10 Ways Modern Doctor Who Changed The Show Forever

Digital effects were in their infancy towards the end of Doctor Who's classic era, and were largely too expensive to achieve on a tiny BBC budget – though the bubble traps in Time and the Rani and the Sylvester McCoy title sequence were early indicators of what was to come.

It would be another 15 years or so before Doctor Who properly embraced CGI, once the likes of Jurassic Park, Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars prequels had shown what was possible to achieve.

Though Doctor Who hardly had the budget of those epic Hollywood productions, the brilliant work of the recently-closed VFX house The Mill did give us alien worlds like we had never seen before in Doctor Who. From the moment the Doctor and Rose look out on the expanding sun in The End of the World, we knew that Doctor Who had changed forever.

And it wasn't just alien spaceships or planets that were achieved via CGI – aliens were too! The Reapers from Father's Day were purely CGI creations, while other monsters like the Daleks and Slitheen were augmented with CGI to increase their numbers, or make them look more threatening.

While the CGI didn't always cohere with its practical surroundings, it was clear that this was a brand-new world for Doctor Who, and would only improve the show going forward. Who would've thought in 2005 that we'd eventually get something as technically ambitious as Wild Blue Yonder, Dot and Bubble, or the living cartoon Mr Ring-a-Ding in the upcoming Season 2?

Who knows what crazy effects the show will be pulling off in another 20 years, and we have that initial leap made by the 2005 revival to thank for it.