BBC To Re-Create Lost 'Doctor Who' Episodes As Animations

The BBC has announced it will be making an animation of a lost ‘Doctor Who’ story dating from 1966, to be released later this year on the 50th anniversary of their original air date.

‘The Power of the Daleks’ was a story with six episodes that dated from the fourth season of the BBC’s long-running sci-fi series, which featured Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. They were broadcast once in November 1966, but were lost during a purge of the master negatives in the BBC’s archives in 1974.

A handful of clips and stills were salvaged by ‘Doctor Who’ fans, but the complete visual recordings were lost.

Six lost 'Doctor Who' episodes, titled 'The Power of the Daleks', are to be restored as animations

However, BBC Worldwide announced on Wednesday (September 7th) that an animation studio had been commissioned to re-create the six lost episodes as animations, which will be released on the BBC Store at precisely 5:50pm on November 5th – exactly fifty years since BBC One first broadcast the episodes.

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Charles Norton, a producer and director, and the comic book artists Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, have been signed up to make the animations after they did a similar piece of work to re-create a lost ‘Dad’s Army’ episode earlier this year. They’ll be restoring the episodes with references to the stills and clips recovered thusfar, plus known audio recordings that survived.

“’The Power of the Daleks’ is one of the great lost classics of 1960s television and a superb example of the black-and-white era at its finest,” Norton said.

Paul Hembury, of BBC Worldwide, added: “We are thrilled that fans will soon be able to enjoy this rather sinister but wonderful, classic story.”

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