10 Doctor Who Flops The BBC Has Buried

With Doctor Who having one of the largest, most enduring fanbases in pop-culture, any project bearing that brand name is guaranteed to be given a great deal of attention.

But what isn't guaranteed is that the projects themselves will be popular or high-quality, or that the fanbase will respond to them in a positive manner.

Indeed, with so many spinoff shows, video games, comics, movies, audio dramas, and animations having been produced throughout Doctor Who's long, 60-year lifespan, it's inevitable that there are some the BBC probably wants you to forget.

Perhaps the broadcaster is actively ignoring said projects, or hiding them, or has taken steps to remove them from canon. Or, alternatively, perhaps the critical or commercial failure of the projects in question makes it glaringly obvious that nobody - including the BBC - wants anything to do with them.

While not all of the following duds are totally irredeemable from a quality perspective (though some are), they undoubtedly failed in one way or another, and you have to imagine that the BBC wishes it could delete these outings from Doctor Who history.

Doctor Who hasn't had the best of luck in the video game space.

Though things are looking more positive lately with Maze Theory's solid work on The Lonely Assassins and The Edge Of Reality, the majority of previous titles - from old-school fare like The First Adventure, to the recent MMO Worlds In Time - have either reviewed poorly, flopped, or disappointed fans. Sometimes all three!

But while we're singling out individual projects, one of the most notable failures in Doctor Who's gaming catalogue is the 1997 release Destiny Of The Doctors, which initially showed a lot of promise due to the involvement of several actors from the show (including Tom Baker, Anthony Ainley, and Nicholas Courtney), alongside Terrance Dicks, one of Doctor Who's very best writers.

Unfortunately though, the final product proved a big ol' letdown.

Bizarrely, the player didn't even control the Doctor, instead stepping into the shoes of a jellyfish-like alien called the Graak - and despite having a limitless universe to explore, the game also took place in dull, repetitive environments. But arguably its worst offence was its sleep-inducing gameplay, which didn't come anywhere close to capturing the excitement or wonder of the show.

All you really need to know is that one of the game's more favourable reviews labelled it "a piece of crap", so it really isn't surprising that this underwhelming title has essentially been discarded from Doctor Who memory.