Tuesday, February 23, 2010

YouTube Tuesday: "Who" and What

In our first Doctor Who-related video this week, we find the question is not, in fact, "Who?" Instead, it's...

A couple weeks ago, we got good and funky with the theme from Star Wars (among other music from the first four released movies). Now it's Doctor Who's turn. Amazingly/horrifyingly enough, this is the only arrangement of the theme ever made by its composer, Ron Grainer. Reportedly, he said that if he had had the chance to arrange it in 1963, it would have been something like this. So if you haven't thanked your deity recently for putting Delia Derbyshire on this earth, you will in a few minutes. (Okay, okay... despite the utter wrongness of this music, I sometimes find myself listening to it several times in succession.)

Finally, watch 45 years flash before your eyes. I don't know where that clip that's allegedly from "The Massacre" came from, because it has no surviving clips. The "Mission to the Unknown" clip appears to be a photograph touched up with CG. ("Marco Polo" has one existing clip, on the technicality that it repeated the end of the previous episode.)

Thanks to the fans who recorded the off-air soundtracks, and to the superhuman efforts of Mark Ayres in restoring them, you can, at least, hear those stories. (In the case of "Mission to the Unknown," he took two different recordings-- one that was generally superior, and one that had more top-end --synced them up line by line, and combined them into an even better version.)

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