History SpecialEffectFailure / DoctorWho

Each era's failings are in a way that [[UnintentionalPeriodPiece summarises the worst production aspects of that time period]]. The early 60s saw the show's lowest budgets, [[{{Blooper}} minimally edited episodes]], [[MatteShot cardboard planets]] and box sound-stage sets; the late 60s had PeopleInRubberSuits and monsters made of bath foam. The early 70s was dominated by [[ConspicuouslyLightPatch hideous]] {{CSO}}; the late 70s was all austerity sets, [[PropRecycling community closets]] and malfunctioning props. The mid-80s has [[DaylightHorror garish lights]], [[ShootTheMoney brief setpieces]] that [[BottleEpisode consume the budget of the rest of the season]], and BBC apathy that progresses to [[ScrewedByTheNetwork purposeful production sabotage]] by the end of the 80s.

** The Absorbaloff looks rather stupid when finally seen. And it might not even be the fault of any of the Effects team - when one is tasked with creating a blobby humanoid creature with the partial faces of its victims merged into its body, even with a job well done it would be rather difficult ''not'' to make the end product look dumb.

** The Absorbaloff looks rather stupid when finally seen. And it might not even be the fault of any of the Effects team - when one is tasked with creating a blobby humanoid creature with the partial faces of its victims merged into its body, even with a job well done id would be rather difficult ''not'' to make the end product look dumb.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E13JourneysEnd "Journey's End"]]: The TARDIS tows the Earth across the ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar'' loading screen.

** The FakeShemp Doctors in the final shot quite obviously have faces cut and pasted on, some at unfortunate angles. The Eighth Doctor's head is too big (worse, Creator/PaulMcGann was asked to return as the Eighth Doctor a ''week'' after filming wrapped — he could have been used in this scene instead of a body double), and the Fourth Doctor's head is a photo of his [[UnintentionalUncannyValley terrifying]] waxwork. Two does some creepy finger twiddling, while Six looks like he has the neck of a Rock'em Sock'em robot. Plus, only the real actors actively move, while the phonies stand still like paper cutouts, which makes the scene a little rigid. And some of the body doubles don't look very good either. Keep in mind that this episode was being filmed ''for cinema release'', and some harder, more animated hed-pastede-on-yay effects were achieved flawlessly to revive Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker's Doctors for one of the ''trailers'' for this episode. But worst of all, Matt Smith's head ''flinches'' a split second before the fade to black.

** The Absorbaloff looks rather stupid when finally seen.

* The scene where a Nestene-controlled plastic wheelie bin eats Mickey in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E1Rose the very first episode of the reboot]] has already aged ''particularly'' poorly.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS39E4VillageOfTheAngels "Village of the Angels"]]: Poor Claire's freaky TomatoInTheMirror moment with the Weeping Angel is ruined by the floppy pair of Angel wings glued to her back.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E12ArmyOfGhosts]]: One instance where this trope is inverted. The completely-smooth uncanny-valley appearance of the Void ship is actually ''heightened'' by the artificial CGI/Photoshopped work; It looks like something that has come from beyond this universe and shouldn't be here.

The original ''Series/DoctorWho'' television series, particularly in its early years, brought home the cliché of "Incredibl(y Cheap) BBC Special Effects" to entire generations of fans. The shoestring-budget look has become one of the most warmly remembered parts of the show, and a major fear of many fans prior to the premiere of the new series is that it would look too well-done. Though Creator/ColinBaker's response to the people who "loved" the poor special effects is that you ''didn't'' love them: you ''tolerated'' them, you ''forgave'' them. Claiming otherwise is just your NostalgiaFilter operating. It really demonstrates that if the writing and acting is good (as most, but by no means all, of ''Doctor Who''[='=]s has been), the audience will forgive pretty much anything else. It was still ''generally'' good for its time (compare other sci-fi from the same time period), except for the earliest seasons and the seasons made during the UK recession of the late '70s. In addition to being lovable because of its Special Effect Failures, there were times when the inability to properly articulate humanoid aliens or robots put them squarely in the UncannyValley to pants-wetting effect.

** The FakeShemp Doctors in the final shot quite obviously have faces cut and pasted on, some at unfortunate angles. The Eighth Doctor's head is too big (worse, Creator/PaulMcGann was asked to return as the Eighth Doctor a ''week'' after filming wrapped — he could have been used in this scene instead of a body double), and the Fourth Doctor's head is a photo of his [[UncannyValley terrifying]] waxwork. Two does some creepy finger twiddling, while Six looks like he has the neck of a Rock'em Sock'em robot. Plus, only the real actors actively move, while the phonies stand still like paper cutouts, which makes the scene a little rigid. And some of the body doubles don't look very good either. Keep in mind that this episode was being filmed ''for cinema release'', and some harder, more animated hed-pastede-on-yay effects were achieved flawlessly to revive Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker's Doctors for one of the ''trailers'' for this episode. But worst of all, Matt Smith's head ''flinches'' a split second before the fade to black.

* An example of a character who became TheScrappy (if not to the audience, certainly to the cast and crew) as the result of this is the RobotBuddy K-9. The actual K-9 prop looks nice and solid if you like the {{Camp}}y design, and some of the touches, like its twizzly ears and tail, are quite cute. But the cast, crew and writers soon grew to hate it because it was poorly made and constantly broke. It also moved very slowly and unsteadily, especially annoying as it's the companion of a particularly tall and kinetic Doctor who was forced to pace down his naturally fast and comical movements to speeds matching that of K-9, usually with an adlibbed "come along, K-9" every time it just stopped for no reason. Quite often, the prop would break, and so the character would just be [[AbsenteeActor written out of the serial]] with its important lines [[CompositeCharacter rewritten and given to Romana]], and as it could barely even handle a straight, perfectly level floor, it would never show up in stories shot anywhere more exciting than corridors (such as the BBCQuarry, the wetlands in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS16E5ThePowerOfKroll "The Power of Kroll"]] or the streets in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS17E2CityOfDeath "City of Death"]] and [[Recap/DoctorWhoS17E6Shada "Shada"]]). Many of the scripts are peppered with sarcastic Douglas-Adamsesque stage directions for K-9, such as (from "Shada") "K-9 HEADS OFF AT WHAT PASSES FOR TOP SPEED", and (in one of the few recorded cases of [[CreativeDifferences on-set rivalries]] between a human and a prop robot) Tom Baker developed a habit of subjecting K-9 to ad-libbed verbal abuse in rehearsals, footage of which occasionally surfaces in HilariousOuttakes BBC shows ("Yeah, you never fucking know the answer when it's important"). On top of that, it was the K-9 prop that caught fire in a prop warehouse thanks to an electrical fault, in the famous fire that destroyed many better-made and more loved 1960s and 70s ''Who'' props.

* The titles for Sylvester [=McCoy's=] era were impressive at the time, but the primitive CGI has ''not'' aged well in the slightest, with the lumpy, untextured asteroids that fly past the camera early in the sequence looking particularly bad and more like crumpled up bits of paper than actual rocks.

** The episode starts off with a [[ScoobyDoobyDoors Scooby-Doo-style hallway chase]] which uses jump cuts to create the effect, but the jump cuts are ''very'' obvious and distracting because the water on the floor visibly moves each time.

** Which is odd, because the credits show that the same person designed both.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E1TheMagiciansApprentice "The Magician's Apprentice"]]: Missy and Clara's discovery that they're on Skaro is followed by a Dalek that is very obviously CGI, poorly composited into the scene and has its dome lights positioned too far up it's dome, creating a somewhat squashed appearance.

* The titles for Sylvester [=McCoy's=] era were impressive at the time, but the primitive CGI has ''not'' aged well in the slightest, with the lumpy, untextured asteroids that fly past the camera early in the sequence looking particularly bad.

* The replacement prop used from 1977 to 1980 loses it's lamp between seasons, resulting in its hasty replacement by a blue rotating police siren light, receives painfully obvious patchwork repairs to the windowframe on the right door (due to the actors using that to pull the door closed, the prop lacked a door handle), and by "Shada" has a very obvious broken window pane and a roof that appears to be falling into the prop.

* The panels on the doors of the TARDIS used for some scenes of [[Recap/DoctorWhoS19E1Castrovalva "Castrovalva"]] and [[Recap/DoctorWHoS19E5BlackOrchid "Black Orchid"]] don't match the design of the side walls, due to the prop being the retired Fourth Doctor prop redressed and partially rebuilt to match the new prop introduced in Season 18.

* The proportions of the "Police Public Call Box" signage fluctuate in terms of height during Series 10 due to the 2013/Series 7B prop being brought out of retirement to replace the Series 9 "Clara TARDIS" prop.

* The offscreen Daleks in [[Recap/DoctorWhoTVMTheTVMovie the TV Movie]] manage to be this despite being completely unseen due to some truly awful sound design. The illusion of many Daleks is created by taking a voice clip recorded at normal speed and then just speeding it up a lot to fit multiple repetitions of it into the very short scene, and they aren't even ring-modulated, so they all have comically squeaky voices that sound neither cool nor anything like Daleks.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS4E2TheTenthPlanet "The Tenth Planet"]]: The Cybermen are obviously just made of surgical tape, paper and wires. They have normal human hands, because ''the costume designer forgot to bring the gloves''. However,
[[Administrivia/TropesAreTools this fits their nature as once-human creatures who had been altered through technology]], and a common complaint in the fandom is that [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the better-looking Cybermen from later on are not as scary as the shoddy ones from "The Tenth Planet"]], who fall firmly into the UncannyValley. (This is one reason the Mondasian Cybermen were brought back for the Twelfth Doctor's penultimate story.)

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS4E2TheTenthPlanet "The Tenth Planet"]]: The Cybermen are obviously just made of surgical tape, paper and wires. They have normal human hands, because ''the costume designer forgot to bring the gloves''. However, this fits their nature as once-human creatures who had been altered through technology, and a common complaint in the fandom is that [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the better-looking Cybermen from later on are not as scary as the shoddy ones from "The Tenth Planet"]], who fall firmly into the UncannyValley. (This is one reason the Mondasian Cybermen were brought back for the Twelfth Doctor's penultimate story.)

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS10E2CarnivalOfMonsters "Carnival of Monsters"]] has a moment in Part 4 when an Inter Minorian's bald cap completely slips loose. This was considered so bad by producer Barry Letts that when he learned the BBC were going to repeat the story in 1981, he expressly requested that the scene be edited to remove the offending shots.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS11E2InvasionOfTheDinosaurs "Invasion of the Dinosaurs"]] is thrilling when you read the script — but on the screen, the dinosaurs make the Dalek action figures look convincing by comparison. Someone from the effects team knew someone else who had an effects team in Pinewood Studios who specialised in making puppets, and assured Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks that they would be able to have convincing dinosaurs. (To be fair, this team had done the Drashigs in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS10E2CarnivalOfMonsters "Carnival of Monsters"]], which Letts had considered a success.) Convincing dinosaurs were in no way delivered, and Dicks gleefully notes in a DVD Easter Egg that the company went out of business after the episode was made, for reasons obvious upon viewing. They are so bad that the producer actually begged the BBC to destroy all the copies out of personal embarrassment (all episodes of this one, ironically, survive). Not only did the creatures look rubbery and altogether unlifelike, but they were wired to the miniature set through the leg, so they couldn't walk and could only move one foot. Especially embarrassing/hilarious is the scene where one dinosaur is mauling another, except it looks it's trying to leave a hickey instead.

* [[Recap/DoctorWhoS20E5Enlightenment "Enlightenment"]], otherwise beautiful, has the scene where Turlough gets rescued after throwing himself overboard. Cue yellowscreen background of a ship with Mark Strickson hanging from wires in front of it while a net is brought over to scoop him up. Fortunately, many of the bad special effects were fixed when a special remade version was released on DVD along with the original episode.

* The black and white era sometimes uses photographic reproductions (read: cardboard cut-outs) of background Daleks in scenes with lots of them (before the first movie was made, there were a total of four Dalek props, and after it a massive ''twenty'', one of which was accidentally rendered unusable in filming the second movie the next year). The background in the [=TARDIS=] control room in the black and white era is also a simple matte painting. (This could be gotten away with because the TV system used in the UK for black and white was also much lower resolution than any system ever used for colour. [[note]]The system in use, System A, had a total resolution of 405 lines and an even lower effective resolution, which is even lower than that of a black and white System M (NTSC) TV. In fact, it had the lowest resolution of all television systems, black and white or otherwise. This persisted until the UK switched over to the superior 625 lines resolution of System B at around 1968.[[/note]] This level of crudity was never tried for any colour episode.)