I think my earliest memories of Doctor Who are pretty clearly Tom Baker, but less the tv show and more the cut out and keep weetabix models. Toys were a scarce commodity in those toys and tie-in toys to tv film or tv even scarcer.
I mean look at this advert from 1977 – this, for the period looks like incredibly high production values for something printed on the back of a cereal box
There are earlier DR WHO cardboard cutouts, but this is the one I remember, and it spurred in me a need to make more cardboard cut out toys. My earliest memory of 2000ad is also cardboard related. Making the Justice-1 spaceship out of computer punch card with my uncle (not only were tv/film tie in toys a rare commodity but even paper and cardboard was hard to come by in the 70s)
I remember creating a little motorbike bay area for the Justice-1 spaceship that was perfectly to scale and had Judge Hershy, but memory is kind sometimes (and cruel other times) and thinking back there’s absolutely no way it was anything but rubbish.
Around the time of Return of the Jedi (1983, and by this stage I was 13 and probably still a little too juvenile for my own good) I went with the next door neighbour to go to a toy shop so he could measure the snowspeeder toy they had so he could go home and build one out of cardboard (these things were wonderouly expensive, way out of my family’s budget – at least for another few years until we were doing ok and my young brother – by then the perfect age for all things star wars – ended up getting things like the millenium falcon and the deathstar…)
The papercraft landspeeder met a fiery end as many of his papercraft toys did. Me? I’d’a held on to that thing. Again memory being what it was, I remember it as being a perfect 1:1 replica of the plastic toy.
Anyway this has all be spurned on by the fact that the BBC have just put online all of the Dr Who’s it’s within their power too. To be honest, this is what I want from the bbc – every tv show ever produce stuck online, give it to me! let me press pause on getting older and wallow in the nostalgia of my childhood viewing (way back when dr who was appointment viewing, when any random channel at any random time of day I could wander past and tell my parents exactly what it was on tv, because man I had not much else going on).
I thought I’d start by going back to the Sylvester McCoy era, because I did NOT enjoy that series – but I was 17 turning 18 when it aired, and man Dr Who was uncool enough without this goofball turning up and ruining it all. (I mean, he probably didn’t, the beeb was desperate to destroy doctor who by that stage so who knows). I never looked fondly at the over the top drama-school-ness of some elements of Dr Who, but boy I loved mad scifi ideas.
BUT! BUT! I didn’t – I’ve gone back further to Colin Baker (like many who watched at the time, Baker’s choice to play a deeply unlikeable doctor stung, especially since I LIKED Davidson Doctor Who was like a kindly uncle or something, Baker was too much acid after the calming balm of Davidson). So I’ve started watching Series 26 The Trial of the Time Lord. Some shabby acting (from actors I know can do better) some obviously massive budget constraints (the doctor was forever fomenting revolution in places where the local tribe was like 15 people) and a big ol interesting-silhouette-but-obviously-man-in-a-suit villain, and a plot that is so typically doctor who that it feels like a big old dr who cliche. But I’m overlooking it all, because deep deep down, the sight of Dr Who and the cardboard sets always brings me right back to being 12 years old.
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