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Post by nucleusofswarm on Jan 6, 2018 1:30:20 GMT
So, let's talk about the infamous American reimagining of the show, courtesy of Amblin and the man behind HBO's Spawn and Night Sins. Like it? Hate it? Confused by it? (For those not in the know: tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Leekley_Bible)
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Post by SG. on Jan 6, 2018 2:02:13 GMT
It reads like someone didn't have a clue what the show was meant to be about and wrote everything based on Wikipedia articles, or whatever the equivalent was then.
Also, they really really wanted everything to be set in America, didn't they? Talons of Weng-Chiang... in New York? Come off it.
EDIT: Having said that, a story focusing on the outcasts of Gallifrey wasn't a bad idea.
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Post by J.A. Prentice on Jan 6, 2018 4:06:35 GMT
I've heard conflicting reports as to whether the remake stories were actual stories they wanted to do or examples of what Doctor Who was for writers/executives unfamiliar witht the format that were never seriously considered. If it's the latter, the series might have turned out all right. If it's the former... not so much. Either way, I think we were better off with the EDAs and Big Finish.
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Post by theotherjosh on Jan 6, 2018 4:14:00 GMT
Thanks for sharing! I wasn't familiar with this. I don't think it's an inherently bad concept and anything can seem weird and gimmicky if stripped of context and summarized in a single sentence. It could have been good, bad or anything in between. My guess would be that if it had been produced it would have followed an arc similar to that of The Stranger, starting off with its Who DNA showing very clearly but eventually diverging off into its own mythology as it went along.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2018 4:15:36 GMT
Ehh... *equivocating noises* It could maybe have worked, so long as they dropped the hard reboot idea and instead bolted it onto the preexisting canon of the show. The Doctor being a fugitive on the run from a Gallifrey that is now under the total rule of the Master feels like a great backstory to have, but not necessarily to show in a pilot. Keeping the Doctor's search for his father vague like the reasons for his initial departure in An Unearthly Child could've worked rather well. The audience could ask week-after-week: who is he actually searching for? Why? Is he looking for answers? Does it have something to do with overthrowing the Master?
Taking some of the later entries of the bible less literally could have yielded some potentially nice stories as well. A story like The Talons of Weng-Chiang in present-day New York? A story like The Celestial Toymaker in a The Mind Robber meets Aliens future sci-fi kind of setting? Some of the original ideas aren't necessarily bad either. The Yeti with Sir Edmund Hillary, the Dalai-Lama and a race of Neanderthals reads like one of the more optimistic entries from The X-Files... The Doctor pressganged into a treasure hunt against Blackbeard in The Pirates feels like the prototype to an archetypal Eighth Doctor story... The story set amongst The Outcasts could have been this series's version of Dalek...
It'd take some wrangling, but I reckon that there could've been potentially been a good series borne out of this. I think you'd need a Grace Holloway to make it work though, an outsider who can poke and prod at things already well known to the Doctor and Borusa (probably a good idea to make him a different, original character too). I like the image of this adventurer off in the universe with a grand backstory, the avatar of his Ship providing a then-unique spin on the TARDIS and Grace keeping everything accessible. Rope in William Gibson to do a Cybermen story, Paul Haggis to write that Sea Devils-like story on a Louisiana oil rig, Coleman Luck for that New York story, etc; it could have potentially had legs.
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Post by whiskeybrewer on Jan 8, 2018 12:55:07 GMT
There are some intriguing concepts in it, but Wolfie's take would have been the best route
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