INSPIRATION
It's 2013. Character's line of action figures has regenerated, now into 3.75" scale. The plan was to make a new story to showcase the mini Doctor and Clara as soon as possible. This wasn't the story I'd intended to make but that tale would have taken more effort and time than I had available so I needed to come up with a short and easy to make adventure. To that end I turned to some pitches that I'd sent to Doctor Who Adventures that were never picked up. Among them was the tale of a robot in a junk yard...
CAST
11th Doctor, Clara Oswald and a Star Wars Dark Trooper.
So when they announced that Doctor Who would be switching scale, I'd actually already been thinking that I'd like some smaller figures. Not at the expense of the wonderful 5" figures, but just the Doctor, TARDIS, maybe a companion and some iconic monsters. Enough to fight alongside Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones.
By the end of series 7a (The Angels Take Manhattan), I'd seriously lost interest in new Doctor Who. I found the stories overly smug, self-involved, utterly engaging and worse, totally lacking in new and scary monsters. The figure line needed something to reinvigorate it and the prospect of this new scale really did invigorate my enthusiasm. I viewed the next series (series 7b/ 2013) with fresh eyes and a renewed excitement.
Some people don't like change and many fans took an instant dislike to the new scale without seeing any prototypes and I believe that bile, vitriol and unjustified sense of betrayal has become a habit that has poisoned fandom.
Unfortunately, some of the figures weren't that great so many of the fans weren't won over. Extremely rare chase figures and a couple of waves of repaints and repeats meant that the figures never really took off. By the time they were producing really good figures, Amy Pond, the 10th Doctor, classic daleks, fans had all but given up.
As someone that did support the scale change and bought their first wave upon release in May 2013, I was really disappointed. Clara's hair was wrong and by the time they corrected it, I was loathe to buy another. And the daleks were just a shade too small.
SCRIPT
The pitch already set out what happened page by page so it didn't take long to work up a basic script to shoot from. This was done in June 2013.
SHOOTING
The story was on the same day using a single set dressed with various bits of paraphernalia from various toy lines. How much can you spot?
There's the vehicle maintenance engineer mini-rig from Star Wars, bits of the Star Trek 2009 transporter playset, the Queen's hyperdrive from Star Wars episode 1 and my own custom walls used in The Space Mutant.
The whole story was short virtually in order apart from a couple of reverse shots of the robot which were done out of sequence.
EDITS
The story was edited just as quickly and completed the same day.
CONTINUITY
This story could be dropped anywhere into series 7b. I arbitrarily choose to put it after Cold War.
TRANSMISSION
On it's original publication, I had intended to get the story out as quickly as possible but the AFT was stacked up its monthly episodes.
So it was originally published on Outpost Doctor Who forum, a page a day between 10th-13th June 2013.
It then appeared on the AFT main site on 24th Feb 2014.
It was republished here on 16 December 2023.