Doctor Who: 4 Reasons Why Aborted American Remake Would Have Been Terrible

1. The Stories

Doctor Who Leeky Bible Concept Art The Amblin Doctor Who would have drawn the majority of its story inspiration from the original series, adapting a large number of serials with very few changes including Tomb Of The Cybermen, The Ark In Space, and The Daemons. But there were also plans to adapt other stories more loosely. A remake of The Abominable Snowmen called The Yeti would have seen the Doctor travel to Nepal in 1953, run into Sir Edmund Hilary, and eventually discover a tribe of peaceful Neanderthals living on Mt Everest. An interesting aspect of this story outline is that it completely abandons the idea of the Yeti being robotic and of the Great Intelligence controlling them, and inserts a more contemporary histroical figure into it. The last of these is rarely done in Doctor Who. Also on the cards was a much more historically accurate remake of the First Doctor story The Gunfighters titled Don€™t Shoot I€™m The Doctor, an adaptation of the Cybermen story Earthshock featuring Amblin€™s reimagined Cybermen, and a completely original story set onboard a pirate ship where the Doctor would have tried to determine if hi s father may have actually been the pirate Blackbeard. Which isn€™t any less nonsensical than anything else that was planned when you think about it. The biggest problem with adapting thse stories was that they all had runtimes of between 100 and 150 minutes, which provided a huge amount of time to set up and tell the story in a great deal of depth. There€™s no indication that any of these remade stories would have had more than one episode devoted to them which, in a slot on commercial American TV, would give them a runtime of around forty-two minutes. If you try condensing something like Genesis Of The Daleks or The Talons Of Weng-Chiang into three quarters of an hour, it will fail miserably. Pretty much everything that was planned for this remake flew in the face of Doctor Who€™s spirit and history so its unsurprising that the entire thing was moved to Fox and reworked from the ground up as the 1996 TV Movie with only a few of the original concepts bleeding through such as the Doctor being half human. And we€™re still hoping for a retcon of that.
Contributor
Contributor

JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.