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Post by Kitten Kong Destroyed Wotan on Jan 14, 2006 21:38:00 GMT
I've just been thinking about if in a few thoudand years a TV company (or whatever they have as an alternative) started doing remakes of the classic Doctor Who serials, maybe including there own stories and the novels and audios.
How would they be written? What changes would they make? and would any comtemporary stories be re-set in the then present?
I was considering starting a little fan fiction project on this, would any of you lot wish to join in with it? If so I might start up a forum for it and a website.
(oh and if any moderators think this is in the wrong section, feel free to move it).
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Post by Tumble Lord on Jan 14, 2006 22:56:39 GMT
Hmm, well judging by the rate of technology that we have at our disposal and the range we've travelled at, take for example- The Tenth Planet was set some twenty years into the future of the sixties whereupon an expedition had returned from the moon, orbitting space craft and Geneva was in control rather than the UN.
From 1966 it wasn't far off in places but the Cybermen element based on the dehumanised medicine fear of human progression going too far.
Yet today prosthetic limbs, artificial hips would have been the 60s fear personified.
With this in mind; advanced medical technology would rule out Cybermen being a cognative and believable menace. Everyone would have implants in some way or another, biological as well as mechanical so a fear of logical uprisings against emotion would be laughed out as light-hearted. Humans being augmented forcefully, moralities change over time, the audiences of the future might think it too humourous a reason for people to resist.
If however you argue that it could be feasible to bring them back, redesign graphically rather than a blank mask but to go for a more organic shape, perhaps more akin to the Mondasian Cybermen with human flesh on display encased within transparent replacement implants. Becoming by the end nothing more than.... animated corpses wired up to electrodes; scarily staring wide eyes that are unblinking so to make them not a mechanised monster but to bring out the the human aspect of them.
Onto other such monsters; the Autons/ Nestene weapons have a place in our time, not sure how they'd work in the far future. Recognisable household items become scary threats, hard to imagine how you could take the Terror of the Autons phone scene to a contemporary settings, for the machine itself would probably be a headpiece or a videophone. Unless the headpiece could constrict but as for daffodils... not sure they'd work.
I can only think that to use retro classic looks would be to alter the Third Doctor era to having his exile to be cast back in time rather than contemporary Earth.
Robot stories would work well though Mad computers, I'm not so sure of, if AI is eventually created, then such mighty characters like BOSS and Xoanon would simply be relegated to antique pieces that crash like HAL of 2001 rather than have a mind of their own.
The Japanese have displayed recently an advance in robotics, so far a dancing robot, one that kicks a ball and a brassband that can actually play. In the future, robots may well be part of a household appliance, which is where Robot K1 and the Storm Miner Robots would have the same sort of feel to it as the Nestene weapons. The terror would be walking around in your house doing menial tasks while on TV, Chub would get interrupted... Probably resulting with a backlash and the equivalent of Mary Whitehouse's millenial successor standing up to say; you've gone too far!
Though providing history is well archived, I can imagine that some historicals would be moved up, rather than dealing with a fairly obscure area of history, Marco Polo may well get moved up a couple of hundred years from 1289 to a more dramatic 1889, so to grab the attention rather than bore 3005's audience with "ancient history".
I could however imagine the Hartnell story; The Time Meddler reworked but moved geographically southwards and advanced in time towards the year 1982 and the community becoming the Falklands. So to form a historic event plus involving a rogue time traveller, which might become more so, to exaggerate his might using a micro i-pod instead of gramophone hidden inside a garden pond (rather than cooking pot) to cast the Monks chanting.
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Post by Kitten Kong Destroyed Wotan on Jan 22, 2006 10:47:31 GMT
Very good ideas there Cyberlord
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Post by Claire Voyant on Jan 31, 2006 16:10:49 GMT
...If however you argue that it could be feasible to bring them back, redesign graphically rather than a blank mask but to go for a more organic shape, perhaps more akin to the Mondasian Cybermen with human flesh on display encased within transparent replacement implants. Becoming by the end nothing more than.... animated corpses wired up to electrodes; scarily staring wide eyes that are unblinking so to make them not a mechanised monster but to bring out the the human aspect of them.... Isn't that basically what Star Trek did when they created the Borg? Don't get me wrong. I love Doctor Who to death, including the Cybermen. But honestly I found the Borg much scarier for the reasons you stated above. |
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Post by Tumble Lord on Jan 31, 2006 17:16:30 GMT
Ah yes, that on recollection does sound a lot like the borg but it's hard now trying to predict how Cybermen would work as a 3000 year concept. Go too far and you're either robotic cylons or organic zombie borg.
What about combining the two and settling on expanding the transparency of the Earthshock Cybermen "living" jaw but encompassing the face. Human-like, stripped of humanity, deadened muscles, yellowing with age reinforced with pistons, parts of the skull becoming more prominent, metallic and sculpted.
The face framed by a metallic stream-lined Cyberhead with plasticky transparent face-plate, the eyes staring out, never blinking, no skin- just muscular sinew dead and grey, yellowing teeth- probably blackened, the mouth that moves and the voice, augmented but crackling like dried rustling leaves but stinging with a metallic rasp.
The body being stream-lined, metallic and the hands human but reinforced, like the face lacking skin, the tendons, silver, metallic, the metal skeleton surrounded by greying flesh, the exposed fingernails are black and the hands are covered almost like a laminated plastic covering. (Sealing in the evil)
The Cybercontroller would be immobile suspended on a cruciform-like frame, dead-like yet still alive, missing its hands and legs; cables and piping streaming into the framework. The body, still a cyberman's, laminated but the head is the biggest difference.
The face is still human with deadened skin tones, deathly pale, but lacking the top of its head, the brain matter grey but surmouted by a transparent skull plate.
The brain glows red when the creature speaks (an extention of the Cyberplanner glowing centre), it opens its mouth wide, the eyes are dead and staring, the face fixed into a human screaming and the voice is guttural and buzzing.
The Cybermats have been greatly improved upon (my own design- see Fallen Soldiers!) Renamed "Spikters", transforming metallic spider-crab things that leap; face hugger-like onto the back of a victim's head, drill into the flesh, down to the spinal cord and hijack the body or can transmit or download information. Leaving the victim under total Cyber-control!
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