More Doctor Who-ness :)

I spent the weekend avoiding anything specific about The Day of the Doctor (the 50th Anniversary episode of Doctor Who, for anyone who doesn't know), in hopes of enjoying a spoiler-free experience seeing it in theaters tonight. So far, so good...just a few hours left to go! :)

In honor of this exciting occasion (which I've been looking forward to for months!), I have decided to post a few fun, spoiler-free Doctor Who related tidbits I ran across over the last few days. Oooh, I also painted my nails TARDIS blue (see right)...well, as close to TARDIS blue as I could find at Target, anyway! :)

Enjoy!


#1 - Guinness World Record
"The special 50th Anniversary episode of Doctor Who, the world’s longest running and most successful sci-fi series, has received the Guinness World Record for the largest ever simulcast of a TV drama following a massive global campaign which saw the episode broadcast in 94 countries across 6 continents.

In addition to the TV broadcast, the episode was screened in over 1500 cinemas worldwide, including in the UK, US, Canada, Latin America, Germany, Russia and Scandinavia. Over half a million tickets were sold for the theatrical screenings at which fans were able to watch the episode in spectacular 3D."  

#2 - A Whovian wedding
Nobody panic...I'm not saying I want a Whovian wedding...I'm just saying this one was very sweet and tastefully done. My ideas for a wedding theme vary greatly, from classic black and white, navy and silver (if I get to have a New Years Eve wedding), Spring, Fall, garden chic or vintage...and to date these are my favorite wedding invitation. I have a Pinterest board full of ideas...what single girl doesn't these days? :)  Anywho...

TARDIS blue would be a great color for a wedding and they didn't go crazy with Doctor Who references - looks like mainly just blue trim, the bridesmaids dresses and the cake. And her shoes, which are adorable. I've decided I want my "something blue" to be my shoes. :) If nothing else, it's fun to look at their wedding pics.


#3 - Tom Baker: how I made Doctor Who
This is just a fun summary of Tom Baker reminiscing about his time on Doctor Who. I knew about the scarf thing, from the "50 things you didn't know about Doctor Who," which is below. :)


#4 - Doctor Who: 50 Things You Didn't Know
Fifty year, fifty things...seems fair. :) In case you don't want to scroll through all fifty, some of my favorites are:


5. The Daleks were based on the Nazis
… by their creator, Terry Nation, who suggested their call of ‘Exterminate!’, their obsession with forcible eugenics and their dedication to total conformity. The BBC designer Raymond Cusick, meanwhile, came up with the distinctive pepper-pot shape and the zapper with its sinister storm trooper salute. In The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1966) the Daleks roll into London and turn Britain’s stout inhabitants into mind-controlled, brainwiped ‘Robomen’ -- a stark nod back to the once-real possibility of an Axis invasion of Britain.


13. Stephen Fry once wrote a script for the series. It was never used
And gosh, it’d be superb if it would kindly pop up on the internet someday. Fry’s script, written for the second series of Russell T. Davies’s revived show, took as its base the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval poem with deep roots in English and Celtic tradition. But Davies thought it was too complicated to run immediately, and Fry, apparently, never had time to make the necessary changes.


14. Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who, originally used as a code name

When Russell T. Davies was filming the first series of the revived Doctor Who in 2005, the anagram Torchwood was used to label the series tapes so that no information about their contents would leak out. When he was offered the opportunity to spin off a post-watershed series from the Who material, Davies was so fond of the anagram he decided to keep it.


16. Ryan Gosling cast Matt Smith in his new film because of a single Who speech

According to Smith, the star of Drive was channel-hopping when he happened to stumble across the 11th Doctor giving his rousing extended speech in The Pandorica Opens (‘No plan, no backup, no weapons! Oh, and something else I don’t have: anything to lose!’). A suitably impressed Gosling quickly cast Smith in his directorial debut, How to Catch a Monster.


21. The Twelfth Doctor was a teenage superfan

^BBC
Peter Capaldi’s casting as the Doctor must have been all the sweeter for an actor who set his sights on Whovian world domination aged 14. According to the book The Official Doctor Who Fan Club Volume One (!) the teenage Capaldi, already a vigorous writer of letters to the BBC and the Radio Times, was incensed at being passed over for the presidency of the show’s fan club after a rival, the 13-year-old Keith Miller, got the gig instead. Sarah Newman, the Doctor Who producer’s secretary, became so cross at the subsequent deluge of Capaldi letters that she wrote to Miller: ‘I think he’s the end and I wish the Daleks or someone would exterminate him.’ Presumably, all is now forgiven.


30. Time Lords need to eat too
Doctor Who has inspired many an odd item – but few as a left-field as a cookbook. Chris-Rachael Oseland’s Dining with the Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook contains a recipe for each episode of the series since the 2005 reboot and no fewer than 18 ‘adult beverages’. Other recipes include ‘Open Faced Dalek Ironsides’, ‘Cinnamon Pull Apart a Crack in the Wall’ and ‘Chicken and Ood Soup’.


31. The writers' imaginations are even wilder than you think
Colin’s Baker’s debut Who episode, The Twin Dilemma, is commonly dismissed by Who fans as one of the worst ever. But scriptwriter Anthony Steven claimed to have had an excellent excuse: his typewriter exploded as he was writing it.


36. Michael Jackson almost played the Doctor

^REX
Hollywood has never known what on earth to do with Doctor Who, so has mostly left him alone. But in the Eighties, according to the book Now on the Big Screen: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who at the Cinema, Paramount Pictures considered making a Who film with the Moonwalker-era Michael Jackson. Their second choice? Bill Cosby. But stranger things have almost happened: in 2003, Robbie Williams was approached by the BBC to voice an animated Doctor Who story, Scream of the Shalka. ‘We all sat around wondering, ‘Is this a good idea? Is this a crazy idea?’’ said producer Muirinn Lane Kelly. Williams was sadly unavailable; the part went to Richard E Grant.


40. The sound of the Tardis was created on the cheap, with a bunch of keys
Necessity was the mother of invention in the early days of Doctor Who, and so it was that the distinctive sound of the Tardis materialising came to be invented using house keys. Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop dragged the keys across the bass strings of an old piano, and played the resulting sound backwards.




45. The BBC fought the law for the right to make TARDIS cookie jars
When the Time Lord took on the Metropolitan Police, there could be only one winner. And in 2002, after a six-year battle, the Patent Office declared that the exterior design of the TARDIS could be patented by the BBC for use on Doctor Who-related merchandise. The Met had challenged the application on the grounds that the design belonged to them; after all, in a previous incarnation, Tardises had been seen on the streets of Britain masquerading as public police telephone boxes. Lawyers ruled that, given that the Met had stopped using the boxes in the Sixties, the design was now more closely associated with Doctor Who. Et voila: the TARDIS dressing gown, the TARDIS cookie jar, the TARDIS soap dispenser and the TARDIS UV Book Light, ‘so you can write secret notes to The Doctor’.


47. Matt Smith is the youngest Doctor ever
Smith debuted in the role at the age of 27, making him the youngest actor to play the part. The Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, was previously the youngest, beginning the role at the age of 29. William Hartnell has always held the title of the oldest Doctor, taking on the role at the age of 55; new Doctor Peter Capaldi will also be 55 when he takes over from Matt Smith.


49. The Daleks almost didn’t appear in the revived series due to a copyright dispute
When the series was revived in 2005, there was a very real chance that the Daleks themselves were going to be exterminated. The estate of Terry Nation (who was co-creator of the Daleks) owns their copyright, and to begin with they were unable to come to an agreement with the BBC with regards to editorial control. However, after a lengthy dispute in which the estate accused the BBC of trying to ‘ruin the brand of the Daleks’, the Daleks returned. Antony Wainer, the spokesman for the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, was relieved, saying, ‘Doctor Who without Daleks would be like Morecambe without Wise or Wimbledon without strawberries.’



~ Katie