BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Dolby Digital City Trailer Menu Audio & Animation Music Tracks (8)-Linear PCM 48/16 2.0
Rating
Year Released	1983
Running Time	100:47
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (53:48)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Selection then Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Peter Moffatt
Studio Distributor	BBC Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Peter Davison Jon Pertwee Patrick Troughton Richard Hurndall Tom Baker
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$34.95	Music	Ron Grainer Peter Howell

    Sadly, William Hartnell died before this twentieth anniversary celebration of the BBC's most successful franchise was even conceived, necessitating the use of another actor to impersonate the First Doctor. There are conflicting stories about why William Hartnell quit the series, but the more popular opinion relates to ill-health, which necessitated the invention of the Doctor Who standby concept known as regeneration. In essence, this means that the Doctor is able to regenerate his body when dying or otherwise seriously injured, allowing him to take on a new taller, shorter, younger, or even older form. This also paved the way for reunions of the actors who played the Doctor in various incarnations, such as this one.

    The film begins with a Strange Cosmic Force™, or a Time Scoop as it is referred to in the script, snatching up Doctors One (Richard Hurndall), Two (Patrick Troughton), Three (Jon Pertwee), and Four (Tom Baker). Actually, that's slightly misleading, because the Fourth Doctor is only in the film through the use of stock footage from an episode that was filmed but never aired, and spends the rest of the episode in stasis. Anyway, after these four Doctors and some of their travelling companions are snatched up by bizarre forces, the fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), who was the current doctor at the time, makes his own way to the same place the forces take the others to: a strange, forbidden place on the Doctor's home world of Gallifrey known as the Death Zone. While the identity of the person responsible for tampering with the cosmic forces that drag the doctors to Gallifrey is somewhat telegraphed, we are introduced to what was then the most current incarnation of the Doctor's most human rival, a fellow Time Lord known as the Master (Anthony Ainley). In case you've been wondering, think of Blofeld from the James Bond series, but with some actual menace and class, and you've pretty much got the Master. In exchange for having all of his previous crimes pardoned, the Master is charged with the task of going to the Dark Tower in the middle of the Death Zone and discovering why it has been draining power away from a device that supports all life on Gallifrey. Meanwhile, the four doctors who were successfully pulled from their own time-streams and taken to the planet make their own way towards the Dark Tower, which is also a tomb to the first and most powerful ruler of the planet, an enigmatic fellow named Rassilon (Richard Mathews).

    Of course, no Doctor Who adventure would be complete without a common and exceptionally flawed set of villain armies, and The Five Doctors gives you two of them for the price of one: the Cybermen and the Daleks. Also in the mix of villains are a Raston Robot (Keith Hodiak), and a Yeti (Lee Woods). It is worth noting that when this particular series of episodes was originally transmitted, the total length of the programme was ninety minutes, following what appeared at first to be the format of three half-hour episodes with cliffhangers to tell a ninety-minute story. While this format for Doctor Who adventures has varied considerably over the years, with most of them consisting of four episodes, and some containing as many as nine, this is one of the few adventures that was actually conceived as a full-length feature from the beginning. This special edition adds about eleven minutes of footage, with new lines of dialogue, more footage of Tom Baker, and improved special effects being the most obvious additions. Another improvement that was made for the special edition was a Dolby Stereo soundtrack, which has been remixed into Dolby Digital 5.1 for this DVD release. All in all, if you have any interest in real science fiction, rather than the crap that men like the brothers Wachowski have tried to pass off as science fiction, then Doctor Who: The Five Doctors, or indeed any Doctor Who adventure, is for you.

Video

    The transfer is presented Full Frame, the same ratio that the film was produced in, and is not 16x9 Enhanced. The transfer is sharp most of the time, but there are moments when some definition and clarity is lost, presumably due to photographic limitations and the ages of the aforementioned stock footage. The shadow detail is lacking, but there is only one sequence which really needs it, a sequence in which the second Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) are exploring a series of caverns near the Dark Tower. Low-level noise is not a problem for the most part, although film grain picks up the slack to create something of a noisy haze in some shots. Fortunately, it is not particularly distracting.

    The colour saturation is dull, but it is uniformly dull, reflecting the dry British style of the photography and set design as well as the age of the source material, which seems to have had some noticeable effects on the final picture. There is no colour bleeding or misregistration apparent at any time, but some scenes, such as the third Doctor's encounter with the Raston Robot, seem to have lost some of the colour from some shots. Whether this is the result of overexposure or fading of the source material is probably immaterial.

    MPEG artefacts were not a problem with this transfer, reflecting the large amount of space that has been allocated to the main feature. Film-to-video artefacts also were not a problem, although there really isn't much in the picture that would lend itself to aliasing, and telecine wobble certainly isn't a problem. Film artefacts are a slight problem in this transfer, with occasional black and white flecks as well as a few scratches appearing on the picture from time to time.

    This disc is presented in the RSDL format, with the layer change taking place between Chapters 15 and 16, at 53:48. I missed this layer change the first time I viewed the disc, it is that well-placed.

Audio

    There is only one soundtrack on this DVD: the original English dialogue, remixed from the Dolby Stereo remix into a Dolby Digital 5.1 remix.

    The dialogue is easy to understand at all times, although some clarity issues arise from the effects that have been placed on the voices of some characters, especially the Cybermen. Still, dialogue is very important to a film that relies more on a clever script and serious character development to entertain its audience, and this transfer is reflective of that. Audio sync was not a problem at any point, unless you consider the manner in which the actions of certain non-humanoid characters and the sounds that they make don't quite jibe to be an audio sync problem.

    The score music in this feature is credited to Ron Grainer, although it also makes use of the popular Doctor Who theme upon which a number one dance song was based, which was written by Peter Howell. As I've stated in the technical details, this theme is simply the best credits theme you will ever hear on television, and the visuals that accompany this theme are almost always better than any drug trip you can possibly imagine. The music itself is like a Burzum or Avrigus song: simply sit back and listen with your eyes closed, your mind open, and this music will pick you up in its hands to drag you through space like most of the current score composers could only dream of. The great John Williams himself would have been amazed with himself to have written score music like that which features in The Five Doctors.

    The surround channels were used in a surprisingly consistent fashion to support the music and special effects, giving this film a certain feel that would be consistent with a British answer to Star Wars: never excessive, but always amazing. The effects used during the scenes in which the five Doctors are snatched from their own times, as well as the moments in which we see the Raston Robot in action, all give the surround channels a good workout. Occasionally, the soundtrack would fall into a monaural field, but this did not occur very often, and didn't last for long when it did.

    The subwoofer occasionally supported a minor explosion or a subtle bass-heavy sound such as the TARDIS' engine, but there were long periods when it had nothing to do at all.

Menu

Music Tracks (8)

    The video quality ranges from being an acceptable transfer of thirty-seven year-old source material to an excellent transfer of source material nearly half that age.

    The audio quality is an excellent remix of a remix of a soundtrack that was originally monaural.

    The extras are limited, but their quality certainly isn't.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall