Dr. Who and the Daleks (Gordon Flemyng, 1966) One must admit: I came to the party late. I came to the party as an adult. I came to the party as an American. I came to the party post-Douglas Adams. What I knew about "Who" before that was a professional aside—I did sound design earlier in life and a lot of the BBC's licensed Sound Effects Library (from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) had a LOT of Dr. Who effects with all sorts of titles like "Tardis Interior" and "Take Off" and "Dalek Base"—there were also lots of "Dr. Who" sound effects record albums cluttering the bins (back in "the day" of vinyl and record stores). In my sound design duties, I didn't use them much. They were primitive electronics using lots of reverb and "loop rings" and feedback and, frankly, I could do that myself. They were best used as "camp" and "humor" effects. They were "hokey," I snootily thought.
What I didn't know is that they were also beloved.
Oh, I got into it once it got rebooted in 2005, there had already been eight Doctors (not counting the subject of these films) and such as Stephen Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Neil Gaiman and (good lord!) Richard Curtis started to write them. The old shows—which a local PBS station runs ad infinitum—I never warmed to. But, then, I hadn't yet cracked the realization that a Dr. Who plot had to be something that a child might come up with for an afternoon's game, but laced with an adult's cultural knowledge.
There were two films made for the theaters, with slightly higher budgets—on film, on location, widescreen and in colour—and their stories were culled from the television series' highlights, but the dogma of Who was mostly ignored.
This Dr. Who (played in both films by a fussy Peter Cushing) was merely an eccentric inventor—not a Time Lord—very much Earth-bound and human, but could travel time and space by his marvelous transport The Tardis—police phone-box on the outside, large control room on the inside. He is joined on the Tardis' voyage by granddaughters Susan (Roberta Tovey), Barbara (Jennie Linden) and Ian Chesterton (Roy Castle), Barbara's beau. They find themselves on the planet Skaros (although it isn't named in the film) which has suffered an atomic war. The two warring parties were the Thals, humanoid creatures (with much make-up) living in the jungle, and the Daleks, a species that encase themselves in maneuverable metal housings to protect themselves from resulting radiation who live in a large city-complex. Dr. Who and his companions—or as they function in the Who-niverse "exposition-receivers"—find an antidote to the radiation, and, visiting the city under the pretext of fixing a Tardis component, come to realize that the Daleks are not some poor little travelling versions of spam-in-a-can, but bent on eliminating the Thals and taking the planet for their own.
Excuse me. Not eliminate. But, "EX-TERMM-I-NAAATE".
The Daleks aren't exactly capable villains; you have to take for granted that the fearful reactions of our heroes are warranted. Oh, they threaten a lot in their ring-modulated voices (in English), but their arms are topped by a very clumsy double claw or, unimpressively, a plunger emanating fire extinguisher fumes. But, there are a lot of them and their hive-mind singularity of purpose gives them a Nazi-like implacability. But, they were popular with the TV series' young viewers, who were awed by the inhuman qualities of the Daleks.
The film is crudely done, and there are incidental little elements that make one roll one's eyes, but would energize a 6-year-old by letting them know they were smarter than the people on-screen. It was popular enough in Britain, and did even cause a stir in America. But, it was enough to encourage a sequel, also with Cushing.
It doesn't take long before the answer is revealed—a Dalek is rising out of the river Thames! The Daleks have invaded Earth. With the inevitable separation of the heroes, things start to look increasingly bleak: Tom and the Doctor are taken prisoner aboard a Dalek ship and threatened with being turned into Robomen! Susan and Louise are captured by resisters and held in the London Underground, where they learn that there's an imminent attack on the Dalek ship. Susan stays behind with the wheelchair bound Dortmun and the tramp Wyler, while Louise joins the attack. The three decide that their best use will be to travel to a rumored Dalek mining camp located in Bedfordshire...Susan leaves a scrawled chalk message on the door for her grandfather telling her where she's going. "Meanwhile"...back on the Dalek ship, Tom and the Doctor are nearly turned into Robomen, a process that dresses them in black latex jumpsuits and clamps a motorcycle helmet with ill-fitting goggles on their heads while lights flash and their natural tendencies to "just go with it" are enhanced turning them into non-critical thinkers, conspiracy-theory "specialists" and "patriots" ready to subvert any system designed to create a civilized democratic society for one ruled by self-obsessed autocrats. Any six year old will recognize this as a metaphor for the rise of Nazism in Germany, but once puberty scrambles the hormones, one forgets this and confuses it with their right to cherish freedoms that make them appear more powerful than people who remember history.
So, at this point, everybody is at the Daleks' concentration camp with the collective objective of freeing their fellow Londoners and defeating the evil-saltshakers. Their weakness, it turns out, is linked to their ultimate plan of dropping a bomb into the Earth's core and replacing it with a mechanism to turn the Earth into a giant space-ship. However, The Doctor looking at the mine-shafts plans reveals that if they can somehow deflect the bomb to a shaft that is equidistant of Earth's magnetic poles, the resulting explosion would pull the metallic Daleks into Earth's core, crushing them like grapes and destroying them utterly. And so, that is just what they do, crushing the Daleks, saving the Earth, and convincing British youngsters not to go into the mining industry. Good triumphs, the Tardis returns Tom to the point ten minutes before they initially picked him up, so that, knowing what had happened in the past, he can successfully apprehend the criminals he let escape the first time and allowing him a chance to guest-star in the TV series when it gets rebooted in the much-more-near-future. I'm sure there were some audience members who wish they had a Tardis so they could get the two hours they just spent back. "EX-TERRRMM-I-NAAATE!"
One has to say that, however puerile and juvenile the whole thing is, it certainly looks better than the previous film, probably because the film-makers had a better idea of what London looked like after a blitz than they did an alien planet, and that Dalek ship actually looks pretty nifty. And there is one character who is particularly fascinating, and that is Brockley (played by Philip Madoc), a black marketeer who doesn't give a hoot what the struggle is about, he'll just use it to his advantage. The character is such a snake and the actor plays him so matter-of-factly that he stands out from the rest of the cast just for taking the role so seriously. He gets a lovely "that'll show 'im" death, as well.Who-afficianados in "Whoville" tend to look askance at these films as "not-according-to-canon" and best left undiscussed like other humiliating embarrassments, such as "The Star Wars Holiday Special" and Marjorie Taylor Greene. But, still, it's Peter Cushing in an iconic role, which, like his turn as Sherlock Holmes, may not be as true as it could be, but is still a game "go" at it. "Okay, go back to your homes, everything's alright now, bye!"
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