Spiral Muttering 7: Marketing the Doctor

When you have followed the exploits of everyone's favourite Timelord as avidly, and for as long as I have, you dream of the day when, in the company of like-minded folk, you can stand and display your complete collection of Dr Who videos, Target novelisations, New Adventures, Big Finish Audios, BBC Novels, and DVD's.

However, amongst the stalwart legions of media folk who bring us these tasty morsels of adventure in the fourth dimension, there are a few "bad eggs". They are to your Doctor Who collection what Borusa was to the Presidency, Davros to the Kaled race, Kelman to the Nerva Beacon. They seek to destroy from within, that which you hold most dear. They could have their own Dr Who adventure - Dr Who and the Marketing Men.

You see, the problem is if you look at a Star Trek fans video collection, all the spines for the Classic series are the same. So are their Next Generation spines. And DS9. And so on....but no such luxury exists for we Whovians. And its a malaise that has affected us for decades.

Target were the first culprits. They started us off with reprints of the early sixties novelisations, with a bold logo in the William Hartnell style.
As a set of three, divorced from the rest of the range, they look quite a nice set. These 3 classics were published in 1973. But by 1974 the rot had set in. The first three were published in January, the 4th in March, and the Sea Devils in August...each with markedly different designs. already, the Dr Who fan's book collection was suffering an identity crisis.

The following year saw a greater descent into madness. Different coloured spines, and full cover illustrations meant the books had a different feel yet again.

By 1976, the logo had at least settled down, keeping the banner from the "Diamond logo". The spines still varied in colour, though. Things carried on in this vein until 1981, when lo and behold - the logo changed again. Now, I could understand having each Doctor's respective logo on the novelisations of their era, but this was not the case.

I guess it could be argued that such a technique kept the range recognisable with the current TV logo, but wouldn't it be nicer to have a fixed design, to facilitate a nice set of novels?

I thought that just such a happy concept had occurred to Target, now part of Virgin, in the early 90's when their reprint range hit the shelves. Sharing their covers with the corresponding BBC Video release, this looked like it was going to be a really nice, complete looking set of novels. Until....


Yep, you guessed - the novelisations of Seasons 25 and 26 failed to bear the new style.

And Virgin/Target aren't the only culprits. What about BBC Video? At least 3 designs have been used for those. The Virgin New Adventures underwent a revamp at the 50th novel. The BBC Novels have changed once. And even the relatively infant DVD range has a "Five Doctors" that sticks out like a sore thumb. Big Finish have also made changes, albeit slight, to their rang of Audio sleeves. Only the Missing adventures have remained free of this malaise, and as things stand, its one of the few that I have complete....

Maybe this is just a personal gripe, but there you go. There are armies of fans out there who produce replacement covers for DVD/Video sleeves, just so they can all look like they belong to one series. Check out these links for just a few of them....

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Quadrant/4626/
http://members.fortunecity.com/masomika/covers/jpcovers/jdvd.html

Of course, now that the series is back on TV, the BBC have appointed a "Brand Manager" to ensure all licensed merchandise is consistent. Oddly, it now feels slightly wrong....Also, I'm slightly peeved that DWM had a similar article in a recent issue - albeit a thinly veiled attack on the old World Distributors annuals. Don't get me STARTED on those....