I Heard A Crash From The Lab

We got the Tom Baker Doctor in Oz when I was growing up – the show has really been in decline ever since. But the original Doctors were able to lay claim to something the new Doctors have never been able to – an unbroken lineage from the golden age SF of the 50s, and the New Wave SF of the ‘60s – they brought to the screen many of the compelling SF ideas in the literature of the time. The new Doctors have been merely repeating this ever since.

”I recall the original Daleks episode being very frightening for a then young person such as I was. Even though we all agreed that they looked just like a decorated upside down rubbish bin with a plumbers plunger attached.”
Like in Buffy: the sets and costumes may have been junk but they largely pulled it off: the characters and plots were compelling.
Flashback to an amusing conversation with my youngest brother, bit Aspergery, something of a Dr Who junky:
“…Anyway, if the Daleks are so good, how come they can’t go up stairs?”
“Tim!”
“The Doctor said so himself!”
“That was a joke! The Daleks use rockets!”
That last sentence is a paraphrase – I can’t actually remember the stupid anti-grav technology they use.

Oops. Somebody should probably have said something when they put them up. Still, it’s only taxpayers’ money, right?
“Incidentally, did anyone else watch the BBC’s retelling of Dracula…?”
I shouldn’t think so.
“The basic premise of Doctor Who has always been better than its generally shabby execution, the thing that ends up on screen. But it’s remarkable just how badly it can be made.”
Very true. I thought it couldn’t get any worse than the late ’80s. Remember the one with Bertie Bassett? That was where I threw in the towel first time around. Choice quote from the Wikipedia article: “In 2010, Sylvester McCoy told the Sunday Times: ‘Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered’”. So this sh*t isn’t new.
To think I spent years hoping, praying, that the show would return. The fact is the black-and-white era and the late ’70s were the exceptions, not the rule. Through most of its existence, it’s been a pile of old cack. (Ditto Star Trek. Runs and hides, yelling over shoulder, “I like TOS and DS9!”)

Back in my D&D days, one of our players had a priest character with a magic mace which he christened “Roddenberry’s Club of Subtlety.” He delighted in whacking monsters over the head with it, while lecturing them about the evils of greed or racism or whatnot.
Screamingly funny for about 20 minutes, that was.