Years ago, it might well have been considered an impossibility to have a "complete" Doctor Who collection for good reason. The early black and white years of television as a whole were overlooked as not being profitable beyond their original transmission both at home in the UK and in overseas territories where Doctor Who was screened, having purchased several serials at once from the BBC. A lot of the tapes sent overseas were either destroyed or wiped after their use had expired, were lost in one way or another or were returned to the BBC where sadly, they also met their end.
It became standard practise in the 1970's to wipe programmes from the archives in which they were stored and it was unfortunately no different for the BBC who wiped a plethora of content, including a huge amount of Doctor Who from the 1960's and original master tapes of serials from the early 70's, leaving only tele-recordings for those wiped from the latter and telesnaps, clips and off air recordings for the former.
Over the years that passed, recoveries were made in a number of unexpected places that bought a whole heap of missing Doctor Who episodes back to life and thus, back into the archive for permanent preservation. Sadly though, some serials are still either partly or entirely missing and may well never be found, as the time between recoveries passes, the world moves on and the chances of finding those rare tapes and film reels decreases.
The last recovery effort bought home the full serial 'The Enemy Of The World' and five out of the six episodes of 'The Web Of Fear'. All six of the latter were found but during negotiations for the return of the film cans, the third episode mysteriously "went missing" and is believed to have been poached by a private collector who was aware of it being found by the restoration team which means sadly, another episode that was once thought lost is almost certainly lost to the general public and Doctor Who fans alike for the foreseeable future.
Some serials, although returned in majority part have lacked an episode or two in order to stand as a complete set and some of those have received animation treatment over the years. 'The Reign Of Terror', 'The Tenth Planet', 'The Moonbase' and 'The Invasion' are examples of mostly existing serials, having had most episodes recovered but still missing at least one. These serials were completed via animation efforts from Planet 55 (Now Big Finish Creative) and released on DVD. However, in recent years, concentration has turned from completing partly existing serials to those that are completely missing.
Through a collaboration between the BBC Studios animation team and Sun & Moon Studios, with use of original off air audio recordings, 2016 saw the release of the completely missing serial 'The Power Of The Daleks' which featured the debut of the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. This was the first time ever that a completely missing story was restored entirely through the efforts of extensive animation and set a new standard for just what can now be achieved in regards to finally bringing back television once thought lost forever. Since then, we've received a complete animation of another missing story in 'The Macra Terror' which was released on DVD back in March.
2020 will see the release of TWO serials that until now have been mostly ('The Faceless Ones') and entirely ('Fury From The Deep') missing from the BBC Archive. Both of these releases will be worked on for the first time by two teams : Sun & Moon Studios with the BBC Studios Animation team and Big Finish Creative (formerly Planet 55). Despite the two existing episodes of 'The Faceless Ones', all episodes of both serials will be fully animated but will also feature reconstructions that will use the existing episodes.
So what can we expect going forward?
Well it's clear that the BBC is building its budget and confidence with these animations by having two being worked on at once, both for release in the same year. So whilst it may be futile to guess and make assumptions, i would imagine that we're potentially looking at potential double releases going forward, whether it be two releases a year or two releases every two year. Again, i imagine they'll plan to try and do two releases a year, starting with 2020. Given that Troughton's missing serials seems to be the current focus, i think its unlikely we'll see anymore Hartnell animations since the animation workload on his era would basically be double as he has six entirely missing serials yet to be done and four that are mostly missing. See here.
So if i had to guess something of a rough schedule for potential releases it would probably look like this :
The Faceless Ones - 2020
Fury From The Deep - 2020
The Evil Of The Daleks - 2021
The Highlanders - 2021
The Abominable Snowmen - 2022
The Wheel In Space - 2022
Should the schedule look anything like that, it would leave only 'The Space Pirates' to be animated in which case, it could get a 2023 release either by itself or very possibly, another Hartnell animation for which my guess would be The Smugglers but we're doing some serious hopeful guessing now. I could be entirely wrong and heck, we could even get some Hartnell goodness in 2021 but i do think Troughton's era will be the focus for now. Either way, the future looks bright for Doctor Who's missing episodes being given a new lease of life through the power of animation which i think we can all agree, is a positive.
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