Dom Robinson reviews
Doctor Who: Robots of Death
Distributed by
Producer:
Screenplay:
Music:
Cast:
The Doctor: Tom Baker
Leela: Louise Jameson
Uvanov: Russell Hunter
Toos: Pamela Salem
Dask: David Bailie
Poul: David Collings
Borg: Brian Croucher
Zilda: Tania Rogers
Cass: Tariq Yunus
D.84: Gregory de Polnay
S.V.7 Miles Fothergill
Transdimensional engineering, a key Time Lord discovery - that's how you should pull the girls!
Or at least it worked in as far as it kept new trainee Leela (Louise
Jameson - whoever thought Eastenders' Rosa di Marco could be sexy?)
interested and intrigued. The cast also includes another ex-Eastender, Ted Hills,
aka Brian Croucher.
Similar to the James Bond series, the first actor you see in the leading role is the one
you think is best. Tom Baker fits into that theory for me with his eccentric ways
and is now the earliest Doctor still alive.
The Doctor and Leela find themselves teleported into Storm Mine 4, a sandminer searching
for precious metals, with a small crew and getting smaller as each episode. The problem
is that someone has reprogrammed the robots to bump off all the humans, but who would
be so sadistic? Metal Mickey, also a regular Saturday afternoon favourite at the time,
would not approve. Whoever's at fault, the finger is initially pointed at our heroes since
they're the outsiders.
The Robots of Death was first transmitted from January 29th to February 19th, 1977.
The picture quality is rather good considering the age of the programe, with no artifacts
but just a few scratches on the print, but watch out for those dodgy blue-screen effects
which seemed so state-of-the-art at the time :)
Presented in the original fullscreen ratio, I was unable to determine the average bitrate
since some of the standard DVD features have been disabled such as this and the bookmark
function.
The sound is the original mono. The theme tune is as recognisable as ever and the special
effects stretch to whizz-bang computer noises which, again, seemed the best thing since
sliced bread 23 years ago. A shame we couldn't have a remastered Dolby Digital 5.1
soundtrack here as we did with
The Five Doctors
Extras :
There's not a great deal of extras, but what's here will certainly appeal
to the Who fans.
These include a 30-strong Photo Gallery, a map of the Studio Floor
Plans from when the programme was made, Model Sequences which
show original Sandminer footage before it was cut into the series and
In-Studio, the rushes from the Doctor's and Leela's first meeting
with SV7 before any special effects and music were added.
Finally, every episode contains a Writer/Producer commentary from
Philip Hinchcliffe and Chris Boucher.
There are 24 chapters spread throughout the 95-minute feature covering all
the major scenes and breaks down to six per episode. The language and
subtitles are in English, while the menus contain suitable animation and
music from the theme tune.
Overall :
It's well-presented, but it's time the BBC were more prolific with their
DVD output and since they can fit all of a series of some programmes on a
DVD for £19.99, including Only Fools and Horses and Absolutely
Fabulous, why do we only get four episodes of Doctor Who here?
FILM CONTENT
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
|
|
|
OVERALL
|
|
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.
The following is a list of all the Doctor Who DVDs reviewed to date :
1977 The Robots of Death
1983 The Five Doctors
1984 The Caves of Androzani
1988 Remembrance of the Daleks
1996 Doctor Who TV Movie
Also visit Steve Roberts' Doctor Who Restoration site at :
Restoration-Team.co.uk
Please tell him you found his site via my Doctor Who review.
[Up to the top of this page]
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
