by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had a chance to watch a movie together last
night and I picked out the DVD of a Doctor Who sequence from 1967, “The Moonbase,” featuring Patrick Troughton, the
second Doctor. One of the conceits of the show is that the Doctor, a Time Lord
from the planet Gallifrey, can periodically rearrange his atoms at will and
change his appearance — thereby giving the producers of the show the chance to
replace the actor playing the Doctor and “explain” his different looks by
saying he’s just rearranged his atoms. (Charles was a bit put out when the BBC
recently announced their latest casting change so there’s now a 13th
actor playing the Doctor, when the original series posited that he could only
have 12 alternate appearances, like the proverbial nine-lived cat.) We’d seen
one previous run in this series of reissue DVD’s, a French Revolution story
with the original Doctor, William Hartnell; this time it was a science-fiction
tale instead of a history lesson (apparently the original intent of the series
was that it would teach kids about real-life historical events by creating
versions that wrote the Doctor and his sidekicks into them) and ran only four
half-hour episodes instead of six. Once again we were at the mercy of the BBC’s
policy in the 1960’s of “wiping” — that is, erasing and reusing the videotapes
— their lighter fare (as I’ve noted in these pages before, six of the original
45 Monty Python shows were lost
to this policy and the only reason the other 39 survive is some anonymous
bureaucrat at the BBC put a note on them saying, “Save these. We may be able to
do something with them in the States”); the original second and fourth episodes
of the run survived but the first and third existed only as soundtracks (I guess they were broadcasting these
as radio shows as well as on TV) and had to be reconstructed via animation
synched to the original soundtracks.
I was also amused that the villains, the
Cybermen (a returning Doctor Who
menace who’d already been introduced earlier and apparently killed off when the
Earthlings destroyed their home planet — which meant that the cast were
startled when they turned up again this soon after the apocalypse that
supposedly wiped them out), were supposed to be robots made of metal, but the
folds of their cloth costumes were clearly visible as they walked, especially
when they were shown with their backs to the camera. It got even more amusing
when the show switched from live-action episode 2 to animated episode 3 and the
animators had faithfully reproduced the revealing mistake of the cloth folds
being visible! “The Moonbase” was actually quite a good science-fiction tale
that, according to the surviving actors being interviewed for the making-of
feature on the DVD, got added weight and heft from the fact that it was being
shot during the early stages of the Apollo program and everyone involved with
the program — including producer Innes Lloyd, director Morris Barry and writer
Kit Pedler — were well aware that in just a few years humans would be on the
moon for real. The show is set in the year 2070, by which time humans have not
only colonized the moon but have set up a base there containing a “gravitron,”
a sort of giant device that looks like a cross between a telescope and a cannon
and which can alter the earth’s gravitational field so it affects the tides and
thereby changes earth’s weather. The idea is to keep things as temperate as
possible and make sure that any hurricanes or other big storms exhaust
themselves harmlessly over oceans instead of striking dry land and causing loss
of life and property.
Only just as the Doctor and his sidekicks Jamie (Frazer
Hines), Polly (Anneke Wills) and Ben (Michael Craze, who must have endured a formidable amount of teasing over his
last name when he was a kid!) arrive at the moonbase — true to form, the Doctor
was aiming for Mars but missed — the weather machine starts going haywire due
to the graviton going out of control. Hurricanes start hitting places like
Florida after decades during which the Floridians haven’t had to worry about
them, and the moonbase commander, Jack Hobson (Patrick Barr, who’d previously
played Patrick Troughton’s father on stage in a play called Honor
Bright), is trying to figure out what’s
going wrong. At first this exasperated in-over-his-head bureaucrat blames the
Doctor and his crew for sabotaging the gravitron, but eventually he learns that
the real cause is an invading force of Cybermen from flying saucers who have
broken into the moonbase through its storage room and sickened a lot of the
staff with a “neurotropic virus” that first makes their nervous system visible
through their skin and then immobilizes and finally kills them. (There’s a
howler of a scientific mistake in Pedler’s script: the Doctor discovers the
virus by looking at it on a slide under an ordinary visible-light microscope;
viruses, unlike bacteria, are too small to be seen through a visible-light
microscope, which is one reason it took so long to discover them.) Only the
Cybermen usually don’t wait for the virus to kill the human victims; instead
they want to take them over and put them under control of the Cybermen’s
hive-mind so they’ll become accomplices in the Cybermen’s plan to turn the
gravitron against Earth and destroy it.
For this series the producers made some
impressive changes in the Cybermen’s costuming — instead of wearing stocking
masks over their faces to denote “cybericity” they got full metal masks which I
suspect costume designers Daphne Dare, Alexandra Tyson and Mary Woods copied
from the Iron Man comic books,
and when we didn’t see those giveaway cloth folds the lamé suits they wore
looked suitably metallic for robot-people. Also, though 11 actors played the
Cybermen visually on screen, they were all voiced by the same person, which
left the actors playing humans sometimes confused about which Cyberman was speaking to them and therefore whom
they should turn to when they gave their response line. “The Moonbase” has some
good suspense moments and nice bits of dry wit in Pedler’s script — my favorite
line was when the Commander back Earth (Alan Rowe) gives Hobson some utterly
impractical bit of instruction and Hobson mutters under his breath, “He’ll
probably get knighted for this” — as well as a surprisingly butch performance
by Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. During the show I had assumed Troughton was
deliberately modeling his acting on Richard Burton’s and had decided to make
the Doctor more butch, without the screaming-queen nelliness that had afflicted
the otherwise charming acting of his predecessor, William Hartnell — but in the
making-of featurette Anneke Wills recalled that Troughton loved the camp aspects of the show and, among other
things, was begging its writers for scripts in which he could do drag.
Apparently it was director Barry who pushed Troughton’s performance in these
episodes away from camp and towards a more serious, action-oriented reading of
the character.
“The Moonbase” drags in spots, and the junctures between the
surviving live action and the animation jar (and given all the time, money and
trouble that went into the production — including building an elaborate set of
the moon’s surface that apparently took up virtually all of Ealing Studios, one
of three facilities used to make
this show — it seems bizarre to say the least that the BBC should have had such
a cavalier attitude towards it that they erased two of the four episodes just
to recycle the videotape!), but overall it’s a quite good science-fiction tale
and the special effects are considerably more credible than they were in the
first Cybermen story (which Charles and I watched together on videotape ages
ago and in which I invidiously compared the effects to those in the original Star
Trek, which was made about the same time
but had the benefit of larger production budgets and color) even though some of
the costumes and props are endearingly tacky — including the white plastic
household bottles we’re supposed to believe supply the astronauts with oxygen
when they’re in spacesuits on the surface of the moon. According to the
surviving actors interviewed on the making-of featurette, the real problem with the spacesuits is that their helmets
were clear plastic bubbles (not the metal helmets with plastic visors that real
astronauts wore) and that they fogged up quite quickly so you couldn’t see. Frazer
Hines recalled that no sooner were you encased in the spacesuit that you’d
develop a virtually uncontrollable urge to do some normal bodily function you couldn’t do in that costume, like scratch your nose or use
the restroom — the latter just had to wait until they finished shooting and
could give the go-ahead for the laborious process of dismantling the costume
and getting you out of it again. Ah, the practical problems of making a science-fiction movie!
