Toybox REVIEW: Doctor Who "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" Sound FX Dalek

While Character Options may have relegated the majority of their classic Doctor Who releases to Forbidden Planet exclusives, every so often a few slip through the net and manage to get a mass release. The 11 Doctors box set was one example, and now a wave of talking Dalek figures has been released.  The first wave features a total of six Daleks from various periods of the show's history, with representations from the following stories;

• The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)
• Power of the Daleks (1966)
• Planet of the Daleks (1973)
• Death to the Daleks (1974)
• Revelation of the Daleks (1985)
• Bronze Dalek (2005 relaunch)

With my Dalek collection continuing to fill my room, I've chosen to only pick up the varities which are seeing release for the first time in this wave. First up is the The Dalek Invasion of Earth variant. While the Saucer commander and pilot ranks have been released in the past, this is the first time for the standard drone variant.

The packaging is a fairly standard blister, but a nice little touch is that the backing card is in the shape of a Dalek dome/neck. There's a hole in the blister for the Dalek's "try-me" function, which is activated by pushing down on one of the skirt spheres. The talking feature can be turned off via a switch on the base once opened.

While the Dalek design is very similar to the one seen in the race's debut story The Daleks, there are a number of aesthetic changes. The most obvious of all is the larger bumper which storywise was to make the Daleks more mobile on Earth's terrain (remember, they were pretty primitive back in the 60s). Smaller changes are the rounder, silver/black eyestalk and the dish on their backs (to draw in power from their saucers). Its a very unique design in that not only does it have elements that wouldn't be seen in the Daleks again, but its also from the story that cemented them as a reoccurring part of Doctor Who at the height of Dalekmania. As usual the level of articulation isn't much, but it has everything you'd expect from a Dalek - the head can rotate 360 degrees, the eye move up and down and appendages move about. An extendable plunger would be nice, but no Dalek toy in general has been managed to pull that off yet.

But this is the important section, just how good is the voice? The packaging boasts that the Daleks have era-specific sound effects and speech, and as great as this sounds its only half true. While the Daleks do have era-specific speech, they aren't story specific and the lines have been re-recorded. There's no "We are the masters of Earth!" or "We are the masters of India!", but instead "Daleks conquer and destroy!", which is in fact from Power of the Daleks.

While I appreciate the (somewhat half-assed) era-specific lines, the effect is completely lost without the original audio (or atleast something close to it). Not every Dalek speaks like they do now - the ones from Dalek Invasion of Earth, as well as the ones from Revelation of the Daleks, have very specific speech styles that could have easily been recreated. A video of the various voice clips can be viewed below (the Dalek also makes a gun SFX noise, but the toy just didn't want to make the noise on camera).

So the verdict? It's a great toy that lives up to Character Options usual standards, but the speech element leaves a lot to be desired. Without the proper voice or story-specific speech, the promise of era-specific voice clips is pretty empty. Regardless of this, its nice to see more Dalek variants released as Character Options draw ever closer to releasing them all.

Reviews in Time & Space: The Daleks

Taking a short break from my summer quest to see a large portion of the Doctor Who stories I've never seen, I decided to come back a visit an old favourite of mine and I'm sure many other peoples'....the Doctor's first encounter with a race that would become arguably as popular as the Doctor himself. Of course, it's none other than the Daleks.

Following on instantly from the events of An Unearthly Child, the Doctor and his companions find themselves on a faraway planet covered by a petrified jungle. After discovering a futuristic metal city on this dead planet, the Doctor purposely sabotages the TARDIS so they they have no choice but to investigate the city. But the Doctor gets more than he bargains for as they are thrust into the world of the Daleks and their enemies, the Thals. Now the Doctor and his companions must escape from the Daleks and help to end a war that has been waged for centuries, and brought the planet Skaro to its knees...

Fans of the new series be aware, the early adventures of the first Doctor (as portrayed by the late William Hartnell) are very different from the Doctor as portrayed by Eccleston, Tennant, Smith and even some of the later 'classic' Doctors. Here the Doctor is both rash and selfish, his determination to explore the city of the Daleks resulting in him and his companions not only becoming prisoners of the Daleks, but also being exposed to highly lethal amounts of radiation. These early companions are also very different, with both Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) not choosing to travel in time and space with the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan (Carol Ann Ford), instead essentially being kidnapped by the Doctor after they discover the TARDIS and the secrets behind Susan and her grandfather. While they initially seem at odds with each other (which makes for very good viewing, especially when coupled with the prior adventure), their ordeal with the Daleks brings them closer together as a group (or a family even) and is much closer to the usual dynamic between the Doctor and his companions. This character growth is evenly spread out among the 7 episodes of The Daleks, which in turn gives plenty of time for the story to progress at an even rate, looking at the horrors of nuclear war and demonstrating some of the Nazi-esque ideals Terry Nation used in creating the Daleks. It just further emphasises to me how the new Doctor Who series would benefit from more episodes per story, not only to bring back the cliffhanger format but also to make stories with potential (I'm looking at you Victory of the Daleks) not look like rushed messes.

The Daleks of this story are also very different from what they would become. Before a time where there were Dalek empires and Davros, before the Daleks had the ability to travel through time or even space there were these mark I Daleks, mutants trapped in their casings, unable to survive the nuclear fallout their war with the Thals had caused without them. Not only this, but they are also trapped within their own city, dependant on static electricity from the metal floors. These Daleks are far more vulnerable than they would become in the future, but this doesn't mean they aren't a threat. In fact, they are as equally, if not more so threatening then the fully fledged Dalek empires of the future. They may have obvious weaknesses - but they themselves know it, and this creates far less arrogant, more manipulative Daleks (a similar kind appeared in the excellent 1974 story Death to the Daleks). The original design makes these Daleks also feel a lot more alive and individual, each with their own distinct voice pitch and dilating iris in the eyestalk (a feature that was dropped when the Daleks first appeared in colour in 1972's Day of the Daleks and would not be returned to them until 2005's Dalek). Back then there was also the mystery of what exactly was inside the Dalek casing, a brief glimpse of the mutant only being seen at the conclusion of episode 3 'The Escape'.

As the DVD sleeve insert says, this is one of, if not the most important story in Doctor Who's extensive history, and that is no exaggeration. Without the popularity the Daleks brought to the series, Doctor Who may have been another flash in the pan BBC drama and it certainly wouldn't be famous for what it is today - the adventures of a time travelling alien battling monsters in time and space. When the series was originally commissioned the BBC's then Head of Drama Sydney Newman didn't want the series to fall into the generics of sci-fi strictly said "No Bug-Eyed Monsters (abbriviated to BEMs), and no tin robots." Six episodes into the series the Daleks were unleashed upon the world and, well, the rest is history. This story was not only the very first to be adapted into a novel, but also remade into a cinematic adventure starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who (while admittedly this movie condensed the plot into a shadow of its former self, the Daleks have never looked better and therefore the two Cushing Dalek movies are particular favourites of mine).

The Daleks have been a staple of Doctor Who since the very beginning, being the only monster to have battled all 11 incarnations of the Doctor (8th Doctor Paul McGann has some excellent Dalek stories in both book and audio format). The series wouldn't be what it is today without them, so long may they continue to appear.