Dr Who and HG Wells... more references

[AukonDK]

Imagine for a moment it's 1963... Terry Nation is asked to write a script for a new kids series about a space/time traveller... he sighs and glances along his shelf and spots "The Time Machine"...
The show is Dr Who... and the script he writes is "The Daleks"... about a planet with two species, the blonde haired peaceloving Thals, and the mysterious, subterranian Daleks... and the dr and his crew have to persuade the Thals to fight to get part of his time machine back from the Daleks.

The next year, at the birth of Dalekmania, NAtion has to write another Dalek story... "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"... have a guess what inspired him with this one
The Daleks invade Earth and are defeated by something that we humans are not effected by... the Earths magnetic field.

Now i'm not saying he was ripping off Wells deliberatly... he just wasn't expecting the Dr who and the Daleks to take off as well as it did.

A further story had a lot of Wells references, "Timelash" starring Colin Baker in the 80's. The Doctor arrives on a planet ruled by a reclusive dictator, the main punishment for criminals and rebel was to be banished into a time tunnel called the Timelash. The Doc arrives just as Meena, has stolen an amulet that controls the power systems of the planet and jumped into the Timelash. The doc follows in the TARDIS and lands in 1880's Loch Ness, once he finds meena again he travels back with a young stowaway writer. After an adventure involving time crystals, blue-faced androids and nasty creatures known as Morlox who live underground, the baddy is kicked into the Timelash (supposedly becoming the loch ness monster). Also the young writer (who is a really annoying character ) turns out to be HG Wells.

[plug] "The Daleks" is available on VHS and "Invasion Earth" is about to come out on DVD (complete with optional CGI to replace the paper-plate spaceships;))
Both became films in the 60's starring Peter Cushing... both are availible on DVD and VHS...
Timelash is also on VHS but probably only worth it if u're REALLY interested... or if u wanna see Paul Darrow being really over the top... (but when is he not?) [/plug]


I know this is a bit more Time Machine Than WOTW... but i've written it now... so

[Rob]

Nah, it's very interresting. I only ever saw snippets of the Darleks invade earth. I was a big doctor who fan when I was young the darleks used to really scare me.

Who were those guys who were models in shop windows that went mad? or was that not even doctor who?

[AukonDK]

NERD ALERT!!!!

Those were the Autons, plastic dummies controlled by the Nestine Conciousness... that story (Spearhead from Space) was the first story with Jon Pertwee and the first to be shown in colour... also recently released on dvd.

NERD ALERT OVER... Return to your homes!

[Omega2064]

There is an episode I think called "Genesis of the
Daleks" where their origin is explained and it is very
Martian.
The Daleks were once human but have been evolved
forward to see what their final form would be from
years of wars. Then a travel body is constructed to
hold and protect the creature that is little more than
a brain and some tentacles. (sound familliar?)
The scientist though makes the mistake of removing
emotions from the now Daleks, creating the merciless
force that they would become.

Remove the large lower section of the Dalek and replace it with a three legs and you have a somewhat
Tripod looking beastie.

I dont think Doctor Who though was a kids show. Its
time frame and the nature of many stories are certainly
not kiddy fare. (Though alot of the early stories seem
to deal with historical settings. Suggesting a vaugue
"educational" attempt.) I dont think it had a target age
bracket really though. Terry Nation tends to produce
straightforward Sci Fi. Blakes 7 certainly wasnt a kids
show. So its hard to say. British TV much like Japanese
TV has some diffrent viewpoints. That and it was made
before TV started to deteriorate. Particularly here in the
US.

The two Peter Curshing movies are fun too, the Invasion Earth retelling of the TV episode is very
well done.

Omega2064

[Zoe]

AukonDK said:

Imagine for a moment it's 1963... Terry Nation is asked to write a script for a new kids series about a space/time traveller... he sighs and glances along his shelf and spots "The Time Machine"...
The show is Dr Who... and the script he writes is "The Daleks"... about a planet with two species, the blonde haired peaceloving Thals, and the mysterious, subterranian Daleks... and the dr and his crew have to persuade the Thals to fight to get part of his time machine back from the Daleks.

The next year, at the birth of Dalekmania, NAtion has to write another Dalek story... "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"... have a guess what inspired him with this one
The Daleks invade Earth and are defeated by something that we humans are not effected by... the Earths magnetic field.

Now i'm not saying he was ripping off Wells deliberatly... he just wasn't expecting the Dr who and the Daleks to take off as well as it did.

A further story had a lot of Wells references, "Timelash" starring Colin Baker in the 80's. The Doctor arrives on a planet ruled by a reclusive dictator, the main punishment for criminals and rebel was to be banished into a time tunnel called the Timelash. The Doc arrives just as Meena, has stolen an amulet that controls the power systems of the planet and jumped into the Timelash. The doc follows in the TARDIS and lands in 1880's Loch Ness, once he finds meena again he travels back with a young stowaway writer. After an adventure involving time crystals, blue-faced androids and nasty creatures known as Morlox who live underground, the baddy is kicked into the Timelash (supposedly becoming the loch ness monster). Also the young writer (who is a really annoying character ) turns out to be HG Wells.

[plug] "The Daleks" is available on VHS and "Invasion Earth" is about to come out on DVD (complete with optional CGI to replace the paper-plate spaceships;))
Both became films in the 60's starring Peter Cushing... both are availible on DVD and VHS...
Timelash is also on VHS but probably only worth it if u're REALLY interested... or if u wanna see Paul Darrow being really over the top... (but when is he not?) [/plug]


I know this is a bit more Time Machine Than WOTW... but i've written it now... so

Yes, I agree. I thought at the time that the plot of 'The Dead Planet' (AKA 'The Daleks') was a dead ringer for the Time Machine - especially the George Pal version which was still fresh in everyone's memory when Doctor Who came out in 1963.

Nation always claimed that he got the name "Dalek" from the volume of an encyclopaedia that said on its spine

'DAL - EK'

I think he was trying to throw people off the scent and avoid accusations of plagiarism..... I can just see him thinking..... "Morlocks.... Morlocks..... Borlocks? - No! Too much like 'B******s' ...... Dorlocks? - No, too much like 'Door locks' - Wait a mo..... Darlocks..... Dar... licks... Daleks ..... Dal....exterminate!"

The 'Eloi' like beautiful race were called 'Thalls' and that is.... phonetically close to 'Daleks'...... Chesterton teaching them to fight is very like the bit in the film where The Time Traveler teaches the Eloi to fight the Daleks.

Incidentally I also thought that the marauding daleks were very reminiscent of the George Pal martians...... Just the relentless, unstoppable way they moved forwards and mowed down the Thalls who had turned up to negotiate.... rather like 'Uncle Matthew' in the movie. In 'The Dead Planet' we did not actually see the living Daleks outside their machines but we did see the distorted hand of a dying Dalek reaching out and falling limp just like in the Pal Movie. I think there really are enough similarities to show that Nation did derive his story from at least two Wells novels. And why not? He did not do it in too obvious a way.....

Wells's point was social critique - TWOTW was written out of Wells's horror at the extermination of the Tasmanians and other Imperial excesses. It points its finger at the comfortable inhabitants of the Home Counties and says "How would YOU like it?" . The Time Machine warns what might happen if Britain's 'Two Nations' were to continue in to the far future. "Push your brother down underground and one day he might come back looking for YOU!" is the message of that book. The films made slightly different points because George Pal was a more or less fundamentalilst Christian. In War of the Worlds the point was "Super Science cannot solve all the problems of the world - only a higher power can do that!" Note in The War of the Worlds that when Sylvia says of the six days in which the Martians can conquer the world "The same number of days it took to create it!" none of the scientists corrects her - even though they include - presumably Darwinian - biologists in their ranks. It is taken for granted that that 'ol' time religion' is the business. "We were all praying for a miracle" says Dr Forester at the end.

In The Time Machine there is less of a heavy handed religious message this time but Pal does change the original, egalitarian point of the novel to one that is basically anti-war and anti-nuclear. Interfere with 'Mother Nature' and she will respond with 'volcanic violence of her own' and then we will see our society hurled into barbarism, canibalism and decay. Nation however, was greatly affected by the Nazis and their technological genocide - the mechanised conveyor belt of extermination of the concentration camp. The Daleks were Nazis only more so. So mechanised that their humanity was hardly there at all.

One thing that Wells, Pal and Nation seem to agree on though is that an advanced technology might be - as Arthur C Clark once said - "indistinguishable from magic" but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is good.

Zoe

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]There was another referance to H.G. in last nights episode of The Horror Of Fang Rock, with the doctor defending Wells ideas of alien life etc to an incredulous fellow who doubted that they were in danger of being killed by an alien from another planet.[/glow]