10 Times Doctor Who Reused Footage And Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

The other entries on this list cover reused shots within Doctor Who. But this entry concerns a shot originally created for a spinoff.

The climax of Journey’s End saw all of the Tenth Doctor’s companions band together to help tow the Earth back home, including K9.

K9 had made a triumphant return to Doctor Who, alongside Sarah Jane Smith, in School Reunion. Both also appeared in spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures – though rights complications limited K9's involvement (hence why he spent a bunch of time consigned to a black hole).

K9 would eventually escape his spacey purgatory in The Mad Woman in the Attic, but as of Journey’s End he was still at the black hole, with the script requiring a shot of him materialising in Sarah Jane’s attic for a brief cameo (above).

Fortunately, one such shot already existed – from the Sarah Jane Adventures story The Lost Boy (below), where K9 had made a rare in-person appearance. As we’ve established, CGI shots are expensive. Why make a new one when existing footage will do?

Indeed, this is a particularly clever bit of shot reuse – not least because only a small portion of the audience (who watched both shows) would've actually seen it before.