Sunday, February 5, 2017

My VHS Purge: Doctor Who "The Tomb of the Cybermen"





As part of a downsizing project eight years ago I purged most of my pre-recorded VHS tape collection. I've never been a big collector of movies -- my DVD library is fairly small -- but the fact is I had accumulated around 70 tapes: 

Doctor Who: The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) Long thought to be a "lost" Doctor Who, all four episodes were eventually discovered in 1991 residing in Hong Kong. (The copy was a 16mm kinescope used for foreign distribution; the original recording tapes had been erased by the BBC years before.) Considered a glorious find by "Whovians", this one works, I think, because it drips with atmosphere. The actual storyline is almost secondary; at times it seems to exist just to bump and creep along in order to fill four parts/episodes. The Cybermen are great villains, however.

My introduction in any real way, other than having read a fair bit about "Tomb" over the years, was through a British friend who told me it scared him when he saw it as a child. He may have used the word "frightened". Doctor Who certainly scared me when I was a child.

Acquiring the VHS tape allowed me to see "The Tomb of the Cybermen" and I was impressed.

2 comments:

Tibor said...

I keep thinking the creepy thing on the right has a beehive hairdo!

Simon St. Laurent said...

That is the Cyber Controller. Mind your Ps and Qs whenever you're around that guy/thing.