The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #05 - Who Nose?

Welcome once again dear friends to the creaky old pile of half-forgotten ephemera that is the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! This week we are, I promise, concluding our look back at the first very range of Doctor Who action figures - or dolls as they were called back then - produced by UK toy masters, Denys Fisher in the late 1970s. And in this final installment we are looking at the nine inch plastic versions of the Doctor's most famous enemies. 

Now the first proper monster to ever appear in the show would also become the most famous - I refer of course to those genocidal pepperpots, the Daleks. These armoured horrors from Skaro first appeared back in December 1963 in the second ever Doctor Who serial, variously known as 'The Mutants', 'The Dead Planet', or simply 'The Daleks', for back then Doctor Who adventures only had production codes rather than definite titles for the story arcs, and hence strictly speaking the story is called Serial B. Anywho, these metal monsters were an instant hit, indeed so much so that the Daleks got their own spin-off toys years before there was ever a Doctor figure, with the first miniature Daleks hitting the toy shops in 1965 in a whole variety of shapes and sizes from different manufacturers. 

Now then, gingerly stepping over the tatological* tarpit that is the various breeds of toy Dalek invading the toy shelves in the mid '60s - for they were legion (see here) - all we really need to note right now is that none of them were actually what we would now call 'screen accurate'. In fairness, they were all recognisable as Daleks, and were never in any danger of being mistaken for Gareth Hunt, but they tended to sport somewhat off-piste proportions and colour schemes. Up until Denys Fisher came on the scene, the best toy dalek you could buy was one produced by another UK toy firm, Palitoy in 1975 - a battery operated talking Dalek whose only real flaw was that it was slightly on the chubby side. Hence there was still room from improvement, and indeed the Denys Fisher Dalek from 1977 was widely hailed as the most accurate toy Dalek to date. 

However that said, I always thought the Denys Fisher Dalek looked a little on the small and undernourished side. To my childish eye, it looked like a Dalek that hadn't been eating its greens, and I much prefered the chunkier Palitoy one, even if it did look like it had eaten all the pies. But as the Denys Fisher Daleks are still much sought after by collectors, and are currently going for around £500, so I'm probably in the minority there. However while we could argue all day over which of these '70s toys is the more accurate version of their screen counterparts, there is an interesting tale surrounding the colour scheme of the Denys Fisher incarnation. As you can see from the pictures, this particular Dalek has a silver body and a striking red head piece, giving it something of a sporty look. And while that colour scheme might seem a little unusual, it was familiar to 1970s kids for identical Daleks had appeared in a set of cardboard figures given away by Weetabix (a tale for another day), and in Doctor Who comic strips found in British weekly comic Countdown**.

A Weetabix Dalek card and a panel from Sub Zero published Countdown comic in 1972

However the curious thing is, despite the Skaronine terrors adopting various liveries over the years, there had never actually been a silver and scarlet model on screen, neither in the TV show, or even in the two movies starring Peter Cushing as the Doctor produced in the 1960s. However interestingly, the origin of this rogue pepperpot is tied to the creator of the Daleks themselves -no, not Davros, but writer Terry Nation. Now Nation has invented the Daleks in his script for The Mutants/Dead Planet/Serial B and had cannily retained the rights - which was why they were so heavily merchandised in the 1960s. Nation even ended up with a flotilla of Daleks of his very own, after acquiring some of the movie props, which would go out on promotional tours. In an article on the Daleks in the Radio Times special issued for the 10th anniversary of the show, old Terry was pictured at his home with his own honour guard of Skaro's finest patrolling his drive!

Terry Nation and his Skaro posse

And look, there's the Scarlet Top! So where did he come from? An unrealised outing for the Daleks perhaps? For there were a few of those down the years, most famously Nation planned to bring them into his other SF TV series Blake's 7 and tried to get a solo Dalek show on US TV.  Actually the truth is more prosaic - over the years the various Dalek props own by Nation got a bit battered during their days on the road. Sadly rumours of them smashing up hotel rooms and hanging out with Keith Moon have just been made up by me. Anyhow, due to assorted Daleks getting damaged in transit, those deemed to tatty to show to the public ended up as spare parts, and eventually lead to the creation of Scarlet Top, essentially a Skaro Frankenstein made of bit of ex-Daleks*** (more details available here). However, it would seem that reference materials provided by the Beeb for Denys Fisher featured lots of snaps from the Radio Times photo shoot, and likewise Weetabix and Countdown artist Gerry Haylock got the same press pack to work from too. And hence the Scarlet Top came into the Dalek canon...

The 10th Anniversary Doctor Who special from Radio Times 

Now then, to move on to the other arch nemesis manufactured by Denys Fisher, their nine inch Cyberman shares a similar heritage. As detailed here, their terror from Telos was clearly modelled on the Cyberman seen menacing the Third Doctor on the cover of 10th Anniversary Radio Times special - it's the silver wellies that are the give away apparently! However, it is fair to say that the resulting Cyber-doll wasn't as quite as screen accurate as their Dalek. The decision to go with fabric for the Cybersuit makes it look like it's wearing pajamas, and the pipes and chest pieces look a bit too chunky and cumbersome. Indeed the chest unit, which serves as the Cyberman's lungs by the way, often slipped down so much, it would end up being worn like a bum-bag by many Denys Fisher Cybermen.  Obviously, much of this comes down to a matter of scale - there's lots of fiddly bits on Cybermen that were hard to do well at nine inches. But none of that explains why this Cyberman is a true rogue. Look closely here...

Yes, this Cyberman has a nose! And, as far as I can tell, nobody nose why! Boom! Boom! ...Oh alright, please yourselves! But leaving the bad puns aside, the only thing I can come up with is perhaps the designers at Denys Fisher were short of pictures of Cybermen, and possibly were consulting a range of photos of assorted old Cybermen. Now over the years, the Cybermen have changed quite a lot, in in their first appearance had gauze face masks rather than steel headpieces, and hence you can see a bump where their noses were. And looking at the general features of the Denys Fisher Cyberman, it could well a result of a harassed designer attempting to synthesis the four different models of Cybermen pictured in that fabled Radio Times Special. Quite possibly while screaming "what the hell are these silver bastard things supposed to look like ?!?".  Well, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it!

A Tenth Planet Cyberman

So then dear friends, that brings us the end of this trawl through Doctor Who toys from the 1970s. However, never fear, the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat as many. many more dubious treasure to share with you! 

*  - Yes, I did just make that word up
** - A story in which Scarlet Top appears, Sub Zero, was reprinted last month by Doctor Who Monthly as a free gift with Issue 508
*** - All together now "They have ceased to be!"

The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #04 - K1 OK!

Welcome once again dear friends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! And this week, we are continuing our root through the very first range of actions for Doctor Who, made way back in the late '70s by Denys Fisher in the UK. Now obviously this included nine inch high versions of the current Doctor (incarnation #4 Tom Baker) and his companions: at this time Leela played by Louise Jameson, and K9 played by ... erm... an increasingly unreliable prop. Of these latter entries in the range there is little of note to say, other than that the Leela doll tended to have extremely mad frizzy hair, and the miniature K9 proved to be somewhat sturdier that his full size TV counterpart, handling out of studio work i.e. adventures in the back garden, far better. 

However Doctor Who has always been a show not just about the adventures of its hero but also about monsters, and quite rightly Denys Fisher did not skimp on a range of villains. Now there were only three different enemies available to do battle with the nine inch Baker, however thankfully Denys Fisher had licensed two of the big boys, but more on them next week. The other villain in the range was the Giant Robot. Now this always struck me as something of an odd choice as this metallic chap only ever appeared in one Doctor Who story, "Robot" which aired in late 1974/early 1975. And while this had been the debut outing for Baker's Doctor, in 1977 he was somewhat old news when the Denys Fisher figures hit the shelves. 

So why did Denys Fisher chose this particular foe? Well, first up we have to note that the design is brilliant, none of your couple of boxes stacked up with waldo arms and some old TV aerials here! This mechanical maniac was actually designed by a fellow named James Acheson, who would go on to win three Academy Awards for Costume Design, for his work on The Last Emperor, Dangerous Liaisons and Restoration. Quite a pedigree, I'm sure you'll agree. And the toy version was pretty decent too - admittedly the some of the proportions aren't 100% exact, but all the same, this is one handsome toy android! But other than looking like some visitant from a robotic art deco future, perhaps a clue to why he was chosen is hidden in his name. Now the original TV serial was just called "Robot", and in the story itself our metal friend actually had a proper name - K1. But the Denys Fisher version hit the toy shops under the name 'Giant Robot'. 

And there is a good reason for this. Back in the 1970s, while there were some home video recorders knocking about, they were rare and extremely expensive beasts. At that stage, we were still a good few years away from the dawn of  the VCR age. Also we should note too, that unlike today, repeats were not a common feature of the TV schedules - back then channels repeating old shows were roundly criticised. But there was another way for Doctor Who fans to revisit old adventures, and that was in book form. Beginning in 1973 with reprints of novelisations by David Whittaker of three First Doctor adventures which had originally been published in hardback in the mid 1960s, Target Books would go on to produce novelisations of nearly all the Doctor's televised adventures, and become a hugely successful publishing imprint in the process.  

After reprinting the trio of Hartnell tales, the range had focused on the adventures of the then current incarnation, 3rd Doctor John Pertwee. And when he regenerated into the 4th Doctor, Target Books were not far behind, with Terrance Dicks novelising his own script, and a book version of Tom Baker's debut adventure hitting the shelves just two months after the serial aired. Now generally the Target Books had the same titles as the TV stories. However in the early days of the range, sometimes they were tweaked, most often to fit the series title format of "Doctor Who and the Such-and-Such of Whatever". However in the first few years, some titles got a bit more of spin, presumably to make them sound more attractive to readers. Hence the novel of the 3rd Doctor's debut story "Spearhead from Space" became "Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion", while his second outing "The Silurians" became "Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters" which presumably was thought to be catchier sounding. 

Hence when the novelisation of the adventure that included K1 was released, the story that on TV was simply named "Robot" became Doctor Who and the Giant Robot. And that wasn't merely hyping the main threat of the tale either, for in that adventure, the climax saw K1 growing to King Kong size. Now Denys Fisher chose to christen the toy incarnation as "Giant Robot" too, rather than go with K1, and that was an interesting choice at the time. For thanks to Star Wars, robot names composed a combination of letters and numbers were about to become de rigour for SF automata, and hence going with K1 would be more zeitgeisty. Not that the wholesome chaps at Denys Fisher would have ever used a ghastly marketing term like "zeitgeisty" back then. I'm regretting doing it now to be honest. But I digress...

...Anyhow, my theory is Denys Fisher went with "Giant Robot", because as thanks to the Target Book, this was now the more familiar name for the nation's kids. I also suspect the sales figures of said Target novel might also have had something to do with their decision. Looking at the Target Books publication schedule, in 1975 and 1976 there were only four other novels released featuring the Fourth Doctor, two of which featured enemies the range were bound to cover anyway: Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen (published 20th May 1976) and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks (published 22nd June 1976). The other two titles Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (a novelisation of Terror of the Zygons, published 15th January 1976) and Doctor Who and Pyramids of Mars (published 16th December 1976) offered alternative iconic monsters, but my suspicion is that given Doctor Who and the Giant Robot has been on the shelves longer, K1 looked the better known and more popular enemy for the range. 

Next time, we'll be taking a look at how Denys Fisher recreated two of the show's most famous villains for their nine inch range... 

The original K1 enjoying a polish up for a recent exhibition

The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #03 - The Gambit Menace (Slight Return)

Alright, this is slightly embarrassing... But the truth will out! 

A few weeks ago, I opened the cobwebbed doors of the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Tat, and in our maiden voyage round its dusty halls, had a gander at the Doctor Who figures issued by Denys Fisher in the late '70s. And in this first missive - which you can find HERE - we covered the infamous tale of how the toy version of Fourth Doctor Tom Baker ended up actually having the head of Gambit from the New Avengers. All well and good...

...Or so I thought. But literally mere days after I'd pressed the big orange PUBLISH button, what would turn up but some new revelations concerning this famous toytown head transplant! Now the story of who the Fourth Doctor figure got a bonce resembling Gareth Hunt has long been doing the rounds. However in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine new information regarding the Denys Fisher toy range came to light (and special thanks to Mr Clayton Hickman for bringing these revelations to my attention).

In a rather splendid issue themed around 1970s Doctor Who (and coming with a very nifty reprint of some '70s Who comic strips which I highly recommend picking up), there is a feature on the Denys Fisher toy range. And said feature includes an interview with the man who oversaw their production, Mr Peter Viner. This gentleman had joined Denys Fisher as a development engineer in 1969, and went on to become the Head of Research and Development, so if anyone knew the truth, it would be this veteran toymaker!   

Now as the Gambit/Gareth Hunt headswap tale has been in circulation since at least the early 1990s, Mr Peter was well aware of it. However when quizzed about it by DWM's Gary Gillatt, he was quick to debunk the story and put down any resemblance to Gareth Hunt down to the more primitive sculpting and manufacturing techniques of the late '70s. Of course, none of the above will sway a die-hard conspiracy theorist, who would undoubtedly take the "well, he would say that!" line, but tinfoil hats are well known to be impenetrable like that...

But looking at publicity shots of Gareth Hunt as Gambit, and comparing them with the Fourth Doctor doll, there is most obviously a big difference in the hairstyles. Now it is true that Mr Hunt had a more Bakerseque permed look in later years, most notably in the "Three types of the finest coffee beans" Nescafe ads he starred in the early '80s, but at the time when Denys Fisher would have been plotting a Gambit figure, publicity shots show him sporting a side parting and a distinct lack of bubbly curls! See for yourself below, here's '70s Gambit on the left and '80s Hunt to the right.

See, Gambit era Gareth clearly has a wavy barnet! So then, I rather suspect that this much passed about tale of head swapping may well have its origin in the distant days of the 1980s, when folks spotted a resemblance between the Doctor doll from the '70s and with the then current incarnation of Mr Hunt who was doing his coffee beans routine on every other ad break on the telly at the time. And until new evidence surfaces (probably in two days time the way things are doing round here currently), I'm going with it! 

Next time, we will get to the monster figures I swear, unravelling the mysteries of Dalek livery and how a Cyberman got his nose! 

The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #02 - Trek And Relative Dimension in Shops

Hello folks! Welcome back the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Do take a seat... No, not there, that's still got the remains of dropped lolly on it! A Walls Sky-Ray I think. But I digress... Anyhow yes, this week we are still going through the big dusty box marked "Denys Fisher Dr Who" and taking a look at another item in that range of toys that helped kids create new adventures of the titular Time Lord in the comfort of their own bedrooms back in the late '70s. 

So then, in 1976, British toy company Denys Fisher, in conjunction with Mego in the US, released a range of nine and half inch Doctor Who figures. Obviously we had the Doctor himself, all teeth and curls and wearing Tom Baker's face (or was it... see our last trip here). There was a Leela doll, which despite having exceedingly bushy hair like those old Troll dolls, had a certain resemblance to Louise Jameson. And there was also a range of enemies which we'll have a gander at next time. But the centerpiece of the range was the TARDIS playset. 

Nicely scaled to the figures in the range (and for a good reason too), the Denys Fisher TARDIS was a sturdy beast and a rather nice replica of the current TV version. However while later toy TARDISes (and no, it shouldn't be TARDII - the name's an acronym remember) were just empty blue boxes, this first time capsule for action figures had a trick up its plastic sleeves. If you looked at the photos on this page, you'll notice that the only major inaccuracy in the design is the inclusion of what look like red and green lights on the top. But these were actually buttons to allow the toy TARDIS perform its main selling feature.

For when you opened the doors, you discovered a little chamber, just big enough to stand a Doctor or a Leela, or at a squeeze a Cyberman figure inside. Now for maximum effect, you then shut the doors, and pressed the green button. The TARDIS would make a strange noise - sadly not the famous wheezing and groaning dematerialisation sound effects - and then when you opened the doors, the Doctor (or whoever that been shoved in there) had disappeared! My giddy aunt! And then if you shut the doors and pressed the other button, they came back! Amazing! 

Of course, it was blindingly obvious to most children how this all worked, for the chamber in which you placed your plastic pals was suspiciously curved and put one in mind of a revolving door. And indeed essentially that was the secret of this particular TARDIS - it worked just like those secret doors in movies and cartoons where you pull a concealed lever, usually a torch on a wall, a candlestick, or a book on a shelf. and a section of wall span around. It was, at least to a child of the time, very cool. Although I suspect I'm not alone in being slightly bothered by it, for the TARDIS is not some species of secret door, or a magician's vanishing cabinet. And so, while this feature was undoubtedly great fun, it didn't quite fit the lore of the parent TV show. Personally I rationalised this by choosing to see it as representing the Doctor wandering off into the sadly unseen control room for which, equally sadly, there was never a playset equivalent of. Of course I was aware that that was just an imaginative sticking plaster, what we might now call "head canon" but it evidently worked well enough as I played with that until the mechanism eventually broke! 

But even back then, I kind of guessed why this toy TARDIS performed this vanishing trick, for I had seen another playset that did more or less the same stunt - the Star Trek Transporter Room from Palitoy. Now over in the US in 1974, legendary toy giant Mego (and that's a company not some fee-fie-fo-fumming titan made of playthings) began producing a line of Star Trek figures, eight inch high replicas of the crew and assorted aliens. The big item in that range was the USS Enterprise Action Playset, a construction of card and plastic that delivered a captain's chair for our Kirk to loaf about on, a Navigation Console, six different pictures to put on the bridge view screen, and some stools for the other crew. All very exciting, but the highlight of the set was the Transporter. Now although a transporter shouldn't have been on the bridge,  and in the show looked more like the stage of a late '60s nightclub, this was a little pod that looked like a futuristic wardrobe. But it did perform the same magic trick with a revolving panel as the TARDIS, to allow you to "beam down" figures to areas of carpet and hallway that had been pressed into service as alien planets. 

Sadly however, this set was never released in the UK, and indeed if I remember rightly the Star Trek figures were never widely available in British toy stores for long - certainly Palitoy versions of the second wave of figures released, the aliens in particular, were and are very hard to come by. However we did get a playset that was exclusive to the UK, with Palitoy creating the Transporter Room set. This was just the transporter unit from the US set, shipped as a stand-alone item and sporting a jazzier colour scheme. It was created from Mego parts shipped from the US and Hong Kong, as toy historians reckon that the execs at Palitoy decided it was cheaper to create this set from pre-existing bits than import the USS Enterprise Playset (for more on this saga, boldly go here). 

Now there was a fair bit of back and forth across the Atlantic between Mego and Palitoy, but the legendary American toy makers also had a good relationship with Denys Fisher too. And hence no one seemed to mind too much when Denys Fisher essentially borrowed the concept and mechanism. However as the Who figures were an inch and half taller than the Kirk and co figures, everything had to be scaled up with new bespoke parts to create their version of the TARDIS.

Of course for the kids of 1970s Britain the real upshot of the this difference in figure sizes meant that any bedroom team-ups or playground crossovers where the Doctor met the Enterprise crew often ended in farce, with the Baker Doctor giving Kirk the old Benny Hill head slapping treatment, the "get out of that" routine (as frequently demonstrated by Eric Morecambe on little Ern),  and of course the classic held-off-at-arms-length-you-can't-hit-me wind-up beloved of older siblings everywhere...   

NEXT TIME - We'll be round off our look at Doctor Who dolls, sorry I mean action figures, with a look at some of the curious things going on with the Doctor's enemies... 

The 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat #01 - Doctor Who and the Gambit Menace!

Welcome dear friends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Now this creaking old edifice contains a good many items that were produced in thrall to the great God Spin-off, and a further good many of those are items produced with the aim of extracting money from small children. Or at least, their parents. These days any sort of property with a demographic that includes legions of ankle-biters will have a range of tie-in action figures leading the charge at the frontline of the merch. But it wasn't always this way. The trailblazer for this brave new world of spin-off toys was of course the original Star Wars, and after the massive success of the Kenner/Palitoy action figure range, any movie or TV enjoyed by a sizeable number of children would transform their characters into a line of plastic homunculi. And before you could say "by the Power of Ponyskull!", this approach was developed further in the 1980s with the emergence of franchises and properties that were created to just flog toys in the first place. 

However while Lucas and Star Wars are often hailed as the creators of this toytown trend, spin-off toys had already been around for a while already. However in the years before we had heard the phrase "may the Force be with you", action figures based around cinema or TV properties were something of a different proposition. In the post-Deathstar years, the Star Wars approach of pocket sized figures at pocket money prices became the industry standard, along with the canny approach to turn every possible character into a doll, even if they had only lurked about in the background - Death Star Droid I'm looking at you. But in the pre-Stars Wars toy stores, any figures you found based on your favourite TV shows or movies were likely to come in a wide variety of different scales and sizes, and often be limited to only a handful of characters. And a perfect example of this simpler era of tie-toys comes in the form of the Doctor Who figures released by Denys Fisher in the late '70s.

In 1976, the Time Lord had been travelling for over a decade on the telly, and his current incarnation, the Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, was proving to be the most popular yet. And so, the venerable British toy makers Denys Fisher released what would be the first proper action figure version of the Doctor. Now since the show's beginning, it had been popular with kids, and there had been many tie-in toys and much merchandise, such as books, comics, jigsaws and board games. However up until 1976, the only figures or dolls you could buy were various toy versions of the Doctor's arch enemies, the Daleks. However thanks to Denys Fisher (and Mego in the US) now you could buy a nine and half inch high Fourth Doctor, complete with hat, scarf and even a sonic screwdriver! But wait, there was more! You could also buy a Leela, complete with hunting knife, and an in-scale version of the Doctor's beloved robot hound K9. There was a range of enemies to pit your plastic heroes against in the form of Daleks, Cybermen and the K1 Robot (AKA the Giant Robot), and topping off the range was a replica TARDIS. 

Now don't get me wrong, these were a great range of figures and are now highly prized by collectors. Certainly I was delighted to get a Doctor, TARDIS and a Dalek one Christmas. But there were several features to this range that make them worthy of inclusion in the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat. The first is an odd little detail about the Doctor himself, or rather his miniature toyshop version. Now at first glance, it's rather nice to note that  the costume was very faithful to the Doctor's onscreen ensemble, and they did really try to have a figure that looked like Tom Baker. But I always found that my Fourth Doctor figure reminded me of another small screen hero - namely Gambit from Brian Clemens' The New Avengers, as played by Gareth "three types of the finest coffee beans" Hunt. 

And the funny thing is, many years later I discovered that there was a very good reason for this. For around the same time as the Denys Fisher Doctor Who range was being made, they were developing plans to do a range of New Avengers dolls. featuring plastic versions of Steed, Gambit and Purdie. The figures were to feature a karate chop action, and while some ads and promotional material did surface, the range of toys never really materialised, probably due to the New Avengers disappearing from our screens in 1977. And as far as toy historians know, only Joanna Lumley's character from the show, Purdy, turned up in action figure form in the shops. 

However, not wanting to waste a lot of development time and money, the sculpt of Gareth Hunt's bonce was cunningly recycled to give the Fourth Doctor doll a noggin. And it was, if you'll pardon an absolutely shameless pun, a gambit (boom! boom!) which worked rather well, as it certainly looked enough like Tom Baker to fool most kiddiewinks. However it would perhaps explain why the Doctor's plastic hat never quite fitted on his head well enough for my liking...

However the range holds further and stranger anomalies... Come back to the 'Orrible 'Ouse next time, to discover what wonders the Denys Fisher TARDIS had to offer!