Some Whovian retro thrills are on offer here with the re-release of the two quasi-canonical Doctor Who feature films of the 1960s: Dr Who and the Daleks from 1965, and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD the following year. These were Technicolor adventures brought to the British public by the American writer-producer Milton Subotsky under his Amicus Productions banner, known more for horror. They were adapted from existing TV plotlines and capitalised on the runaway popularity of the sinister Daleks, with their hysterically enraged metallic voices and their strange arm-pieces: all Daleks were issued with the weapon arm to zap people, but for the second, some had a claw-type grabber and others had the sink-plunger thing whose purpose is not shown here.
Peter Cushing is the Doctor, very much in the William Hartnell mode: an elegant, eccentric Edwardian-style inventor, and actually introduces himself in the second film as “Doctor Who”, as if Who is his surname. In both films, he is accompanied on his adventures by young granddaughter Susan (Roberta Tovey); in the first he is also accompanied by his daughter Barbara (Jennie Linden), and in the second by his niece Louisa (Jill Curzon), although the whereabouts and identity of Susan’s father is a mystery. And in both films, the Doctor is accompanied by a clean-cut, slightly goofy young man: Roy Castle in the first film, doing some outrageous physical-comedy pratfalls, and in the second by Bernard Cribbins. Castle and Cribbins effectively embodied the younger quirky action-lead that the Doctor was to become.
