There are two really wonderful things about the era that we live in. No. 1: the ability of any entertainment vehicle to reach a worldwide audience with comparative ease. There's a reason we're still finding lost episodes of Doctor Who in sheds in Africa half a century after they were shipped there. Getting the word out used to be really hard and uncertain.
The second thing is that incredible film and television technology is so accessible to the average consumer that with a little practice and hard work virtually any fan can surpass many aspects of his favorite geek shows and movies themselves. That's a good thing because sometimes a show like Doctor Who sort of drops the ball in places.
These five fans not only pick up the ball. They run it all the way down field for a touchdown.
R. A. Mitchell: One clear area where the BBC is failing fans is that it doesn't seem really all that keen on keeping up with the vast world outside the show. I'm not talking about making sure that every single fact adds up and doesn't contradict itself across the novels, audio stories, and comics. I just mean making sure that they're accessible.
Consider the Eighth Doctor, who many met for the first time in "Night of the Doctor" recently. As I pointed out last week, getting to know some of his wider work outside of his 1996 television movie can be a huge headache. Especially his comic appearances, because Panini Books has allowed the first volume, Endgame, to go out of print.
Enter R. A. Mitchell, who has started not only preserving them online, but turning them into pretty spectacular motion comics. While Mitchell is no Paul McGann, he still has a pretty incredible voice that brings the stories to life. BBC is really missing out by not taking all these comics that they have lying around and turning them into motion comics along the lines of Buffy Season 8. It'd basically be printing money, but until then Mitchell has us covered.
Alisa Stern: Another thing that would be nice from the world of Doctor Who would be more content aimed at the 3 - 5 age group. My daughter loved the animated special Dreamland, but it's more or less the only one of its kind (Infinity Quest is rubbish). Dreamland is also not very good, with production values slightly below that of your regular straight-to-DVD Barbie releases.
Stern, an animator who has worked on quality shows like Team Umizoomi has outdone Dreamland amazingly with her Doctor Puppet series. The shorts are expertly crafted recreations of the various Doctors having minor adventures, and I can tell you from personal experience that it accomplishes ten times what any other official animated adventure has with far less. That BBC hasn't given Stern some sort of job producing these officially is kind of a travesty.
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