Doctor Who: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About The TARDIS

4. The Police Box Was A Budgetary Decision

While the perennial police box design has served Doctor Who tremendously well over the years, and has probably generated its fair share of revenue from all that merchandising, the original concept behind making the TARDIS a permanent police box has very little to do with character or the show's particular brand of peculiarity. No, the TARDIS's design was maintained to keep the budget of the once-small BBC show as low as possible. From that perspective, it makes perfect sense. Why bother spending a great deal of money on either a stereotypical alien spaceship/time machine, or else a properly functional TARDIS with a working chameleon circuit, when a police box would do the trick just fine? In fact, the TARDIS's unconventional design, to this day, reflects what people love best about the Doctor: his humanity-loving, inimitable individuality. Since its original design, the TARDIS has undergone some subtle permutations, including the deletion (and subsequent re-addition) of the St. John's Ambulance insignia, and a few understated colour changes, among other things. Despite the design being made in the interest of saving money, the creative team perhaps unknowingly created a vastly important symbol to reflect the uniqueness of Doctor Who, setting it permanently apart and above other, more conventional science fiction.