Doctor Who is Not a Children's Show
Yesterday I managed to upload another video for the youtube website concerning my thoughts about recent comments made on my page.
Most of the attacks from passerby youtubers went along the lines of this: “Doctor Who is a children’s show and you should grow up.”
There were a couple of things that went through my mind. Number one, I never bothered these guys on their page so why did they have to come around my side of the woods and drop their inane comments?
Number two, what gave them the idea that Doctor Who is a children’s show?
But the complains are the same. It is the same for any science fiction TV show in general which often gets to be the butt of the joke for unimaginative folks. They believe that shows with monsters in it are for children. They think that any piece of fantastical TV viewing should only be for children. Because the show has cheap sets and boxy surroundings in the older Doctor Who series should be regarded as adolescent nonsense.
Don't make the same mistakes as these complainers did.
I do remember PBS stations around here televised Doctor Who series late at night for many years about twenty years ago. On Sunday nights around 11 p.m. Not exactly the best time for children as they are going to school the next morning.
However it was a pretty good night for adults who like to stay up late and watch some things to challenge the mind with ideas and concepts. In England, they broadcast Doctor Who around the 6 p.m. time which is considered family time… as adults will be able to view it. This isn’t a Saturday morning cartoon.
I hate it when people say Doctor Who is a children’s show. I want to give them a rhetorical punch to their faces with some of my writing.
I’ve already made my case in the near twelve minute video arguing that the horror themes of the series makes essential adult viewing as the episodes do borrow greatly from the most frightening stories such as Frankenstein and any vampire myths.
But I have only scratched the surface for it in my video clip called “Doctor Who is Not a Children’s Show.” There’s more to say.
The audience was greeted with bloodier than usual Doctor Who in the 1970s. There were scenes of one man being crushed to death in the Seeds of Doom episode during the always excellent Tom Baker period. In fact, the same episode portrayed a rather grotesque transformation of a human being into something hideous. Other stories to use this theme was in “The Ark in Space” and “Planet of Fear.” Many of the horror elements continue to frighten the children… and remains potent for adult viewers as well.
One of the things I didn’t cover in my video was the nature of the fourth Doctor's attitude to killing every now and then. When he finds that it may save the thousands of lives, he’ll give the villain and good thumping… and pull the rug from under him when he least expected it. The fourth Doctor, abandoning his trademark scarf for a Victorian period suit, locked horns with a maniac butcher from the future in "Talons of Wang Chiang."
In this show, he threw the arch-nemesis Magnus Greel into an extraction chamber as his life was sucked away… leaving him like a pile of dried old leaves. Such a callous behavior of the hero shows that he dismisses a “life” when it comes to killing the villain. What would the children think? That all heroes kill the bad guys? It must have been a dilemma for children to face when they realize their hero had a dark side to him.
However, killing the villains came to a forefront during the mid-eighties when the Doctor entered his sixth persona donning a multi-colored suit (played wonderfully by Colin Baker)… and his personality became even more fractured than before. Striking, arrogant, and egotistical, the sixth Doctor was perhaps the most violent of any of his incarnations.
It was here that we saw him poison a man in the episode “The Two Doctors,” lure others into a trap involving toxic jungle vines and shove some poor slob into an acid pool as he did in “Vengeance on Varos.” Such symptoms of violence were a cut above the average making it a departure from being a children’s show.
I’m not sure why the few still call the series a children’s show when it clearly isn’t. And they leave behind rather adolescent remarks suggesting that I should grow up. It is almost as if they are trying to bully me on the youtube website. It isn’t working out very well for them. They keep suggesting that I should leave Doctor Who behind in the past. Why is that? Why would I want to do that?
These are the same people who probably spend all their time on the weekends watching sports. Such games like football, soccer and baseball… isn’t that all children's games you played when younger? If this is true, then perhaps these people should leave behind their adolescent interests of sports. These are all games which are enjoyed by teenagers and youngsters. For them to say that I should leave behind Doctor Who and grow up is both wrong and insulting. These jokers will need to abandon their childish interests of sports if they’re going to say the same thing about a science fiction show.
There is always violence everywhere. But Doctor Who does remain very responsible in portraying the violence as an evil thing. The title hero of the series does abhor violence to a great degree unless it’s as a last resort. Even then, he doesn’t like it. The Doctor Who series does use violence to portray the ugliness of life and often the wrongdoing of people against others. Which makes it a very good moral play for the series both old and new. And the Doctor Who series teaches about the ethics of violence. Therefore, if anything, making the Doctor Who series not a children’s show.
And Doctor Who is a good education tool for portraying violence. You may recall Tom Baker saying in the episode the classic episode “Robots of Death” before leaving the safe comforts of his time traveling police box, “If they see you’re not carrying any weapons, they’ll never hurt you… nine times out of ten.”
Violence remains a huge part of the Doctor Who saga.
Most of the attacks from passerby youtubers went along the lines of this: “Doctor Who is a children’s show and you should grow up.”
There were a couple of things that went through my mind. Number one, I never bothered these guys on their page so why did they have to come around my side of the woods and drop their inane comments?
Number two, what gave them the idea that Doctor Who is a children’s show?
But the complains are the same. It is the same for any science fiction TV show in general which often gets to be the butt of the joke for unimaginative folks. They believe that shows with monsters in it are for children. They think that any piece of fantastical TV viewing should only be for children. Because the show has cheap sets and boxy surroundings in the older Doctor Who series should be regarded as adolescent nonsense.
Don't make the same mistakes as these complainers did.
I do remember PBS stations around here televised Doctor Who series late at night for many years about twenty years ago. On Sunday nights around 11 p.m. Not exactly the best time for children as they are going to school the next morning.
However it was a pretty good night for adults who like to stay up late and watch some things to challenge the mind with ideas and concepts. In England, they broadcast Doctor Who around the 6 p.m. time which is considered family time… as adults will be able to view it. This isn’t a Saturday morning cartoon.
I hate it when people say Doctor Who is a children’s show. I want to give them a rhetorical punch to their faces with some of my writing.
I’ve already made my case in the near twelve minute video arguing that the horror themes of the series makes essential adult viewing as the episodes do borrow greatly from the most frightening stories such as Frankenstein and any vampire myths.
But I have only scratched the surface for it in my video clip called “Doctor Who is Not a Children’s Show.” There’s more to say.
The audience was greeted with bloodier than usual Doctor Who in the 1970s. There were scenes of one man being crushed to death in the Seeds of Doom episode during the always excellent Tom Baker period. In fact, the same episode portrayed a rather grotesque transformation of a human being into something hideous. Other stories to use this theme was in “The Ark in Space” and “Planet of Fear.” Many of the horror elements continue to frighten the children… and remains potent for adult viewers as well.
One of the things I didn’t cover in my video was the nature of the fourth Doctor's attitude to killing every now and then. When he finds that it may save the thousands of lives, he’ll give the villain and good thumping… and pull the rug from under him when he least expected it. The fourth Doctor, abandoning his trademark scarf for a Victorian period suit, locked horns with a maniac butcher from the future in "Talons of Wang Chiang."
In this show, he threw the arch-nemesis Magnus Greel into an extraction chamber as his life was sucked away… leaving him like a pile of dried old leaves. Such a callous behavior of the hero shows that he dismisses a “life” when it comes to killing the villain. What would the children think? That all heroes kill the bad guys? It must have been a dilemma for children to face when they realize their hero had a dark side to him.
However, killing the villains came to a forefront during the mid-eighties when the Doctor entered his sixth persona donning a multi-colored suit (played wonderfully by Colin Baker)… and his personality became even more fractured than before. Striking, arrogant, and egotistical, the sixth Doctor was perhaps the most violent of any of his incarnations.
It was here that we saw him poison a man in the episode “The Two Doctors,” lure others into a trap involving toxic jungle vines and shove some poor slob into an acid pool as he did in “Vengeance on Varos.” Such symptoms of violence were a cut above the average making it a departure from being a children’s show.
I’m not sure why the few still call the series a children’s show when it clearly isn’t. And they leave behind rather adolescent remarks suggesting that I should grow up. It is almost as if they are trying to bully me on the youtube website. It isn’t working out very well for them. They keep suggesting that I should leave Doctor Who behind in the past. Why is that? Why would I want to do that?
These are the same people who probably spend all their time on the weekends watching sports. Such games like football, soccer and baseball… isn’t that all children's games you played when younger? If this is true, then perhaps these people should leave behind their adolescent interests of sports. These are all games which are enjoyed by teenagers and youngsters. For them to say that I should leave behind Doctor Who and grow up is both wrong and insulting. These jokers will need to abandon their childish interests of sports if they’re going to say the same thing about a science fiction show.
There is always violence everywhere. But Doctor Who does remain very responsible in portraying the violence as an evil thing. The title hero of the series does abhor violence to a great degree unless it’s as a last resort. Even then, he doesn’t like it. The Doctor Who series does use violence to portray the ugliness of life and often the wrongdoing of people against others. Which makes it a very good moral play for the series both old and new. And the Doctor Who series teaches about the ethics of violence. Therefore, if anything, making the Doctor Who series not a children’s show.
And Doctor Who is a good education tool for portraying violence. You may recall Tom Baker saying in the episode the classic episode “Robots of Death” before leaving the safe comforts of his time traveling police box, “If they see you’re not carrying any weapons, they’ll never hurt you… nine times out of ten.”
Violence remains a huge part of the Doctor Who saga.
posted by K.M. Paters at 12:35 PM
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