Doctor Who and the Daleks (short story)
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Doctor Who and the Daleksfor other, similarly-named pages.
Doctor Who and the Daleks is the collective name for two 1964 short stories told on a series of 50 cards included with Dr Who and the Daleks sweet cigarettes, manufactured by Cadet Sweets.
Summary
Story one (cards 1-25)
The First Doctor goes to the planet Marinus where the Daleks are at war with the Voord. He watches the battle collapse after the two sides agree to go to Earth to find a mysterious power source. The new allies capture the Doctor and force him to divulge the secret of Ultkron travel, or how to travel through time.
En route to the Solar system, the Doctor unsuccessfully tries to sabotage the Voord ship. The Voord eject him into the vacuum of space, but the Daleks use their hoverbouts to rescue him. They secret him to their part of the Voord ship.
The Doctor then tries to send a warning to Earth. He successfully transmits to Earth Space Station, but he is re-imprisoned by the Daleks before he can fully explain. Earth officials dismiss the Dalek attack as unlikely, and do not prepare an adequate defence.
As the ship approaches Earth, the Doctor overhears that the Daleks intend to destroy the Voord. The Doctor shares this information with the Chief Voord, who is more than surprised to see the Doctor back on his ship. All Daleks onboard, save one in seclusion, are rounded up. A battle ensues which rips apart the ship. The Doctor uses an escape capsule to fly to the freedom of Earth. Unbeknownst to him, the Chief Voord is also aboard the escape capsule. As the craft enters Earth's atmosphere, they notice that several Daleks have survived the explosion of the Voord ship, and are now, like them, bound for South America and the "Great Power".
Story two (cards 26-50)
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Characters
References
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Notes
- Each card has a snippet of the story on one side and a full-colour painting on the other. Despite the age of the story, it is easily accessible to modern audiences since it is included on The Keys of Marinus DVD.
- The stories are told in a very economical way, because of the tiny space available on each card. Sentences are often devoid of articles, and are rendered, unusually, in the present tense to eliminate the need for helping verbs. Modern readers might justifiably consider it "a story as told on Twitter".
- The cards' art is by Richard Jennings.[1] Although the writer is unknown, the stories are a clear effort to market Terry Nation-owned characters. It is one of the few pieces of merchandising to include the Voord and the planet Marinus, which had also been introduced in 1964.
- They are the first original prose stories to use the character of the Doctor, in this case the First Doctor, in the history of the Doctor Who franchise. They may also be the first works of original Whoniverse prose, though it's unknown when exactly in 1964 this product was first released. It could, then, have been beaten to the market by June 1964's The Dalek Book. That book is actually referenced on card #33, but it's unclear whether that's a call back to something already on the shelves, or advertisement for something that was soon to be published. Whatever the case, Doctor Who and the Daleks is unlikely to have been released prior to mid-April 1964, since that's when the Voord debuted on television.
- For Dalek fans, the second story is notable as the first piece of fiction in any medium to feature the Dalek Emperor, and the first to depict him as having a golden dome. This would later be developed in TV Century 21 Dalek comics, where the Emperor was often styled the "Golden Emperor".
- The story's name is rendered, oddly, Doctor — Who and the Daleks on each card. However, the dash is not really a part of the story's name. It is instead a typographic "trick" used at the time to make the primitive full-justification "balance" on the page. Were the card printed today, there would be no need for the dash.
- The Doctor's TARDIS never appears, nor is it even mentioned, in this story.
- There was an album that was available for one shilling. The cards could be pasted into the album. The album was likely a generic one rather than one that had been produced specifically for this promotion.[1]
Continuity
- This story specifically equates hoverbout with transolar disc. This is somewhat unusual, since most later Dalek fiction calls a hovabout a transolar disc, but a hoverbout a kind of intra-planetary shuttlecraft that is crewed by multiple Daleks and has scientific equipment aboard.
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Howe, David J. Blumberg, Arnold J, 2001, Howe's Transcendental Toybox, Telos Publishing, Great Britain
External links
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