Back in the run-up to the premiere of the TV Movie, the Internet had been awash with speculation about it, particularly the news that the Daleks would be making an appearance. Those who were around back then scoured the virgin territory of previously unseen newsboards and chats to find grainy animation tests of the CGI spider Daleks - which everyone hated on principle, of course, but were still psyched about the possibility of seeing. Then came the actual movie, and all we got of the Daleks were the voices. God, those voices... It's a sign of how universally loathed this sequence is that you can't find a single clip of it on YouTube. Instead, there are plenty of revisions that either take the audio out entirely, insert footage of Anthony Ainley from the PC game Destiny Of The Doctors, or dub in Gordon Tipple's original voiceover as the Master (it appears we dodged a bullet there, as it's far inferior to McGann's narration). The Daleks' voices were done by the director, who somehow managed to f**k them up despite his being British. In his defense, Dalek voices were notoriously difficult to reproduce faithfully - the original series itself sometimes ran into trouble with it, as is evidenced by the first two stories and by Day Of The Daleks - but this is barely a passable attempt. Yeah, spider Daleks would've been a lot better.
Tony Whitt has previously written TV, DVD, and comic reviews for CINESCAPE, NOW PLAYING, and iF MAGAZINE. His weekly COMICSCAPE columns from the early 2000s can still be found archived on Mania.com. He has also written a book of gay-themed short stories titled CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONS, available on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle format. Whitt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
