Doctor Who: 11 Previous Stories That The Peter Capaldi Era Should Learn From
4. The 1996 TV Movie
The year was 1996. It was 7 years since the original series had been off of the air. We all sat down eagerly to watch the series be revived that night. And we saw Jelly Babies. And we saw the sonic screwdriver. And we saw (sort of) Daleks. What we didn't see was an original story worth telling. Doctor Who was revived, and it was basically all the cr*p that someone who had seen one or two of the originally series episodes on public television while drunk might have remembered. The main failing of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie was not that it tried to be too American. It was not that it had to many 'kisses to the past'. It was not even that the way it killed Sylvester McCoy off was a little on the stupid side, (although it was). The main failing of the 1996 TV movie was that it played it safe. It was in every way the antithesis of Power of the Daleks, and it didn't dare take a single breath that it wasn't sure in advance that the fanbase would approve of. As good a Doctor as Paul McGann demonstrably was - and he was - his Doctor let us down. Because he wasn't brave enough to break new ground. Oh, and don't give the Daleks stupid new voices and storylines that are radically inconsistent with everything else we know about them. That'll be good.
Mikey is, in no particular order, a freelance writer, improvisational comedian, volunteer firefighter, playwright, Bon Vivant, and Jane Espenson enthusiast.
Born in the small mining town of Eden Prairie, MN, he has some 40 years later successfully moved about 20 miles north of there to the City of Brooklyn Center, MN where he lives with an unreasonable number of dogs.
If you'd like to hear him discuss something other than Doctor Who while pretending to be a dog, check out www.the42ndvizsla.blogspot.com or follow him on twitter at @the42ndVizlsa
