Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.5

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 11, 2024

As roiling as our modern day world can often be, at least for curators of various media, it may be a veritable Golden Age. What with new "technologies" like scanning and cloud storage, not to mention the glut of home theater products like DVDs (remember those?) and Blu-ray discs, chances are very good that few if any current or relatively recent films or television offerings will ever completely disappear. They may indeed be hard to find at some point, but that may be part of the snark hunt joy for a certain class of collector. I've had my own "treasure hunts" through the years, and when I was involved in the A&E Biography episode about (another kind of Golden Age) actress Frances Farmer, we spent innumerable hours trying to track down one solitary bit of video: Farmer's 1964 appearance on NBC's Today Show. The best available information we got in the absence of striking gold (and/or vintage videotape) is that NBC, like many broadcast organizations back in the day, simply "wiped" any tapes after a while so that they could be reused. This same situation wasn't exclusive to "this side of the pond", as lovers of Doctor Who are already well aware. BBC has itself been "curating" (if that's the right word) a kind of slightly daffy but still enjoyable series of animated (or reanimated, as I joked in a previous review) versions of "lost" episodes of the venerable series where the video is either partially or completely missing, but audio still exists. So far fans have been treated to Blu-ray releases of Doctor Who: The Abominable Snowmen and Doctor Who: Galaxy 4, and now another Patrick Troughton set of episodes is on tap. In this case, two out of the four episodes in the serial are still extant, and are included in this set, though all four episodes have been animated as well. Kind of interestingly, in poking around the various nooks and crannies of the internet, I found this interesting list on a Whovian fan site that shows several other animated efforts, though it looks like the bulk of them have only had DVD releases, as with Doctor Who: The Animation Collection.

This is yet another patently absurd Doctor Who, which means it's going to be almost insanely entertaining for devoted Whovians, especially "historians", since this is as of the writing of this review the earliest known surviving footage and audio of Patrick Troughton as the titular time lord, and also of Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon. The story has Doctor Who and his companion(s) investigating strange doin's concerning the descendants of the inhabitants of Atlantis. There's some actually kind of weirdly cool quasi-Mayan or Incan attributes to the "natives", especially in the color animated versions. As usual, the surviving "actual" episodes show an almost willfully paltry production design, and so the animated versions may in fact be preferable, one way or the other. Somewhat interestingly, and vis a vis my suggestion that Doctor Who: The Abominable Snowmen might evoke memories of a Yeti-centric episode of Jonny Quest: The Complete Original Series, there's almost a throwaway moment early in the first episode here where the inhabitants of the Tardis mention that they never know where or when they're going to show up next, which is rather similar to the predicament of the heroes in The Time Tunnel (which would have been airing at the same time this serial was originally broadcast).

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of BBC with AVC encoded 1080p transfers in 1.33:1 (for the black and white version) or 1.78:1 (for the color version). I frankly didn't notice any continued use of what looked like actual interpolated photos or at least photorealistic elements in Doctor Who: The Abominable Snowmen, but the animation here is actually rather enjoyable, if often on the minimalistic side. I'd definitely recommend going with the color version, as, also unlike some of the previous animated efforts, the palette actually pops quite pleasingly a lot of the time, with some actually rather gorgeous blue, green and teal hues in some of the "Atlantean" locations. As has been the tradition with these Blu-ray releases of animated Doctor Who fare, line detail is typically excellent throughout. There is some noticeable (and maybe just a bit weird) combing on the closing credits rolls, which may have been composited from archival elements. I've included two screenshots at positions 17 and 18 from the surviving video of Episodes Two and Three. It's actually surprisingly decent looking, at least within the confines of some of the upscaled early Doctor Who seasons that I've reviewed.

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I'd rate Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace's DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track as about on a part with Doctor Who: The Abominable Snowmen, though this track arguably has less discernable damage, but perhaps a slightly overall boxier sound, something that's probably most noticeable during music cues and sound effects in particular. As with The Abominable Snowmen, I wouldn't say midrange and low end are overly full, but there is enough energy to deliver dialogue without any real issues. Optional English subtitles are available.

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One features the animated version of the serial in black and white and in 1.33:1 (see most of the even numbered screenshots), along with these supplements:

• Photographic Reconstruction Episode One (HD; 26:30) offers some frankly goofy at times photos (including some that kind of look hilariously Photoshopped), along with occasional minimal animation, like the light atop the Tardis.
  
  This episode comes with the following audio options:

  Play with Commentary features Toby Hadoke interviewing Michael Troughton, son of Patrick Troughton.

  
  

  Play with Narration offers an audio descriptive version.

• Surviving Original Episode Two (HD; 26:07)
  
  This episode comes with the following audio option:

  Play with Commentary features Toby Hadoke, Anneke Wills (Polly), Brian Hodgson (sound designer), Catherine Howe (Ara), Frazer Hines (Jamie), and Quentin Mann (floor assistant).

• Surviving Original Episode Three (HD; 25:17)
  
  This episode comes with the following audio option:

  Play with Commentary features Toby Hadoke, Anneke Wills (Polly), Brian Hodgson (sound designer), Catherine Howe (Ara), Frazer Hines (Jamie), and Quentin Mann (floor assistant).

• Photographic Reconstruction Episode Four (HD; 25:07)
  
  This episode comes with the following audio options:

  Play with Commentary features Toby Hadoke introducing a number of archival recordings of various people associated with the show.

  
  

  Play with Narration offers an audio descriptive version.

Disc Two features the animated version of the serial in color and in 1.78:1 (see most of the odd numbered screenshots), along with these supplements:

• A Fishy Tale (HD; 29:46) is a fun making of retrospective with a number of highly enjoyable (and often rather funny) interviews.


• Australian Censored Scenes (HD; 2:38) proves that even a former British penal colony has its acceptable standards in terms of what it will allow its children to see. This offers some fragments from scenes in the otherwise missing episodes. These come with some probably unintentionally funny notes from the Australian censors.


• The Man from Miditz (HD; 35:11) is another rare piece of television history, a 1964 BBC 2 fragment featuring Patrick Troughton and Joseph Furst.


• Frazer Hines Introduction for Episode Three (HD; 00:37)


• BBC South Today (HD; 2:51) is an archival piece from 2011.


• Photo Gallery (HD; 2:28)


• Animation Gallery (HD; 5:31)


• BBC Radio Solent (HD; 12:28) features Richard Lotto interviewing Terry Burnett and Ralph Montegu about the recovery of "lost" episodes of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

When even several participants in this serial have no bones about discussing how patently absurd it all is/was, you can't take any of the perceived deficits of The Underwater Menace that seriously. And actually the fact that Australia felt compelled to remove scenes of a hypodermic needle is unavoidably hilarious. The episodes themselves are silly, but that can be part of the fun, but one way or the other a number of the supplements included here are highly enjoyable on their own, even divorced (as much as they can be) from the episodes at hand. Technical merits are generally solid, and at least for devoted Whovians The Underwater Menace comes Recommended.