Doctor Who: Shada

Dont get me wrong, its a realy good story, but the price is just way too steep.

I watched this on the day of release, just meaning to have a quick look at the all-new extras, but I thought I’d have a look at the first few minutes of the main programme. 138 minutes later I was still sitting there, watching the credits - I was riveted from start to finish. It’s like a brand new story and it genuinely feels like watching it for the first time. The live (bulk of the) action is stitched together seamlessly with the new animation - and it doesn’t feel too jarring at first, in fact I didn’t notice it after a short while. All of this is helped with brand new incidental music throughout by Classic Who composer Mark Ayres, this makes a huge difference to bridge it all together in a very natural way. Additional live action scenes were also shot in September 2017 to polish it even further - they went as far as rebuilding / reconstructing the full-size 1979 TARDIS interior set and new model shots for some scenes. It looks great in HD, particularly the location film and it sounds amazing with a totally new surround mix. The animation is far from perfect but it does do the job, it’s quite similar to the style of The Power Of The Daleks, it’s not meant to be 21st century animation, it’s more in keeping with how budget TV animation was in 1979 - simple. The voices (by the original actors) blend seamlessly with their performances from 38 years ago. There are a lot of brand new extras, too many to mention but, the highlights are 45 minutes of raw studio footage from 1979 and an all new HD transfer of the clean opening and closing title/credits sequences including test footage. If you’ve ever had any interest in Shada and thought it a pity that it was never completed or been confused by previous versions, then I recommend getting this. You can tell a lot of thought, time and effort has gone into this production. It’s easily worth every penny. You get over 4 hours of material for £16 - excellent value when you compare that to 150 minutes of badly written, dire audio only ‘adventures’ released by Big Finish the day before, featuring David Tennant and Billie Piper for a whopping £35. 😱

I enjoyed this far more than I thought I would. The integration of the animation with the original footage was superb and it was wonderful to hear the original cast reunited. Highly recommended.

With a large bundle of extra footage and a seamless shift between animated and original, this is a joy to watch; Douglas Adams at his finest. Quality is just quality, superb on a large screen in HD and the final scene is just brilliant. A very well thought out and executed bringing to life of that until now, never finished episode.

Title says it all, would like to watch this, I’ve been a fan for rap years and Tom Baker was my Doctor, but cost doesn’t seem like value for money.

I bought the series pass for this, and Shada will be released on the 24 Nov 17, and I can't wait. I've seen the original VHS release and I've read the book based upon it, but I really want to see what they've done to improve on it. The story is by Douglas Adams so you know it will be good and funny...and for those of you familiar with his work...he used ideas from this script in his novel Dirk Gently's Detective Agency. What I would ask, as an avid Whovian, is that iTunes and the BBC, please, please, please release more Classic episodes onto iTunes from any of the Doctors incarnations. Please?

22 seconds long makes this 11p per second!