Doctor Who pastiches
- You may be looking for Doctor Who parodies or cultural references to the Doctor Who universe.
Many unauthorised versions and pastiches of Doctor Who and imitations of the Doctor have appeared.
A great number of the video and audio-based pastiches of the Doctor and Doctor Who were produced during what is often called the "Wilderness Years", the period when Doctor Who was not being produced in a video format post-1989 to 1996 and post 1996 to 2005.
There have also been a few in-universe instances of Doctor Who parodying itself. For example, the series known as "Professor X" is a broad pastiche of the Doctor and Doctor Who; in the Virgin New Adventures novel No Future Bernice Summerfield even briefly visited a fictional universe where she met Professor X himself and travelled in his "TASID", a ship that looks like a pillar box and can travel through time and space.
List of Doctor Who pastiches
BBV Productions
The independent production company BBV Productions, in parallel with licensed Doctor Who spin-offs, produced a number of Doctor Who pastiches featuring Doctor Who cast members in roles meant to evoke their BBC characters while being sufficiently distant as to avoid legal issues.
In the The Stranger films, Colin Baker portrayed the titular traveller while Nicola Bryant appeared in the first three stories as his companion Miss Brown. The characters were marked out from the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown by different outfits and, in Bryant's case, a different accent: Miss Brown sounded English instead of American. However, it was not until the fourth Stranger film that the Stranger and Miss Brown were definitively given backstories at odds with Doctor Who.
Meanwhile, one of the longest-running subseries of the Audio Adventures in Time & Space, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Professor and Sophie Aldred as Ace — highly transparent stand-ins for their televised Seventh Doctor and Ace, although the TARDIS was kept carefully off-screen. Copyright concerns eventually led to a similar distancing of the characters from their Doctor Who roots, with the Professor revealing his more formal name to be "the Dominie" rather than "the Doctor", and Ace being ascribed the birth name of Alice (in contrast to her TV equivalent's "Dorothy").
Nicholas Briggs, who had portrayed an unofficial Doctor in the Audio Visuals, played the Stranger in some audios. He also portrayed a "Fred" in two audios, the first of which was also the debut of the Cyberons, who was directly intended as a continuation of his unofficial Doctor, but was unable to recall his original name or other BBC-owned elements due to a bout of amnesia, thus allowing BBV to only use the elements of the character belonging to the Audio Visuals writers.
BBV Productions did not just attempt pastiches of the Doctor. The Adventures in a Pocket Universe series featured a licensed appearance by John Leeson's K9, but also featured Lalla Ward (TV's Romana II) as "the Mistress", a character transparently intended to be interpreted as a post-Warriors' Gate iteration of Romana but carefully never unambiguously depicted as such.
Other
Comics
- Marvel Comics had Professor Justin Alphonse Gamble and his enemies the Dredlox who keep shouting "Incinerate" in Power Man and Iron Fist Vol 1 79. Notably, Professor Gamble can change his appearance and had stolen a time machine from the Time Variance Authority. He wrote a play under the name "Sergius O'Shaughnessy" involving the Dredlox based on his life.
- Later Marvel and Marvel UK stories introduced WHO, or the Weird Happenings Organisation, led by Doctor Alistaire Stuart along with his sister, Brigadier Alysande Stuart. (They are obviously named after Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart.) This was originally the creation of British-born Marvel writer Chris Claremont. During the course of his career, he made many references to Doctor Who in his scripts.
- The Wildstorm comic book The Establishment featured Mister Pharmacist, who resembled a much darker and sinister version of the Fourth Doctor. He worked alongside a team of super-secret agents based on other characters from British fantasy and adventure television series. The Establishment made many other allusions to this genre and to British pulp fiction.
- Grant Morrison's The Invisibles featured surgically altered drone henchmen known as the Cyphermen.
- In the Wallace and Gromit comic "The W Files" there is a spoof of the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton and UNIT.
- Alan Moore features The First and Second Doctors as well as Doctor Omega in his League of Extraodinary Gentlemen.
Television
- The ITV children's drama series Press Gang (written by Steven Moffat) in one episode features Colonel X, an eccentric, suave and mysterious children's television hero. Colonel X and the actor who played him, John England, were both portrayed by Michael Jayston who also played the Valeyard on Doctor Who.
- Professor Paradox, a heroic time travelling scientist from the American animated series Ben 10: Alien Force.
- In the BBC soap opera Doctors, Seventh Doctor actor Sylvester McCoy played Graham Capelli, an actor known for playing a 1980s children's television hero called "The Lollipop Man". At one point, Capelli is mistaken for Jon Pertwee.
- The NBC comedy Community features a show-within-a-show called Inspector Spacetime, which follows the eponymous Inspector and his associate Constable Reggie as they travel through time and space in their red phone booth, fighting enemies such as the "Dalek-like" Blorgons. A British programme, Inspector Space Time is said to have begun in 1962, thus making it the oldest sci-fi show on television. A brief glimpse of the opening credit sequence is very like that of Doctor Who during the Ninth/Tenth Doctor era.
- This show-within-a-show now has a pastiche of itself in the form of a web series created by Travis Richey, the actor who portrays "the Inspector". After Richey attempted to start an Inspector Spacetime web-series, using Kickstarter to help fund the show, lawyers representing Community owner Sony requested the production be cancelled. Instead, the show was renamed to Untitled Webseries About A Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time, and the appearance of "the Inspector" was altered.
Prose
- Doctor Omega was the main character of the 1906 French science fiction novel Le Docteur Omega by Arnould Galopin. After Doctor Who nonfiction writer Jean-Marc Lofficier discovered the character and noticed the similarities between him and the First Doctor, Lofficier and his wife, Randy, republished the book in an English translation. They gave it a new cover, similar to that of Chris Achilleos' for Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, with an introduction by veteran Who writer Terrance Dicks. Lofficier added lines suggesting that the novel told adventures of the Doctor shortly before An Unearthly Child, with the Doctor having taken a brief leave of absence from his grand-daughter, Susan Foreman. Subsequent Doctor Omega works often continued to take inspiration from Doctor Who both in actual content, and in branding.
- The Stranger is a 1997 erotic novel by Portia Da Costa. It was published by Virgin Books after they lost the rights to the series under their Black Lace range and featured an amnesic Eighth Doctor. The character Claudia Marwood was then mentioned as a companion in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novels Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin.
