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Post by nucleusofswarm on Jan 15, 2017 17:23:19 GMT
This is not about alternate scripts or if they pursued this or that other direction pre-1996, but if the actual 96 movie had been a bigger hit. What would a 90s NuWho be like, under the very possible stewardship of Matthew Jacobs (if not showrunner, at least being a regular contributor)?
Given what Jacobs wrote fed into a good deal of how the 8 novels would go, would it be basically tv versions of Alien Bodies, Father Time and Ancestor Cell? What would a Jacobs era be like, especially given 2 key things: 1) a lot of the current regulars would've still been in their career infancy and not overly likely to suddenly uproot to America to work on the show, and 2) this was just before the likes of Buffy and X Files changed the whole genre TV and showrunner scene. Could a Jacobs Who have been that gamechanger, instead of Whedon or Carter?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 19, 2017 0:07:52 GMT
This is not about alternate scripts or if they pursued this or that other direction pre-1996, but if the actual 96 movie had been a bigger hit. What would a 90s NuWho be like, under the very possible stewardship of Matthew Jacobs (if not showrunner, at least being a regular contributor)? Given what Jacobs wrote fed into a good deal of how the 8 novels would go, would it be basically tv versions of Alien Bodies, Father Time and Ancestor Cell? What would a Jacobs era be like, especially given 2 key things: 1) a lot of the current regulars would've still been in their career infancy and not overly likely to suddenly uproot to America to work on the show, and 2) this was just before the likes of Buffy and X Files changed the whole genre TV and showrunner scene. Could a Jacobs Who have been that gamechanger, instead of Whedon or Carter?
Honestly, no. I think the legacy of Who would have been tarnished - The Doctor wasn't even allowed to be properly alien because the name Time Lord was thought to be too off-putting for American viewers! (No offense, American posters, it's not you I have a problem with) From the plans for The Doctor to find his Father and the unwelcome, overdone sprouting of the Who mythos, it would have been a narrowier, more generic series with none of the magic of the original. And with Matthew Jacobs planning for original Doctors to pop up, I don't think he really understood what made the original series connect with it's audience. In the end, Doctor Who is about monsters and the mystery of The Doctor, most of the mythos originated as gimmicks to tell a story and to add to that. Buffy only was Buffy because the network didn't have high hopes for it.
If someone had pulled back Jacobs on refering back to the mythos, I think it would have found an audience in the US. But, I don't think it would have been Doctor Who.
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Post by nucleusofswarm on Jan 19, 2017 11:05:57 GMT
This is not about alternate scripts or if they pursued this or that other direction pre-1996, but if the actual 96 movie had been a bigger hit. What would a 90s NuWho be like, under the very possible stewardship of Matthew Jacobs (if not showrunner, at least being a regular contributor)? Given what Jacobs wrote fed into a good deal of how the 8 novels would go, would it be basically tv versions of Alien Bodies, Father Time and Ancestor Cell? What would a Jacobs era be like, especially given 2 key things: 1) a lot of the current regulars would've still been in their career infancy and not overly likely to suddenly uproot to America to work on the show, and 2) this was just before the likes of Buffy and X Files changed the whole genre TV and showrunner scene. Could a Jacobs Who have been that gamechanger, instead of Whedon or Carter?
Honestly, no. I think the legacy of Who would have been tarnished - The Doctor wasn't even allowed to be properly alien because the name Time Lord was thought to be too off-putting for American viewers! (No offense, American posters, it's not you I have a problem with) From the plans for The Doctor to find his Father and the unwelcome, overdone sprouting of the Who mythos, it would have been a narrowier, more generic series with none of the magic of the original. And with Matthew Jacobs planning for original Doctors to pop up, I don't think he really understood what made the original series connect with it's audience. In the end, Doctor Who is about monsters and the mystery of The Doctor, most of the mythos originated as gimmicks to tell a story and to add to that. Buffy only was Buffy because the network didn't have high hopes for it.
If someone had pulled back Jacobs on refering back to the mythos, I think it would have found an audience in the US. But, I don't think it would have been Doctor Who.
I already stated this on the 8th Doc thread, but Jacobs threw out Leekey's human-father-odysesey idea. Maybe some elements may, may, have been used, but ostensibly, that wasn't his idea. In fact, when he was brought on, he actually advocated to bring more of the continuity back in, which explains why the Move was so top heavy.
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Post by dalekbuster523finish on Jan 19, 2017 14:26:56 GMT
I imagine we'd have seen a series full of reboots of classic series serials such as Marco Polo and Genesis of the Daleks.
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Post by nucleusofswarm on Jan 19, 2017 15:37:12 GMT
I am only got to restate this one more time, as I really don't like repetition and want to see discussions move forwards.
The Leekey bible and the TV movie have nothing to do with each other. They are seperated by about 3 years. Jacobs threw out the Leekey bible. Jacobs told Segal the Leekey reboot/remake path was the wrong approach, and wanted to keep the canon in.
McGann wasn't going to be doing a ton of remakes if the TV movie had been a hit, or have a whole to-do with his quasi-mystical father and junk-pirate Cybermen/Cybs. All that business was before that, and did not involve Jacobs. That was one of the possible ideas pre the movie's development, but otherwise unrelated. It's like Gatiss' proposed fantasy reboot for Who in 05, or Lawrence Miles' animation pilot: possible paths, but not directly linked to the end product. This is a misconception that has haunted online discussions of 8 for close to two decades now, and I, for one, am tired of hearing it as it is innaccurate.
If we could move the discussions back to a possible Jacobs era, and not conflated Leekey remakes, that would be much appreciated.
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Post by dalekbuster523finish on Jan 19, 2017 16:41:56 GMT
I am only got to restate this one more time, as I really don't like repetition and want to see discussions move forwards. The Leekey bible and the TV movie have nothing to do with each other. They are seperated by about 3 years. Jacobs threw out the Leekey bible. Jacobs told Segal the Leekey reboot/remake path was the wrong approach, and wanted to keep the canon in.
McGann wasn't going to be doing a ton of remakes if the TV movie had been a hit, or have a whole to-do with his quasi-mystical father and junk-pirate Cybermen/Cybs. All that business was before that, and did not involve Jacobs. That was one of the possible ideas pre the movie's development, but otherwise unrelated. It's like Gatiss' proposed fantasy reboot for Who in 05, or Lawrence Miles' animation pilot: possible paths, but not directly linked to the end product. This is a misconception that has haunted online discussions of 8 for close to two decades now, and I, for one, am tired of hearing it as it is innaccurate. If we could move the discussions back to a possible Jacobs era, and not conflated Leekey remakes, that would be much appreciated. I didn't say remakes, I said reboots. Essentially the same story, but told in a different narrative. See Jurassic World.
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Post by ulyssessarcher on Jan 19, 2017 19:56:34 GMT
If the TV movie had worked, we would never have had Big Finish.
That pretty much sums it up, IMO.
"Sometimes I thank God, for unanswered prayers, remember when youre talkin to the Man upstairs, and just because He doesn't answer, doesn't mean He don't care. Some of God's greatest gifts, are unanswered prayers" Garth Brooks
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2017 1:56:11 GMT
If we could move the discussions back to a possible Jacobs era, and not conflated Leekey remakes, that would be much appreciated. The idea of remakes hadn't been entirely abandoned, Segal was still ruminating on whether or not they could adapt some of the stories lost from the Big Finish archives. They'd have likely transformed beyond all recognition by the end of the scripting process, but it would have been interesting to see a story spawned from something like The Daleks' Master Plan or The Moonbase. I wonder if they'd gotten wind of the Lost Stories, if they'd attempted adapting something like The Nightmare Fair? Casting that aside though... If the telefilm had worked in America as intended, we'd have had something close to six telefilms a year and I think we might have had two versions of the pilot. One where Chang Lee and Grace are dropped back off in San Francisco and another where she accepted the Doctor's invitation to travel. Actually, a really interesting twist would have been to have him go down with her to celebrate the New Year's and getting caught up in something else next adventure coming directly from America. Paul McGann expressed a desire to completely reinterpret his character from what we'd seen, so I'm guessing that we would have gotten a Doctor much more in line with what we saw from Big Finish than this one story. Being in its third year, The X-Files had more or less started to hit its peak with its mythological arc of government conspiracy and I think that we would have eventually seen something very similar bleed over into Doctor Who. Perhaps they would have explored questions left over from the pilot or developed an arc surrounding a power struggle between the Time Lords and the Daleks, but from the position of a shadowy proxy war instead of centre stage (seeing as the Cold War was now something people could discuss with ease). With Pip and Jane Baker's expression of interest, it's likely that we may have also seen submissions from familiar writers like Marc Platt, Kate Orman or Jonathan Blum. As the show was celebrated for its quintessential Britishness during Thirty Years in the TARDIS and a lot of the preexisting fanbase would have been part of that locale, I think the Jacobs/Segal era may have tried to balance out the overt Americanisms with more European locales and possible methods of storytelling. There was a lot to be gained by upping the exoticism of history and alien worlds. It's improbable that they'd have gotten director Geoffrey Sax to come back for every story, so the style of the show would have likely mellowed somewhat from the in-your-face style we'd seen here. The Daleks would certainly have made a return, although in what form is extremely difficult to say. Going by the aesthete of the pilot, I think we'd probably be getting something closer to the Amicus Daleks, although there's every possibility that the spider Daleks would have been repurposed for this new direction (as they were in Fire and Brimstone). All in all, Doctor Who would have looked very different to what we know today.
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Post by nucleusofswarm on Jan 20, 2017 14:07:58 GMT
If we could move the discussions back to a possible Jacobs era, and not conflated Leekey remakes, that would be much appreciated. The idea of remakes hadn't been entirely abandoned, Segal was still ruminating on whether or not they could adapt some of the stories lost from the Big Finish archives. They'd have likely transformed beyond all recognition by the end of the scripting process, but it would have been interesting to see a story spawned from something like The Daleks' Master Plan or The Moonbase. I wonder if they'd gotten wind of the Lost Stories, if they'd attempted adapting something like The Nightmare Fair? True, but not in the fashion that Leekey proposed where it was a drastic overhaul. That remark was more about just how tiring it gets when every discussion about a possible 8 TV series always goes back to Leekey, when Jacobs was going in the other direction. It's one of those annoying misconceptions that comes back more times than a Moffat companion.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2017 14:58:06 GMT
The idea of remakes hadn't been entirely abandoned, Segal was still ruminating on whether or not they could adapt some of the stories lost from the Big Finish archives. They'd have likely transformed beyond all recognition by the end of the scripting process, but it would have been interesting to see a story spawned from something like The Daleks' Master Plan or The Moonbase. I wonder if they'd gotten wind of the Lost Stories, if they'd attempted adapting something like The Nightmare Fair? True, but not in the fashion that Leekey proposed where it was a drastic overhaul. That remark was more about just how tiring it gets when every discussion about a possible 8 TV series always goes back to Leekey, when Jacobs was going in the other direction. It's one of those annoying misconceptions that comes back more times than a Moffat companion. It's always a risk with long histories unfortunately, particularly considering that Paul McGann only had a single on-screen appearance to his name for a very long time. Personally, I've never been a particular fan of doing a hard reboot on a long-running series with a varying cast. Soft reboots like what the show did with Terror of the Autons, Attack of the Cybermen and Remembrance of the Daleks were often pretty successful at getting everything more or less back on track and I think it's always a bit churlish to completely wipe out your predecessors' work. I'm not a fan of the Moffat era's interpretation, but that doesn't mean I'd write a story specifically to throw out all of their stories. Ultimately, because well-meant or not it leads to situations where you actually cheapen stories that have come before you by turning legitimate drama into something much less. I have to admit that the idea to use the cracks in time as a way of restarting NuWho and making it a plot point at the same time was a nice touch, even if it did lead to constant resets and backtracking later on.
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Post by escalus5 on Jan 20, 2017 20:29:18 GMT
I would have been happy to see McGann and Jacobs continue with a series. The only problem I had with the pilot was its cheesy '90s Fox look, from the drab photography to the usual tax break Vancouver locations. I would have rather it continued on a network with more money to spare and stronger talent behind the camera. Otherwise it would end up resembling another X-Files knockoff.
None of the other things really bothered me -- not the "half-human" thing, not McCoy's regeneration, Roberts' performance, etc.
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