Collecting Who

Expecting the blu-ray set for Sylvester McCoy's* third season to arrive by the end of next month or so, which is already wonderfully exciting, only to hear that Tom Baker's truly excellent third season will be the next release from The Collection in a few months' time.

I've been hoping against hope that we will finally get a season of one of the first two Doctors this year as well, tho' reconstructions and animations of lost and fragmentary episodes makes this hope quixotic I know. (If I may be permitted a suggestion, splitting the seasons in half to bring the episode counts of the first seasons in line with later seasons would also happen to make timely releases of some intact episode runs available profitably enough to speed up the necessary reconstructions as well, seems to me, even if I don't exactly like to encourage the BBC to make me spend even more money on goddamn Doctor Who than I already idiotically do). I fear I'll need cheering up after this upcoming November, and a Hartnell season on blu-ray would really do the trick (say An Unearthly Child through Marco Polo or The Keys of Marinus through The Reign of Terror or Planet of Giants through The Web Planet or The Crusade through The Time Meddler; any of these Hartnell half-seasons would be AMAZING to have on blu-ray and seem comparatively doable, I'll leave the possible Troughton half-seasons for you to puzzle out yourselves, I'd settle personally for an anthology of the episodes in which Jaime and Troughton flirt as palpably as Adam West and Bert Ward did in classic Batman, base under siege indeed). If we really do get another Classic season before year's end, however, I'm guessing it's likely to be another Pertwee production, and that would also suit me just fine (Pertwee's a political low point in the show for me in many ways but is also among the most compulsively entertaining run of episodes, and is visually stunning from the opening title sequence -- my favorite in the whole history of the program -- to the hot pop and psychedelia and spy-fi nonsense forever fluttering in the background). Here's the trailer for the Tom Baker installment soon on the way...

* So, my favorite Doctors of the Classic era happen to be McCoy, Baker, and Hartnell, in that order, yep, and thanks for asking -- and, ah, hell, sure, why not, Eccleston, Capaldi, and Whitaker are my favorite New Whos, in that order, not sorry about it at all.