I finally address the awesomeness of Doctor Who...

[seawasp]

... in an Under the Influence post on my blog today!

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Pyraminds of Mars was the first Doctor Who serial I have ever watched and Tom Baker's Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith the first Doctor/Companion pairing I ever knew.

I miss the old show, wobbly sets, meandering and overlong serials, all of it. New Who has never grabbed me in the same way, though some individual episodes have their moments.

[seawasp]

Interesting. That was also one of the few times the Doctor is inambiguously terrified and outmatched by his opponent.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Doctor Who doesn't need comic relief. Doctor Who is 3/4 terror and 1/4 absurdist camp. The surreal humor is built into the foundation.

RTD turned that around. Sort of. He wrote New Who as 3/4 absurdist camp and 1/4 terror. Except when it was 1/4 (or more) angst instead. I exaggerate somewhat but that's because I don't care much for what he did to Doctor Who. Not that New Who is bad -- it isn't, except when it is, which is too often -- it's simply not Doctor Who. It's not *my* Doctor Who in much the same way that Michael Bay's Transformers movies aren't *my* Transformers.

[seawasp]

Interesting. I see New Who as vastly LESS camp and much more serious overall, which is my preferred ratio. There is more angst, but it works with the situation as he set it up. The newer seasons, with Matt Smith, were going back to more of the Old Who campishness at times, which I found sometimes annoying but most of my annoyance was more that I felt the quality of the scripts dropped after RTD left.

And my wife found Michael Bay's "Transformers" to be very much "her" Transformers (as in, from the original series), so a lot of this is apparently perceptions.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Perception has everything to do with it. I had something much longer written but there's a much simpler way to describe it: the uncanny valley. Original Who avoids the uncanny valley with its mediocre production values. The fake monsters are obviously fake, the fake humans are obviously fake. The audience (read: me) are never creeped out by the uncanniness of the effects work so we (I) can get on with the suspension of disbelief at the absurdity the same way we (I) can ignore the universal white cotton panties in Aika and Najica.

New Who and Bayformers, like most recent high-budget productions, use high-end CGI extensively. This CGI frequently is too real. Too perfect. It's uncanny. Welcome to the valley. Productions try to mask the uncanniness by having renders move too quickly for anything to remain in frame for more than a moment, or to make the renders so busy and "noisy" that they lose their uncanniness, or simply by "shooting" in low light so that the uncanniness can't be seen. It works, most of the time. I am fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to still catch the creepiness sometimes despite the tricks.

[seawasp]

That's a very different perceptual process, yes. For me it's "they're all so obviously fake I have a hard time taking any of it seriously -- it's like watching a grade-school drama production". So I have to work to suspend disbelief, and even when I do it's still overlaid with comedy at every turn. Plus the typical (of the era) BBC over-dramatic acting and very clumsy stage-play events like "stand there with widening eyes and screaming, immobile, as sluggish monster clumsily closes in on you" doesn't help. I love Old Who, but it was always rather funny even when it wasn't, so to speak.

New Who gives me, if not top-drawer, at least 1990s-level special effects for me to hang my disbelief on, and thus I can take it a lot more seriously and not be fighting to keep my WSOD suspended. With Old Who, I need Adamantium Suspension cables, while with New Who the same steel cables I use for most science fiction will generally do.