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Post by tingramretro on Aug 17, 2016 13:22:16 GMT -5
In the States, it is much, much less popular than your part of the world No, it really isn't. Dr. Who is huge here. My friends love it, my students love it, social media loves it, and there's tons of Dr. Who merchandise in the stores. I generally don't watch TV, but I've absorbed more about Dr. Who from casual chatter than, say, Walking Dead. It really is ubiquitously out there. Which is not to say you're expected to know about it, but I certainly did know the regeneration thing. No. Not at all. The new doctors recall everything from their past lives, and characters from those past lives often catch up with them again. I had a feeling it was rather better known in the US these days than was being indicated. Certainly, American fans seem to account for a large proportion of visitors to the Doctor Who Facebook page. |
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Post by Randle-El on Aug 17, 2016 15:58:54 GMT -5
The popularity of Doctor Who in the states is a more recent thing. I think it was started when Sci Fi Channel aired episodes of Christopher Eccleston's doctor about ten years ago. That exposed the show to a much larger audience. I was at Awesome Con in Washington DC earlier this summer, and Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman were one of the biggest draws.
That said, prior to Eccleston's tenure, the show had more of a cult following. I used to watch reruns on my local PBS station, but they aired the episodes late Saturday night, around 11 pm or midnight, in direct competition with Saturday Night Live. Not exactly a timespot that inspires a large, mainstream following. The Sci Fi Channel era improved its reach tremendously, and the show is definitely popular today, esp. with younger folks. But I would say in terms of mainstream appeal, it definitely pales in comparison to Star Trek or Star Wars. I would definitely NOT expect the average person in the U.S. to know that the Doctor regenerates, especially the over 30 crowd. Mention Doctor Who and they probably have some vague recollections about a tall English dude with a long scarf and an Afro and a blue telephone booth.
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Post by Icctrombone on Aug 17, 2016 16:33:06 GMT -5
In the early 80's Ny had a channel ( WNYC) that showed many BBC shows. They aired Blakes 7, Are you being served?, Dr. Who and a few other classic BBC shows. My younger brother was very into it at the time.
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Post by Icctrombone on Aug 17, 2016 16:34:25 GMT -5
Also, I have the entire Blakes 7 show which had 52 episodes. I actually recorded them all and transposed them to cd a few years ago. Great show.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Aug 17, 2016 20:11:57 GMT -5
Also, I have the entire Blakes 7 show which had 52 episodes. I actually recorded them all and transposed them to cd a few years ago. Great show. Blakes 7 was phenomenally good. I loved it as a kid and, maybe about five years ago, a couple of friends and I met every week to work our way through the whole thing from start to finish -- and it held up really well. The show had an absolutely minuscule budget, as borne out by the far-from-state-of-the-art special effects and sets. But the writing and the actor's portrayal of the main cast is so strong that it's simply a joy to watch regardless of how cheap it looks. |
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Post by berkley on Aug 17, 2016 20:27:01 GMT -5
I'm for the very basic, almost minimal form of continuity that means you try to be consistent as to a character's personality and background. This is why I'm not much tempted to read the current version of Doctor Strange, for example: they don't seem to me to have bothered with even this bare minimum. To take another example, it's why I'm usually dissatisfied with how the Eternals have been written by the various people who have dealt with them since the end of the Kirby series.
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Post by tingramretro on Aug 18, 2016 1:40:32 GMT -5
Also, I have the entire Blakes 7 show which had 52 episodes. I actually recorded them all and transposed them to cd a few years ago. Great show. Blake's 7 is, in my opinion, one of the greatest SF shows ever, and the final episode still one of the most memorable in television history. B7 is often dismissed for being cheap and having poor production values but despite the low budget, I think the writing put it in a completely different league to a lot of other shows of the time. The BBC really broke new ground with it, creating an ongoing show where the "heroes" were basically, when you actually thought about it, a bunch of self centred, murderous criminal misfits. Even Blake was an obsessive madman, willing to sacrifice innocents on a huge scale by destroying Star One just to win his private war. And Paul Darrow as Avon is one of the greatest anti-heroes ever. |
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Post by tingramretro on Aug 18, 2016 2:28:14 GMT -5
The popularity of Doctor Who in the states is a more recent thing. I think it was started when Sci Fi Channel aired episodes of Christopher Eccleston's doctor about ten years ago. That exposed the show to a much larger audience. I was at Awesome Con in Washington DC earlier this summer, and Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman were one of the biggest draws. That said, prior to Eccleston's tenure, the show had more of a cult following. I used to watch reruns on my local PBS station, but they aired the episodes late Saturday night, around 11 pm or midnight, in direct competition with Saturday Night Live. Not exactly a timespot that inspires a large, mainstream following. The Sci Fi Channel era improved its reach tremendously, and the show is definitely popular today, esp. with younger folks. But I would say in terms of mainstream appeal, it definitely pales in comparison to Star Trek or Star Wars. I would definitely NOT expect the average person in the U.S. to know that the Doctor regenerates, especially the over 30 crowd. Mention Doctor Who and they probably have some vague recollections about a tall English dude with a long scarf and an Afro and a blue telephone booth. An afro!!!? |
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Post by tingramretro on Aug 18, 2016 2:32:41 GMT -5
Also, I have the entire Blakes 7 show which had 52 episodes. I actually recorded them all and transposed them to cd a few years ago. Great show. Blakes 7 was phenomenally good. I loved it as a kid and, maybe about five years ago, a couple of friends and I met every week to work our way through the whole thing from start to finish -- and it held up really well. The show had an absolutely minuscule budget, as borne out by the far-from-state-of-the-art special effects and sets. But the writing and the actor's portrayal of the main cast is so strong that it's simply a joy to watch regardless of how cheap it looks. Most of the main cast, anyway; the exception being Tarrant, in my opinion. They never seemed to know quite what to do with him. I once read an interview with Steven Pacey, who played Tarrant. He was asked to sum up his character's personality. Pacey replied "Personality? I never knew he had one".  |
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Post by Icctrombone on Aug 18, 2016 4:00:15 GMT -5
Paul Darrow was great as Avon.
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Post by tingramretro on Aug 18, 2016 9:28:35 GMT -5
Paul Darrow was great as Avon. He was. He always got all the best lines, and his deadpan delivery made them unforgettable. Vila: " What about you?"
Avon: " What about me?"
Vila: "Why don't you go?"
Avon: " You are expendable".
Vila: "And you're not?"
Avon: "No, I am not. I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going". |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 18, 2016 12:39:05 GMT -5
Blake's 7 is, in my opinion, one of the greatest SF shows ever, and the final episode still one of the most memorable in television history. B7 is often dismissed for being cheap and having poor production values but despite the low budget, I think the writing put it in a completely different league to a lot of other shows of the time. The BBC really broke new ground with it, creating an ongoing show where the "heroes" were basically, when you actually thought about it, a bunch of self centred, murderous criminal misfits. Even Blake was an obsessive madman, willing to sacrifice innocents on a huge scale by destroying Star One just to win his private war. And Paul Darrow as Avon is one of the greatest anti-heroes ever. I haven't watched it since it was on live, so my opinion might change if I saw it again, but my impression, at the time, of the last series was that they trebled the SFX budget and recovered the money by slashing the writing budget. |
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Post by String on Aug 18, 2016 13:48:47 GMT -5
Also, I have the entire Blakes 7 show which had 52 episodes. I actually recorded them all and transposed them to cd a few years ago. Great show. It aggravates me to NO END that a proper collection of this show has yet to be released. The only current DVDs that I know about are Region 2 that I can't watch. I can go onto eBay and find some old videotapes of it but that would mean digging my VCR out of mothballs and figuring out how to connect it to my modern TV to watch. Growing up, I've heard nothing but acclaim for this show but while my local PBS channel aired Doctor Who, they never showed B7. I've yet to see any of it. I think NuWho has definitely widened the appeal and knowledge of Doctor Who in the USA. Two years ago, David Tennant appeared at a WizardWorld Con here in Raleigh which drew a massive audience over that weekend. You couldn't swing your arm without hitting someone dressed up as either the TARDIS or a Dalek (with a few Weeping Angels thrown in for good measure). Classic Who is another matter altogether. Conversing with some of these NuWho fans, their knowledge/watching of the Classic series was rather limited. So while I think the Classic show had more of a cult following back then here in the US, I also think the series wasn't completely unknown either. The more prominent bookstores in my area all carried the Target novelizations of various episodes and other assorted media items. As for regeneration, I believe the concept to be one of the most innovative solutions to continuity ever. While it allows for the overall premise of the show to continue forward, it also allows each incoming main actor to put their own personal mark/stamp upon what is still the same essential main character. It's a veritable win-win scenario from every angle. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Aug 18, 2016 15:02:12 GMT -5
They have the entire episodes on YouTube unless they took them out recently.
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Post by Randle-El on Aug 18, 2016 16:01:23 GMT -5
Speaking of regeneration -- what's the current status quo regarding the number of times the Doctor can regenerate? I thought it was twelve times, but since the current Doctor is the twelfth and I presume they have no intentions of stopping the show, have they come up with some explanation or mechanism that enables the Doctor to regenerate past the limit?
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