleks are the single most iconic monster in Doctor Who history, and have endured for such a long time thanks to their memorable look and freaky robotic voice. The creatures were created by Raymond Cusick, but they were one tiny scheduling conflict away from having someone else design them instead: famed movie director Ridley Scott.

Over the past 40 years, Scott has directed films like Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Prometheus, The Martian, Black Hawk Down, and Hannibal, but in the early 1960s, he worked as a designer at the BBC, and was originally assigned to work on Doctor Who's second ever serial, titled The Daleks.

This role would've had Scott overseeing the creature design for the episodes, which meant that he was almost one of the key creative forces behind the creation of the Daleks. Scott was unable to do this job because of a scheduling conflict, but given how his career panned out from here, he's probably not too mad about it.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.