Characters Franchise Main Trivia YMMV main index Narrative
|
In late 1963 we had Doctor Who, the series which spawned the Whoniverse. Then in 1964, in the pages of TV Comic, the first Doctor Who spin-off comic started. Overall, the Whoniverse has encompassed three stage plays, webcasts, animation, choose-your-own-adventure books, novels, novelisations, audio dramas, comics and feature films (adapting two of the earlier television stories).The three different Sarah Jane spin-offs serve as a lesson in how you can spin off the same character in different ways, using different tropes and for different audiences. Expanded Universe material in general and without the Doctor, in particular, tend to be Darker and Edgier and skew more towards the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism than their parent series. The Sarah Jane Adventures and K-9 & Company stand out as notable exceptions. (Sarah also appeared in the semi-professional direct-to-video production Downtime.)Up to the present, the franchise's Expanded Universe continued usually in the form of comics and novelisations. During the "wilderness years", though, following the cancellation of the original regular series in 1989, and its revival in 2005 (it also came back for a television movie/Backdoor Pilot in 1996), a number of other spin-offs in the form of original novels, audios and webcasts have picked up the slack, some of them involving characters other than the Doctor. Over time, a number of these have evolved into their own sub-continuities.Notably, by the time Doctor Who came back following the wilderness years, the books and two Web Original stories, Death Comes to Time and Scream Of The Shalka (which existed in an Alternate Continuity from each other), had all written out the Time Lords; when the TV series returned, it did the same thing.The Expanded Whoniverse has branched in diverse ways into separate fully licensed and semi-official sub-continuities, divided (in some cases) by the BBC's copyright restrictions, further complicated that no one person, including the BBC, owns all the rights to the monsters and characters which have appeared in the Whoniverse. Sometimes they acknowledge each other, sometimes they ignore each other, Depending on the Writer. Those who expect consistency, or even, in some cases, sanity, will find themselves sorely disappointed.
ComicsThe comics started off in the Silver Age, with a strip in the British TV adaptation anthology comic TV Comic. This ran from 1964 to 1979, with a break during 1971-3 when the Doctor Who strip appeared in a sister title called Countdown and later TV Action, aimed at a slightly older audience. However all these strips were definitely commercial publications aimed at a child audience, and the stories featuring "Dr. Who" and his companions (who in the early days were entirely different from the TV characters, due to the publishers only paying the fee to use the Doctor himself) reflected this. Apart from sharing very basic elements, they didn't have much in common with the television series. At one point, the Doctor joins forces with Santa Claus to battle an evil wizard and save Christmas.The "modern" comics (in the minds of fans), though, started with the comic in Doctor Who Magazine in 1979. By and large, the DWM comics have tended to reference their own sub-continuity more than other media. However, during the early 1990s, they shared the same continuity as the New Adventures; in the mid-90s, around the time of the TV Movie, they made a break with the novels' continuity by killing off the Doctor's companion Ace as a teenager after the books had shown her age, turn into a Nineties Anti-Hero and finally leave the Doctor for good.After the TV series' return in 2005, a new magazine aimed at kids, Doctor Who Adventures, came out alongside DWM, with its own Lighter and Softer comic. Meanwhile, American comics company IDW picked up the licence for US Doctor Who comics, reprinting the Doctor Who Magazine run from the beginning as Doctor Who Classics, producing their own one-shots and miniseries, and eventually launching their own separate ongoing series. (Officially No Export for You to the UK, for licencing reasons, although it's easy to find the TPBs in comic shops.)Some comics works
Tropes used in the comics:
Tropes used in Doctor Who Adventures
FilmTwo color, relatively high budgeted Doctor Who film adaptations, Dr. Who and the Daleks (based on the Season 1 Dalek debut story "The Daleks") and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (based on the second Dalek story "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" from Season 2) came out in the 1960s. The films, starring Peter Cushing, shortened and dumbed down the stories, meaning that they cut out much Padding, but simplified the themes, softened the characters and overall made things Lighter and Softer. The Doctor underwent Flanderization into a human Absent-Minded Professor literally called Dr. Who who had invented a time machine called TARDIS (no "the"). His grand-daughter Susan was de-aged to prepubescence and Barbara and Ian were changed from teachers to Doctor Who's grown-up elder grand-daughter and her incompetent Plucky Comic Relief boyfriend. The second film replaced Barbara and Ian with Doctor Who's niece Louise and Tom Campbell, a bumbling policeman who anticipated a couple of TV companions by stumbling into TARDIS thinking it was a real police box. Needless to say, they occur in a Alternate Continuity from the series. At least one official prose spin-off short story has been published featuring the movieverse characters. Bernard Cribbins, who played Campbell, later played Wilfred Mott in the TV series forty years later. Steven Moffat, current showrunner of the main series has cited the movie Daleks as inspiration for the Dalek design of series 5.Tropes used in Doctor Who films:
Animation/Web OriginalIn the 1980s, Canadian company Nelvana planned to produce an animated Who series for American network CBS, which fell through. Early concept art for the series featured a Doctor who bore a striking resemblance to Egon Spengler, from The Real Ghostbusters.About a decade after Doctor Who went off the air, BBCi started experimenting with the series, doing webcast dramas with animated elements - most notable of these is Death Comes to Time, set in an apparent Alternative Continuity. It ends with the Doctor (seemingly) Killed Off for Real, and might have paved the way for a series revival (with another Time Lord now having assumed the place of the Doctor), but that didn't happen. They also did an adaptation of aborted TV story Shada, with the Eighth Doctor taking the place of the Fourth, and an original Sixth Doctor story, Real Time.BBCi eventually did an full-on animated webcast for the fortieth anniversary in November 2003, Scream Of The Shalka, which featured a Ninth Doctor played by Richard E. Grant. The TV series' return (announced two months earlier), however, meant the Shalka Doctor got overwritten in continuity. It also had a cameo by a now somewhat well-known Who fan who basically insisted on having a part written just for him after hearing about the production from down the hall. Little did we know...The series' return saw animated Who finally make the jump to TV in 2007, with The Infinite Quest, a 13-part serial featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha, broadcast as part of the BBC kids' series Totally Doctor Who. It was followed up in late 2009 with the CGI-animated serial Dreamland, featuring Ten solo with 'guest companions'. Initially, it was shown on digital and online, before appearing on BBC Two.Tropes used in Doctor Who animation:
LiteratureDuring the 70s and 80s, in the days before video took off, the way to catch up on previous Doctor Who stories were the novelisations from Target Books, which retold (and frequently expanded on) the stories on TV.Almost every story from the classic series got a novelisation, with the TV Movie's being done by BBC Books; the five that didn't get one (The Pirate Planet, City of Death, Shada, Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks)* having taken off in the meantime, Target Books was no longer able to afford the advances he commanded.)]] received fan novelisations courtesy of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club. Shada eventually received an official novelisation by BBC Books in 2012, written by Gareth Roberts. However, there've been no official novelisations of the new series' stories, and it looks unlikely there will be.In the early 1990s, after Doctor Who had gone off the air, Virgin Publishing's New Adventures novels filled the gap. Choosing to aim for an audience of 25 and up fans and readers of Science Fiction (versus targeting a younger, less reverent demographic, as they also considered), they made both the Doctor and the tone of the Whoniverse more Grim Dark. They also made the stories a bit harder on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness (the television series had gone in that direction anyway). The novels (more because of the creativity of the fans-turned-authors Running the Asylum than by Executive Meddling) riffed over each other's contributions. Future Show Runner Russell T Davies contributed one of the novels, Damaged Goods. Other writers for the New Adventures would later write for the new series. The penultimate New Adventures novel (before it changed its format and concentrated on the Doctor's companion), Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt, also went into the Doctor's secret Back Story, hinted about onscreen.The Missing Adventures, starring the first six Doctors, later appeared using the same format.Then the series, in effect, bifurcated. After Virgin lost their license following the TV Movie, the New Adventures evolved (by design and with the groundwork laid by writers and editors) into a Doctor-less Spin-Off series still set (nominally) in the Whoniverse starring ex-companion and Adventurer Archaeologist Bernice Summerfield (not owned by the BBC), with the odd Writing Around Trademarks and Lawyer-Friendly Cameo when needed. Under the auspices of Big Finish, the series still continues.The Eighth Doctor Adventures continued on, this time published by the BBC. The authors really had a field day with the Eighth Doctor, who had only appeared in the Made-for-TV Movie. Since his run in the TV series was so short, nearly all of his adventures had to be shown in the Expanded Universe, in the novels, audio plays and comics. General consensus says that both book series took place in the same universe, though some writers disagreed. At any rate, the Eighth Doctor novels started off Lighter and Softer then before and then got Darker and Edgier again and engaged in heavy Story Arcs leading to (arguably) Continuity Lock-Out and eventually Cosmic Retcon, which in turn led to... etc., etc.The BBC also did their own Past Doctor Adventures range, featuring the first seven Doctors.For a brief period, Telos got the licence to do Doctor Who novellas, featuring all the Doctors. These eventually spawned another Spin-Off, Time Hunter.With the revival of Doctor Who, the books changed format completely. The New Series Adventures featured the current TV Doctor and aimed themselves towards a more general and kid-inclusive audience. The Past Doctor range was dropped in 2005, shortly after the debut of the new series, and will be revived with "Harvest of Time" in 2013 , an 8-year release gap. These new books appear to be in continuity with the TV series, being referenced (in Boom Town and The End of Time Part One) in the TV show itself.Spin-offs originating in the books
Tropes used in Doctor Who books:
AudioDoctor Who started venturing into original audio stories back in the 1970s, with Doctor Who and the Pescatons, a Fourth Doctor story on vinyl LP. The 80s saw Sixth Doctor story Slipback on Radio 4, while the 90s saw two new Third Doctor stories, The Paradise of Death (for Radio 5) and The Ghosts of N-Space (for Radio 2).In 1995, Big Finish started a series of audio plays based on New Adventures star Bernice Summerfield. In 1999, they got the license to produce new audio Who stories which continue to the present, involving Doctors Five through Eight. The Fourth Doctor joined the lineup come 2012. They also do a Lost Stories series, adapting unmade stories from the original TV series. Big Finish can't legally use elements from or mention events in the new series because of BBC Audio (see below), though the occasional sneaky reference snuck its way through.The Bernice Summerfield series, also set in the Whoniverse, continues. For several years, Big Finish had the license to do short story anthologies (the Short Trips range).BBC Audio, meanwhile, have been doing original audio books featuring the current TV Doctor, and recruited Fourth Doctor Tom Baker to do several series of audio plays for them.Audio spin-offs
Tropes used in Doctor Who audio plays:
OtherThe Whoniverse has also appeared in many other formats.Examples
Tropes used in other Doctor Who Expanded Universe media:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
0 reviews alternative title(s): Doctor Who Expanded Universe
Privacy Policy
35