Doctor Who spin-offs

Doctor Who spin-offs refers to material created outside of, but related to, the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.

Video

The hunger for more Doctor Who on television, especially between the show's cancellation in 1989 and its return in 2005, was partly answered by direct-to-video productions by various companies. The BBC has never authorised any Doctor Who video productions (presumably on the basis that one might as well make a new television series), but production companies have been able to license individual characters and alien races from the show directly from the writers who created them, and feature them in adventures of their own.

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Companies who have released videos of this kind include Reeltime Pictures (also known for the long-running Myth Makers series of documentaries) and BBV (who have also released a number of Doctor Who-related audio adventures on the same basis). The first spinoff of this nature was Wartime, a half-hour film produced by Reeltime in the late 1980s and starring John Levene as Benton, a UNIT soldier who appeared on Doctor Who in the early to mid-1970s. In the 1990s, Reeltime distributed PROBE, a series of five made-for-video movies featuring Caroline John as her Pertwee-era character, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. BBV, on their part, produced and released a trilogy of movies, Auton, Auton 2: Sentinel and Auton 3 that featured UNIT battling the Nestene Consciousness.

Related Topics:
Reeltime Pictures - BBV - John Levene - UNIT - 1970s - 1990s - PROBE - Caroline John - Dr. Elizabeth Shaw - Nestene Consciousness

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BBV is also known for a number of productions that, while not using any elements from the show itself, tell a similar style of story and feature ex-Doctor Who stars in roles similar to those they played in the series; these include a direct-to-video series starring Colin Baker as "The Stranger", and a series of audio dramas starring Sylvester McCoy as "The Dominie". In later episodes of The Stranger, it was made clear that not only was the Stranger not the Doctor, but that their backgrounds were not even remotely analogous. Some of this clarification appears to have been the result of BBC pressure.

Related Topics:
Colin Baker - Sylvester McCoy

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Many of these independent productions have been acclaimed for their writing and high production values, some of which even exceeded those of the original series. Some people who worked on these independent productions in the 1990s later contributed to the television series after its return. This includes writer Mark Gatiss and modelmaker Mike Tucker.

Related Topics:
Mark Gatiss - Mike Tucker

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