How Doctor Who's Missing Episodes Came Back [Part 3]

0:00 [Music] when we discuss missing episodes of doctor who most people think of the black and white era with william hartnell and patrick trouten they look at their dvd collection and notice that every john pertwee story exists and is on their shelf in full colour but it wasn't always that way by 1975 when the junking of old material was officially stopped almost half of john perry's episodes were destroyed so how did they come back [Music] so let's go back to the very beginning

0:46 to 1978. sue morden the recently appointed archive selector at the bbc film and videotape library had made it her pet project to recover missing episodes of doctor who her first point of contact was to search the library itself she located 60 of the original 2-inch video tapes that the episodes were originally recorded on this means that the episodes listed on screen were in their original quality also 16 millimeter film prints of spearhead from space an episode recorded completely on 16mm film and can be scanned to true hd was also located and archived and that makes 64 individual per wee

1:32 episodes remaining 124 still missing so this is what your collection would have looked like these are just the completed stories there are also orphaned episodes of john perby's era as well but much love stories like the demons and the thai monster well probably not the time monster are at this point considered missing classics but not all hope was lost john pertwee's stories were also sold overseas this was done the same way the 60 stories were by using the tele recording process because many countries at the time were only broadcasting in black and white they had no need for colour duplicates to send out therefore they sent out black and white

2:18 60 millimeter film copies to international broadcasters this process continued up until invasion of the dinosaurs when this process was discontinued this was mainly due for the demand of color programs only when subexplored the archive at bbc enterprises villia's house she recovered nearly all of john perry's episodes in black and white by episode 1 of invasion of the dinosaurs and episode 1 of death to the daleks which wasn't represented at all now that's looking a bit healthier we have 22 total purpley stories completely full but only 8 exists in its original color so what could the bbc do with these black and white episodes

3:04 how could they bring the original color back is there a chance that people who bought this internationally had color copies and if so could we get them back to the archive now that the bbc's internal archive had been tallied and protected it was time to explore outwards could they find full colour copies of the episodes one of the first substantial leads was held by ian levine he was discussing doctor who with andrew trentacosta at kcet in los angeles he heard they were still existing episodes of doctor who at bbc canada when ian phoned up bbc canada they said they're episodes of doctor who were junked years ago but ian insisted they double

3:50 check and upon a physical look in the basement they discovered heaps of colour tapes levine contacted sue morden about the discovery and they organized the copies to be sent back to the bbc the episodes included the clause of axos 1 and 2 the cursor pelodon in full the mutants 1 and 2 the time monster in full and death to the daleks episode 1. this meant that the only episode missing from the archive was invasion of the dinosaurs episode 1. quick note i am so sorry this is boring but i promise we'll return back to some hot ghosts in north america they broadcast using ntsc and everywhere else uses power the main difference is the electrical consumption north america uses 60 hertz

4:36 whereas the standard for everywhere else is 50 hertz therefore these copies from canada are 525 lines meaning ntsc and the uk originals are six to five lines meaning power these can be converted and that's why they're a different color on this table but essentially both are in full color just different formats now back to the hot goss thanks to our canadian friends we can now move these four stories to the color pile including death to the daleks which hadn't been completed in the past in september 1982 john nathan turner the producer of doctor who at the time received a letter from a doctor who fan named nick tilizia nick tells nathan turner that he knew that bbc canada

5:22 held colour transmission tapes of colony in space and the sea devils nathan turner passed this note onto sue morden who investigated bbc canada said that they had their two inch videotapes off-site with a shipping company named thunder north broadcast services this tip-off from a fan helped return a whole bunch of stories some which already existed in their original colour but some which were missing the stories now completed in colour included the claws of axos colony in space and the sea devils canada is back at it again and that means we can add three more stories to the color pile and as you can see we are now officially halfway in june 1983 ian levine decided to hand

6:09 back his 16 millimeter black and white copy of invasion of the dinosaurs episode 1. after holding on to it in the chance of trading it for a different missing episode therefore all purpose cereals were completed in some format in the archive by this date sue morden had just left a position as archive selector and was succeeded by steve bryant's basil sands from bbc sydney let steve know that they had colour copies of a handful of doctor who stories they had received these copies from the us broadcaster lionheart the only story they had which was missing its original colour at the bbc was a frontier in space and bbc sydney sent their copies of the missing episodes to the bbc back to canada once again where the

6:55 broadcaster mentioned earlier lionheart had just sent videotaped copies of inferno to bbc toronto in a few weeks inferno returned to the bbc's archive when john nathan turner announced the news fantasy empire a u.s sci-fi magazine reported seven trouten colour episodes being returned leading to rumors of a colour copy of evil of the daleks being found which is of course impossible for the 20th anniversary of doctor who a special convention was held at long late several old stories were going to be screened there and one of the stories provided was terror of the autons and it happened to be in color so who owned this mysterious colour copy well

7:40 you might have heard his name by now his name was ian levine we're gonna do a bit of a jump backwards in time in 1977 ian had met an american fan tom lundy who had recorded multiple purpley episodes from hon on the original broadcast and ian had asked for some duplicates these stories were doctor who in the silerians terror of the autons claws of axos day of the daleks and the sea devils another us fan had a color home recording of ambassadors of death and inferno these copies were transferred to humatic tape and was given to the bbc for their archives the quality wasn't up to broadcast standard

8:26 but perhaps someday they could come in handy more on that later by the end of 1983 the archive looked like this it's the big one we have got inferno and frontier in space on the color pile and finally we have got one of my favorites invasion of the dinosaurs but episode one is only in black and white there is also a bunch of off-air colour copies which we've mentioned earlier but we haven't really got a pile for them because it's a bit too confusing so here's a graph wow isn't this so much easier to understand we'll get back to those off-air recordings a little bit later on death to the daleks episode 1 was returned in its original quality from

9:11 the abc in australia unfortunately this version was missing a scene near the beginning that was cut by sensors fortunately though david steed noticed a bunch of videotapes at bbc enterprises that had been shipped back from dubai included in the batch was a color version of death to the daleks episode 1 and he grabbed it this copy included the original missing scene meaning the episode was restored to its original quality and that's it the end a hodgepodge that is the puzzle of doctor who you might be looking at this list and feeling confused how come the mind of evil is still listed as black and white but on dvds and colour well here comes the black magic that is the doctor who restoration team

10:00 there are five different ways the restoration team approached colorization varying from hard to difficult to something indistinguishable from magic this section can get a bit technical but i have tried to simplify it the best i can let's start with the heart and work our way up to wizardry shall we remember those off-air colour recordings by u.s van tom lundy the first proper attempt at colorization was to use those lower quality color images and match them with the higher quality 16 millimeter black and white film prints with a component video signal the signal was split into two parts the luminance which controls the brightness and the detail of the image and the chroma which holds the color

10:47 information now if we take the luminance from our 16 millimeter black and white film print and match it with the chroma from the off air recordings we can get a high quality copy of that episode it sounds easy enough right and if it doesn't that's completely understandable either way it wasn't as simple as that the restoration team had to do a lot of manual tweaking and sometimes the image would be cropped in or the edges would bleed and the colour wouldn't match correctly but ultimately they had their first test when the restoration team did their first test on the demons episode 1 the results impressed archive selector adam lee who funded the restoration of the other episodes they later completed terror of the

11:32 autumns and doctor who in the silurians with the same process the process was attempted with the ambassadors of death but unfortunately due to some interference with the color image only episodes 5 and 6 could be recolorized with this technique reverse standards conversion is essentially a process which converts ntsc to pal meaning that the pertwee episodes from canada can be converted to its original format without getting any nasty artifacts on screen that older conversion techniques had colony in space the curse of held on the first three episodes of the sea devils and the first five episodes of the time monster had this conversion james insell was watching an episode of

12:19 doctor who and noticed that small patches of colour would appear on black and white episodes that were originally made in color he wondered where the color was coming from and discovered he could restore the original color using tiny data called chroma dots he worked as part of a group called the color recovery working group a computer program was written by the group that would analyze the dot pattern and decode the colors into the correct places it wasn't a perfect process manual intervention was needed to smooth out sections but mixed with some manual colorization and you get a very good approximate of the original color the first episode to receive this treatment was planet of the daleks episode iii at the time they had commissioned a

13:05 manual colorization and they combined that effort with the chroma dot technology to create an outstanding production more manual colorization later the other episodes to receive the chroma dot treatment include the ambassadors of death episodes 2 3 4 6 and 7 the mind of evil episodes 2-6 and episode 1 of invasion the dinosaurs unfortunately invasion of the dinosaurs episode 1 liked enough blue chroma dots to get a broadcast appropriate colorization but it really is a miracle that this process could even exist and just shows how a little bit of imagination and a hell of a lot of work can make even the wildest of ideas

13:50 come together the fourth method of restoration was a combination of reverse standards conversion and the original color restoration technique this process started with the clause of axos in this instance they used the 60 millimeter tele recording as the base for the luminance track and then the color information from the ntsc via reverse standards conversion would be the chroma track this technique was also used for inferno and for colony in space on the season 8 blu-ray finally the last method is manual colorization this is done generally frame by frame and painting it in manually unlike planet of the daleks episode 3

14:38 which had existing chroma dots the mind of evil episode 1 did not have any chroma dots therefore chroma dot recovery could not be achieved on this episode this episode was manually colorized by stuart humphreys more commonly known as babel color and worked alongside peter crocker she would paint in many key frames and peter would color the in-between frames either via computed assisted technique or by hands after many months the pair brought back color to the final missing color episode of doctor who and there we have it one last episode in the black and white pile invasion of the dino boys episode one since the chroma dot is missing the blue segment we can't get a proper chroma dot recovery for episode one

15:24 therefore it remains in a weird state of either being its black and white print or the half chroma dot recovery process hopefully when invasion the dinosaurs is up for its collection box set release it gets a proper colorization and then we can finally add it to the pile of colour restorations and have a full set of john pauley's era in color the missing episodes of doctor who will forever have an air of mystery will we always have 97 missing episodes philip morris in an interview with phantom films believe that there are at least six episodes that exist in the hands of private collectors but instead of pondering on what we don't have let's appreciate what we do have

16:10 let's appreciate all the hard-working individuals who discouraged archives across the world so that we could watch these episodes that mean so much to us if these people waited a week a month a year these episodes could have been lost forever it makes these episodes even more special and even more precious so let's celebrate them and maybe tonight sit down and watch one of those episodes that was so close to not being there in the first place to everyone involved in recovering missing episodes and restoring them thank you don't forget to click below to subscribe to the official joshnez youtube channel