On Bluesky at least, the reception to the colourised Daleks serial has been thoroughly mixed, and… yeah, so’s my reaction now that I’ve actually watched it. OK, let’s get into it… So, the colour itself is not too bad. It didn’t seem quite as extra in video form as the colour stills from a few days ago did. It does have that sort of “1960s” visual character I spoke of earlier, so it definitely has more of an early 60s B-movie feel (further enhanced by the editing). It doesn’t cope very well with dark scenes like when our heroes find the room in the Dalek city with the Geiger counter, but on the whole it’s fairly impressive. I particularly liked the luridness of the petrified forest.
And yet the overal visual feel is still a bit… off somehow? I don’t know how to explain it. Cos we have to remember, all of William Hartnell’s episodes were shot using 405-line video cameras—which were obviously kind of low-res enough as they were, rather less than what we now call “standard” definition (525-line NTSC or 625-line PAL, depending on where in the world you are)—but all the extant episodes only survive as film telerecordings, mostly 16mm, and quite a lot seem to be suppressed-field recordings which means the film only has about half the visual information of the original picture. When you have to blow that up to 1080p… well, I’ve been impressed by the blu-ray upscales of the original series so far, but even so (and there were artifacts of the suppressed-field prints I noticed this time that never struck me before too). It doesn’t quite look like film or video somehow. Maybe it was just the *cough* dubiously obtained copy of the program I had? I don’t know.
Still—like I said, the colour work is generally impressive. How it’s cut and how it sounds, on the other hand…
So, as we were told, the story was cut to 75 minutes, compared to the 171 minutes the original serial (including opening and closing titles of each episode). That’s… a lot to lose. It’s not exactly a massacre on the order of Stroheim’s Greed, but an awful lot of material has been ditched to slim it down. And it means the pacing of the thing is, frankly, kind of indecent; it moves at a clip that feels alien to the original series. It gave me the sense, indeed, that not only had the video been cut, it’d been sped up slightly as well. Which I don’t think it was, but it felt like that somehow. The editing is mostly fine, technically, some of it’s actually quite clever, it’s just… I missed the magnodon. I missed the food machine. And I don’t know that the “flashbacks” worked either (though I did like the new Dalek POV inserts).
But the editing is nowhere near as egregious as the sound. The program wrong-footed me immediately with Mark Ayres’ reprocessing of the opening theme WHICH DIDN’T NEED THOSE EXTRA NOISES MARK IT WAS FINE AS IT WAS… ahem… to say nothing of his actual music, some of which is admittedly effective but a lot is… not. It’s ill-fitting and it never sounds like it fits the visuals, in that it’s obviously been produced six decades after the program was made and it doesn’t sound like the rest of the program. The new Dalek lines are the same, not just because they’re obviously Nick Briggs at work but they don’t sound like the originals did. And I know that it’s a minor thing, really, but cleaning up and correcting one of Hartnell’s more infamous Billy fluffs? Oooh. THAT made me weirdly angry for some reason. Not thrilled by Murray Gold’s closing music, but then I never was particularly thrilled by Murray Gold…
So, a thoroughly mixed bag, an experiment that only partly worked, and one that I suspect actually probably worked well enough for what I’m sure was the target audience, i.e. fans of the revived series who haven’t seen anything of the original and who the BBC thought they might be able to draw in by… well, kind of misrepresenting it. The really important thing now is that I’ve also *cough* dubiously obtained the actual new episode, “The Star Beast”, and the prospect of that is currently drawing me more than colour Daleks. I’ll be back with thoughts on that later…
