Well, I’ll be damned. “The Underwater Menace” is finally getting an animated reconstruction of its two missing episodes and is due out before the end of the year (which means we’ll probably get it three to six months later here in Australia; we’re only getting the blu-ray of season 9 here this month after it came out in the UK in March).
The original DVD release always struck me as quite unsatisfactory, although I now see that wasn’t entirely the BBC’s fault; the missing episodes were going to be animated in 2014 but the animation company went under before doing the job. That said, rather than hiring someone else to animate it and instead just slapping together a telesnap reconstruction without even the title sequence or proper credits or some sort of text commentary to illustrate the bits of action that you couldn’t discern just from the audio was lazy as hell, so nice to see it’s finally getting done properly, even if it is. Maybe I’ll even like it a bit better if I fully understand what’s actually happening on screen in episodes one and four…
