Have we mentioned before how much we love Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers series? Those folks just get us. Yesterday, we shared our love for the Doctor Who modern trailer, which gave us a crash course on the series from the 2005 reboot to the present day.
But what about the origins of Doctor Who, which originally ran from 1963-1989? Surely there’s plenty of stuff to make fun of from those episodes, right? Reader, there is. Vintage Doctor Who features wacky costumes, terrible effects, casual racism and sexism, and so much more.
The trailer introduces us to the first several Doctors, all variations on British white dudes like “the crabby old man Doctor”, “The Beatle-haired childlike Doctor”, “the snake-tatted Kung Fu Austin Powers Doctor”, and the “kind of arrogant even for the Doctor, Doctor.” Also, there’s the “TV movie one-off George Lazenby Doctor” because I am always down for a George Lazenby joke.
The trailer also introduces us to the classic Doctor Who villains like the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master, an evil time lord from Gallifrey. They also touch on the slow-moving Daleks and how easy it is to defeat them, which mostly consists of shoving the awkward robots out of windows (which honestly I could watch on a loop). The low budget series also offers up some classic monster costumes, which mostly seem to be made up of bubble wrap and old pieces of styrofoam and “dudes with buckets on their heads.”
My favorite might the “inflatable plastic chair of doom” which is basically a murdery version of that plastic furniture you could order from Delia’s. The classic episodes are described as “both timeless and completely out of date”, especially when some wildly problematic “Asian” characters show up. I put “Asian” in quotes because these are clearly white dudes doing their absolute worst. Yikes.
They also mention the futility of trying to watch all of the vintage Doctor Who episodes, many of which have been lost to time and deleted by the BBC. There are some animated remakes of lost episodes, and every once in a while an old cache of long-lost episodes will appear like a treasure from an Indiana Jones movie. In fact, I feel like there’s a potential spin-off movie that just features nerds hunting down long-lost episodes.
What did you think of the Doctor Who classic honest trailer? Were you a fan of the vintage series or do you prefer the modern incarnation? Those clothes though, am I right?
(image: Screen Junkies)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
