Abner Perry

"Abner Perry" is a title based upon conjecture.

Check the behind the scenes section, the revision history and discussion page for additional comments on this article's title.

Iris Wildthyme encountered a dashing old gentleman whom she deemed lovely, and who had "an air of Peter Cushing about him", while trying to prevent MIAOW from killing the reptile people at the Earth's core. (PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love ^[+]Loading...["From Wildthyme with Love (novel)"])

Behind the scenes

Screenshot of Doctor Perry from At the Earth's Core printed in Doctor Who Magazine 550.

While most unnamed characters in From Wildthyme with Love are thinly-veiled parodies of Doctor Who TV characters (with the reptile people, for example, being recognisable to the savvy Whovian as the Silurians), the dashing old Peter Cushing lookalike encountered "at the Earth's core" is self-evidently supposed to be actor Peter Cushing's take on the character of Doctor Abner Perry in the 1976 film At the Earth's Core.

Cushing's Doctor Perry, briefly documented in an article in DWM 550, is of interest to Doctor Who fans for having been portrayed by Cushing in a manner, and in a costume, which made him greatly resemble Cushing's incarnation of the Doctor from the two "Dalek movies" of the sixties, Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.. (REF: 1976) According to a 2009 Den of Geek article, At the Earth's Core was created as a replacement when the BBC pulled out on a third Dalek movie, leading the magazine to cover At the Earth's Core as "almost the third Dalek Movie" on a list of Doctor Who feature films, although Charles Norton's Now On The Big Screen took the view that this was an urban legend, with evidence pointing to Subotsky's planned third Doctor Who movie having been extremely different from At the Earth's Core and developed in a timeframe incompatible with the hypotheis.

Without making any such statements about production and authorial intent, Lawrence Miles also noted the resemblance between At the Earth's Core and a Doctor Who story on his official blog's review of the televised episode The Runaway Bride. He described the film as an influence on his Bernice Summerfield novel Down, bemoaning that editorial policy forced him to set it in the underground of an alien planet rather than simply that of the Earth.

One of these heroes is Doug McClure, as per usual. The other, playing the elderly scientist who acts as both universal boffin and kindly father-figure, is Peter Cushing. Here we should note that the screenplay was written by Milton Subotsky, the man responsible for the '60s Doctor Who movies, which sets alarm-bells ringing for fandom even if Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. is (at the very least) no worse than what Terry Nation wrote. But if anything, what we end up with here is closer to Doctor Who than Doctor Who and the Daleks (sic) ever was. The love of improbable Victoriana, which has been a mainstay of the TV series since Evil of the Daleks and which is often seen as the default setting for "proper" Doctor Who thanks to The Talons of Weng-Chian, is at the core of At the Earth's Core.Lawrence Miles

Predating From Wildthyme with Love by several years, Miles suggested in that same essay that At the Earth's Core might be read as being set in the Doctor Who universe, for instance noting a resemblance between the psychic pterodactyls of At the Earth's Core and the Malevilus of Doctor Who and the Iron Legion. He continues,

It's enough to say that I saw the film at the age of four, and that as a child, I just naturally assumed that the principles of Pellucidar and the principles of Doctor Who were identical. […] True, the Daleks didn't seem to release any psychic pterodactyls when they mined Bedfordshire (The Daleks Invasion of Earth), but they might just have sterilised the cave-systems during construction.Lawrence Miles

However, despite these observations and the winking crossover in From Wildthyme with Love, At the Earth's Core is not considered a valid source by this Wiki, as, at the time of its release, it was not considered by its creators or rights-holders to have anything whatsoever to do with the Doctor Who franchise or universe.