Spider Dalek (TV story)
VFX Tests June 1994 (TV story) or VFX Tests June 1994 (home video), depending on whether the 1995 broadcasting as part of the Gamemasters "future releases" montage counts as a premiere.
Talk about it here.
VFX Tests June 1994, often referred to as Spider Dalek, was a set of two sequences of test footage created by Amblin Entertainment in June of 1994 in expectation of a potential Doctor Who movie or TV reboot. Though the movie project in which they would have fit was never completed, the sequence was included in the special features of the Doctor Who TV movie that was in the end released in 1996.
The few seconds of the Spider Dalek test footage had previously been released on GameMasters in 1995 as part of a montage of clips from future Amblin Entertainment projects, but not as a distinct entity.
Synopsis
Inside a space station, out in the black abyss of space, a Spider Dalek roams the corridors, alternating between crawling on the floor or the ceiling thanks to its polyvalent abilities.
Crew
- Publisher - Amblin Entertainment
- Producer - Steven Spielberg
- Designer - Amblin Entertainment
Worldbuilding
- A Spider Dalek is moving about the metal corridors of a space station, displaying the ability to hang from the ceiling using its clawed leg-like appendages.
Story notes
- This sequence replicates a particular piece of concept art shown off in the Leekley Bible, with the animation showing a Silver Dalek unfold to the second-last vertical form of this illustration. Using this concept art as reference, one can see the test footage dalek mutant has the silhouette of a human figure with three glowing eyes.
- The relation of the Spider-Daleks to the Silver Daleks is further explored in Philip Segal's Skaro - The Dead Planet: A brief history of the Daleks, which seems to suggest that the Spider-Daleks one day become the Daleks seen in The Chase and The Daleks' Master Plan.
- The 1995 glimpse of the test footage constituted the first public unveiling of the Spider Dalek, a Dalek redesign which was eventually introduced into the mainstream Doctor Who universe as a Dalek variant in the Eighth Doctor novel War of the Daleks.
- While the Spider-Daleks in War of the Daleks were more of a reintroduction of the concept into the mainstream DWU, Spider-Daleks based heavily on Leekley Bible "lore", were seen in PROSE: The Chronicles of Doctor Who?, and explained in COMIC: Fire and Brimstone to be of another universe.
Home video releases
- Footage of the test animation, alongside early vortex tests, were included in the 2010 DVD release of TV: Doctor Who under the title "FX test reels."
