Line #12 Film/DrWhoAndTheDaleks


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/doctor_who_daleks_8635.jpg]]
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3	JustForFun/{{The one\|With}} [[TheMovie on the big screen]] -- well, the first one, anyway.
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5	''Dr. Who and the Daleks'' is a 1965 film that cashed in on the craze of Dalekmania by adapting the ''Series/DoctorWho'' serial [[Recap/DoctorWhoS1E2TheDaleks "The Daleks"]] into a [[TheFilmOfTheSeries cinema spectacle]] (albeit distilled into an AlternateContinuity simpler than the show). It features the Daleks (IN COLOUR!) battling against Creator/PeterCushing as Dr. Who.
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7	It was followed a year later by ''Film/DaleksInvasionEarth2150AD'', which did nowhere near as well.
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10	!!''Dr. Who and the Daleks'' provides examples of the following tropes:
11	* AccentAdaptation: The filmmakers on the set didn't fully understand that the Daleks' dome-lights were supposed to be keyed to their speech, not vice versa. The audio engineers then used the lights to pace the Daleks' speech, resulting in voices that are as harsh as the TV series and excruciatingly stilted to boot.
12	* AdaptationSpeciesChange: Unlike the main TV series, the Doctor and Susan are humans.
13	* AdaptationalComicRelief: Ian is much more bumbling than his straight-laced television counterpart.
14	* AdaptationalNameChange:
15	** From simply the Doctor, to actually Doctor Who.
16	** The Daleks have always been known as the Daleks, even before they became their horrid mutated selves we all recognize as Daleks; no "Kaled" ([[DependingOnTheWriter or]] "Dal") business.
17	* AdaptationalNiceGuy: Dr. Who is considerably nicer and more considerate than the First Doctor was in the original story.
18	* AgeLift: Susan is a little girl of about eleven (where in the original she was a 15-year-old teenager or equivalent).
19	* AliensSpeakingEnglish: The Daleks and the Thals, who both speak and read perfect English. There's no mention of an equivalent for the TV show's translation circuit (which was only first mentioned in TV years later anyway), and it is unexplained how either race is able to communicate with Dr. Who and his companions.
20	* AlternateContinuity: Let us count the ways! Some of the changes are deliberate alterations, while others are a result of [[EarlyAdaptationWeirdness continuity going a different direction after the film was made]].
21	** The character of the unnamed Doctor (not yet definitively an alien [[note]]The series wouldn't establish he was ''definitely'' not human for a little while, and wouldn't give his species a name until [[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E7TheWarGames 1969]] nor his home planet a name until [[Recap/DoctorWhoS11E1TheTimeWarrior 1973]][[/note]], but it had been established right from the first episode that he wasn't from Earth) has become a contemporary scientist [[invoked]][[IAmNotShazam literally named Dr. Who]].
22	** Susan ''and'' Barbara are both his granddaughters (with the surname Who, to boot).
23	** Ian is Barbara's boyfriend, neither of them is a teacher, and both are [[invoked]][[DawsonCasting "teenagers"]].
24	** Dr. Who's ship is known as ''Tardis'' (note the capitalization and the lack of the definite article).
25	** ''Tardis'' is still a police box that's BiggerOnTheInside (somehow), but its interior consists of only one room built very haphazardly. There's no hexagonal console, time rotor, or roundels -- just a great many random buttons, wires, and switches... and a single lever is all that controls the space/time travel mechanism.[[note]]A restoration documentary on Kino Lorber's recent Blu-Ray release reveals this was a deliberate stylistic choice by director Gordon Flemyng, due to the idiosyncrasies of the specific wide-screen format the movie was being shot in -- long story short, the central console would have looked weird in the format (a two-sprocket-hole-per-frame format known as "Techniscope") and wouldn't have worked visually in Flemyng's estimation, so it was removed.[[/note]] Also, no [[invoked]][[SugarWiki/MostWonderfulSound vworp noise]].
26	** The Daleks themselves are quite different, both physically and mentally; physically speaking their true form within the robotic suits is green, with webbed hands and a scrawny baby-like form, but still humanoid — as opposed to the ambiguously reptilian creature seen in the original serial and the grotesque, reddish "squid-skulls" that would become standard in the Revival Series. As to mentally, they are "less" AlwaysChaoticEvil than their series counterpart, as it does not seem to have been self-evident to most Dalek soldiers that their higher-ups would order the total extermination of the Thals. Their history is also somewhat different, as they are simply one of many breeds of mutants who were born after the First Dalek-Thal War, who were forced to lock themselves in the robotic suits to escape radiation sickness and because their physical bodies had become gruesome, stunted homunculi — as opposed to having been carefully engineered ''as'' perfect soldiers by [[MadScientist Davros]].
27	* CanonImmigrant: The Daleks were supposed to have flamethrowers, which were scrapped for the infamous fog cannons. However, flamethrowers were included with the Daleks in regular canon, in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E4TheDaleksMasterPlan "The Daleks' Master Plan"]] (where they fire from the plungers instead of the gunsticks).
28	* CapsLockNumLockMissilesLock: The plot is set into motion when Ian and Barbara lean against Tardis' activation lever while making out. Doctor Who then calls Ian out for this, when it was clearly Barbara who started it.
29	* ComicBookAdaptation: Creator/DellComics in the US published a one-off adaptation of the film in the mid-1960s, [[invoked]][[MarthDebutedInSmashBros nearly 15 years before any comics based on the TV show appeared in the US.]]
30	* CompressedAdaptation: From seven 25-minute episodes (175 minutes total) to one 82-minute film.
31	* DeadlyDodging: Most of the Daleks are defeated by being tricked into shooting each other.
32	* EarlyAdaptationWeirdness: Some of the movie's differences from TV series canon are a result of the fact that it was produced less than two years into the series' run, when much of the canon simply didn't exist yet. The Daleks, in particular, are based entirely on their first appearance in the series, before their personalities and history were fully established. The decision to make the Doctor a human would also have seemed more reasonable at the time, when nearly all of the famous details of his alien nature were still in the future.
33	* EntertainmentAboveTheirAge: In the opening scene of the movie, Susan, the 11-year-old granddaughter of a genius scientist, [[SharedFamilyQuirks is reading a college-level physics textbook]].
34	* EntertainmentBelowTheirAge: In the opening scene of the movie, after showing Susan and Barbara reading scientific works, the camera pans to Dr. Who chuckling over an issue of the children's magazine ''Eagle'' (home of the ''ComicStrip/DanDare'' comic strip).
35	* HandWave: The [[VoodooShark ridiculous]] explanation for the interior of Tardis.
36	-->'''Susan:''' Space expands to accommodate the time that encompasses its dimensions.
37	* LittleMissBadass: The movie's eleven-year-old Susan is considerably bolder than the TV show's fifteen-year-old Susan, who only returned to Tardis from the city after much prodding. As another example, when TV!Susan is surprised by the Thal, she is deeply disturbed and has a long bout of HeroicBSOD. Movie!Susan is just annoyed that nobody seems to believe her that there are other people alive on the planet, though she does freak out slightly at the initial tap on the shoulder.
38	* SameLanguageDub: Actress Yvonne Antrobus was unavailable for post-synchronization after the shooting of the film was complete. Thus, while she is seen on-screen as Dyoni, her voice is provided by another, unnamed, actress.
39	* SequelHook: At the end, our heroes try to get back to UsefulNotes/{{London}}, but end up in the middle of an [[AncientRome ancient Roman]] battle.
40	* SparedByTheAdaptation: [[spoiler:Antodus]] gets a DisneyDeath, instead of [[spoiler:actually falling to his death]] as he does in the TV story.
41	* StealthSequel: Peter Cushing believed Doctor Who is a future regeneration of the Doctor from the TV show after having his memory erased and being made to relive old adventures by the Celestial Toymaker.
42	* ATrueStoryInMyUniverse: Later stories in the mainstream Franchise/DoctorWhoExpandedUniverse imply these films are actually a result of Ian and Barbara selling the "real" story of what happened to them to Creator/AmicusProductions as fiction. It was nearly referenced onscreen in "[[Recap/DoctorWho50thASTheDayOfTheDoctor Day Of The Doctor]]" by having the posters appear in UNIT's archive but they couldn't get the rights sorted in time. The novelization actually restored this aspect and makes the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors into massive fans of the film – so much, in fact, that it's hinted they offered Cushing a trip in the TARDIS to star in ''Film/RogueOne'' posthumously!
43	* {{Zeerust}}: The Daleks' colourful fortress, big time. The Dalek control room even has lava lamps, which probably still seemed incredibly futuristic in 1965.

Context Film / DrWhoAndTheDaleks