Trivia / Doctor Who Missing Adventures

• Creator Backlash: Paul Cornell once called the experiencing of writing Goth Opera "most unpleasant", but did not elaborate.
• Development Gag: The Gallifreyan phrases the Fifth Doctor speaks in Cold Fusion are represented by Greek, and they roughly translate to "and I turned around and they were all wearing eyepatches", a reference to an anecdote Nicholas Courtney used to tell about a prank the cast played on him during the filming of "Inferno".
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The plot for Goth Opera was originally developed from an unproduced comic strip for Doctor Who Magazine, which would have featured the Fourth Doctor in a fight against Dracula. Paul Cornell revised the story to use the Fifth Doctor for this novel.
• Recycled Script: Justin Richards later reused much of the premise of The Sands of Time for one of the books in his series The Invisible Detective, Web of Anubis.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Burning Heart was meant to be a Crossover with Judge Dredd.
  • The Crystal Bucephalus was originally pitched as a New Adventure featuring the Seventh Doctor; a chapter of this original submission was published in the 1999 charity anthology Perfect Timing 2.
  • Steve Lyons originally proposed Time of Your Life as an introductory story to Melanie Bush, whose first meeting with the Doctor had not been shown in the TV series. Rebecca Levene, Virgin New Adventures' editor at the time, rejected the idea in favour of introducing a new companion for the Doctor. Mel's introduction would later be written by Gary Russell in the Past Doctor Adventures novel Business Unusual.
  • The Sixth Doctor novel Millenial Rites was originally intended to be about the Second Doctor.
  • Daniel O'Mahony pitched a sequel novel to The Man in the Velvet Mask to BBC Books. He described it as "a black comedy historical set in 1916, called Viet Cong!". However, it was rejected.
  • In Cold Fusion the story ends with the Seventh Doctor punching out the Fifth Doctor in order to erase his memories of what just happened to avoid a disruption in his personal timeline. Originally it would have been revealed (after the Seventh Doctor and his companions left) that the Seventh Doctor had struck the Fifth Doctor harder than intended, and had caused him to regenerate into the Sixth Doctor, long before he was supposed to. The editors at Virgin basically treated it as a joke and nothing more was said of it, and it's unclear whether or not Parkin intended it to really happen. Two years later, Lawrence Miles would do this for real with the Third Doctor in Interference.
  • Dodo was originally supposed to make a cameo in Who Killed Kennedy, but according to author David Bishop, "she took over the book".
• Word of God: In his commentary for Who Killed Kennedy, David Bishop states that the "short and slightly dishevelled" man that James Stevens meets is the Second Doctor. Regarding the book's new ending, in a tweet asking if the Twelfth Doctor received the call from Stevens while at St Luke's University, Bishop answered, "if this lines up, yes".

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