David Tennant. Tom Baker. Both Doctors together, the hip, cool new Doc and the classic Doc who pretty much encapsulated what many fans think of as the Doctor. Sadly only in action figure form – sorry, this isn’t an exclusive scoop on a special episode of Doctor Who featuring two Doctors (although I so wish it were and judging by the regularly recurring rumours of a Tom Baker appearance in the revived show so do a lot of others). If you haven’t seen them already there’s now the first wave of action figures from the classic era of Doctor Who, including Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Tom Baker’s Doctors, Magnus Greel and his nasty homunculus Mr Sin from the nasty Victorian mystery the Talons of Weng-Chiang, a Zygon (which I thought was one of the better monster costume designs from the old show, looked pretty good for the time) and two different mechanoids from the Robots of Death (still a great creepy episode, I think), D84 and SV7 – extra geek points if you can remember what the letter designations for those robots meant without having to look it up (answers at the bottom) – a classic Dalek set and a classic mid-70s Sea Devil (those creatures coming out of the sea are one of my earliest childhood memories of the original Who). As is becoming fairly common with action figure series each comes with a component to build an exclusive character, in this case the Giant Robot from Tom Baker’s first ever outing as the errant Time Lord.
(you’ve got to love the classic, manic grin of Tom Baker’s Doctor – all “teeth and curls” as Jon Pertwee described him in The Five Doctors)
The latter seems slightly odd given that the rest of the villains in the first wave are all Tom Baker era characters but the Sea Devil was a Jon Pertwee foe, although of course they returned to face Peter Davison’s incarnation a decade later, but let’s not talk about that because it was a bloody awful episode with one of the worst monsters ever and costumes where you could sometimes see the joins. Still, it looks cool and it will be a nice addition to go alongside a Jon Pertwee figure when they get round to doing the other Doctors. And when they do that how tempting is it going to be to have all of the Doctor figures? I wonder what else we’ll see in this range – would be good to see a few companions there like Sarah Jane, Leela, Jo Grant and obviously more classic monsters. And maybe Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley’s versions of the Master too. Oh and we want Turlough and Adric too. No, we don’t, I was only kidding.
My nostalgia button has been pressed big time with this new set of figures and I suspect anyone of a similar age who grew up during the Tom Baker era will have the same urge to pick these up. I couldn’t resist adding the Tom Baker figure to my desktop where he now stands next to my David Tennant figure, grinning that manic Tom Baker grin. As we’ve come to expect the detailing is pretty good – Tom’s Doctor has his loose cravat and a semi-flexible long, trademark scarf, even the elbow patches on the jacket (fellow 70s Who geeks will note from this costume this is the very early era Baker outfit) and I noticed that even the sonic screwdriver looks right for the era, a different version from the accessory that comes with the Tennant figure. That’s a small touch but its good to see them paying that level of attention when it would have been easier just to stick the same tiny sonic screwdriver in with the classic figure. The fourth Doctor figure comes with two heads, which is mildly disturbing when you take it out the pack (one with the floppy hat, one just the curly hair), having a loose miniatur Tom Baker cranium in your hand. It would be funny if they had mutiple interchangeable heads for any Jon Pertwee figure, given he once played Wurzel Gummidge, a character who had interchangeable heads for different occassions. The first of the new range is already proving hugely popular with our staff and customers alike and I can imagine a lot of folks planning to stick them in Christmas stockings in a few months time, so if you are thinking along those lines I’d recommend trying to grab them now because I suspect strongly that supply may be outstripped by demand (there’s also a Stolen Earth set from the last series of the new show too). Meantime I suppose I could do an Adam and Joe or Robot Chicken thing with the two Doc figures on my desk to fill in that craving for a new two Doctors special…
(in case you are still wondering the mechanoids in the Robots of Death came in three classes – D was the dumb version for menial tasks, unable to talk, V were the Vocs who were smarter and could talk and the SV was the Super Voc who co-ordinated the other robots while the human crew mostly sat around relaxing. Yes, I am aware of just how big a Doctor Who geek it makes me for knowing that)
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