Sep 11
So, one of my good friends is getting married tomorrow and he has even got me to wear a kilt. As some sort of strange wedding present I decided to include these covers I discovered in the depths of a charity shop. They break our rules due to being a franchise but hey, they are still fantastic.
Graeme, I hope you have a fantastic day, and I hope everyone else enjoys these Doctor Who covers. It’s not my favourite doctor *coughs* John Pertwee *coughs* but they are just brilliant!
Click for full image
Click for full image
Click for full image
Click for full image
(Average: 8.25 out of 10)
Loading...
Lastest Tweet
September 11th, 2009 at 11:23 am
They’re all pretty amazing… they’re all so… 70’s…
I’ve never been a huge fan of Dr Who, though i think i’ve seen most of the older ones.
The Planet of Evil cover is my favourite, does anyone know if the pointy tooth guys head is really meant to be that huge? Compared to the plants it must be 4-5m tall. The expression on The Doctor is priceless too.
Congrats to Graeme! Good Show Sir!
( Is you wearing the kilt got anything to do with the wedding, or is that an unrelated matter?)
September 11th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Oh I do love the classic Who! 🙂 The new stuff just gives us such great lines as:
Someone on TV: “There’s only one weapon against the master.”
CSA: “God, bet it turns out to be love.”
SI: “hahahahaa. No but surely not that’s just cheesy.”
Someone on TV: “It’s love.”
SI: ……
CSA: ……
And yes, I am an usher! 😀 And doing some sort of reading. Unfortunately just some poem and not my choice, an excerpt of RX for Chaos! 😉
September 11th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Finally my having watched every Doctor Who episode comes in useful. All of these covers massively misrepresent the episodes in question. The giant head with pointy teeth was not a 5m tall monster, but a human-sized monster with fake teeth and a wig. The other three books all star the Jon Pertwee doctor. The Doomsday Weapon cover bears little relation to the Colony in Space episode it’s based on, the Day of the Daleks was set on Earth and contained no alien planets or spaceships, and the Invasion of the Dinosaurs only contains a few solitary dinosaurs rather than the hordes shown on the cover, and in the TV show were the most fake looking dinosaurs ever recorded.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Good job Chris! I knew there was someithing wrond with the 5m tall dude.
I remember watching the Day of the Daleks series with my dad when i was really young. I vaguely remember being scared by them.
SI: that was one of my proudest TV predictions, made better by the fact i was only half serious.
In some ways some of the really bad 70’s covers you could get away with having now. The whole “retro” look etc. I think maybe 1/3 people who saw you reading that on a train might even think its cool.
Surely in the Dr Who case they are selling the books based on the success of the TV series… so why didnt they just use a still picture from the series on the cover? seems strange
September 11th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I do appologise Chris! I didn’t realise the other ones were the Pertwee! I guess I just assumed they were all Baker.
Come to think of it… I do have a strange memory of that terrible dinosaurs. I’m not old enough to remember when they were first on TV but they used to show all the old ones on BBC2 at dinner time. But I still knew terrible effects when I saw them!
Do I dare start a Who conversation? Chris, favourite episode + Doctor etc?
September 11th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I have to say I’m not a Docter Who person but the Doomsday Weapon is my fav. Love the crazy heads within crazyheads with random naked man.
What more could a girl want!?
PS. good luck with the poetry reading and the kilt!
September 13th, 2009 at 2:56 am
My favourite Doctor: Tom Baker
My favourite stories: City of Death, Human Nature
September 18th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
What the hell is that Day of the Daleks cover about? There was no spaceship or huge firey planet in that story, just three Daleks wobbling along a canal towpath with the operators’ feet showing. I am guessing the gorrilla is supposed to be an Ogron but even that doesn’t even look like one.
Reminds me of those old 1930s and 40s serials such as Batman and Flash Gordon where the posters were big, bold and busy and promised much more action than they actually delivered.
September 18th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Welcome to the site, Jon, a pleasure to have you here!
Your comments are putting me in danger of kicking off the weekend with a rendition of the original 1960’s Batman movie in full shark-punching glory…
September 19th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
thanks Justin, followed a link here from twitter – had a lot of fun checking out these great covers!
And the original Batman movie is a great way to start the weekend! 😉
Jon
September 19th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Well, I guess they had to get people to spend £2 somehow 🙂
Orginal batman movie? Is that the one where they turn all the world leaders into dust? Doesn’t it also have batman punching a shark! I wish I’d started my weekend with that!!!!
October 27th, 2011 at 10:01 am
“Surely in the Dr Who case they are selling the books based on the success of the TV series… so why didnt they just use a still picture from the series on the cover? seems strange”
In the 80’s, they finally figured that out, but they were still awful. “Hey take a still of a monster, cut out the background and slap it on the book. No, it doesn’t have to be the monster in the story!” Sometimes they would also put a still of the Doctor on the cover as well, from some completely different scene with the background cut out. Then they would make the background color something totally hideous, like varying shades of Puce. They were ridiculous.
The only thing worse were the “Americanized” editions my friends and I occasionally found. Someone, somewhere, had decided that we Yanks just couldn’t understand a British book, so they had been edited to Americanize the punctuation and spelling of several words. Like we couldn’t figure out that “tyre” was the same as “tire”? Sheesh, we are not idiots. And then they had to have a forward in them written by Harlan Ellison (it wasn’t good), and they blazoned this fact across the covers in Big Letters so we would know what great company we fans were in.
August 24th, 2013 at 6:27 pm
‘They want to see the devil’s dumplings.’
‘The devil’s dumplings? Who?’
‘Exactly!’
I realize that I’ve earned the enmity of half the commentators on the site. Well, I am what I am.
August 25th, 2013 at 8:24 pm
I can at last comment from a position of unassailable authority on something. The Conan-style chap on the cover of ‘Doomsday Weapon” appears to be a reference to a line in the novelisation where Norton, the evil mining corporation’s plant, reminisces about school plays and holding a spear, as opposed to his detailed in-character improv to get the colonists to flee in terror. Sadly, in the original he was played by the guy who did the voices for Zippy and George.
The Yank reprints don’t just change ‘tyre’ and make jelly babies turn into jelly beans – they rewrite history to make Tom Baker the star of Jon Pertwee stories.
July 18th, 2014 at 2:07 pm
I think that 3 of the covers shown may have been for markets other than the UK – I used to collect the Target novelisations and, except for Planet of Evil there – none of my copies matched those above. IIRC, Chris Achilleos painted covers for the Target editions that were more appropriate to the story and incarnation of the Doctor (Jon Pertwee, in each case).
January 21st, 2017 at 10:42 pm
The non-Target ones are marked in USD and the hideous font looks vaguely familiar, though I’d have to check my BFFs collection. We tried to get the Target (which causes a snicker here, being the name of a large department store chain) versions.
It’s not like putting high-budget covers on them helped; we had even more of a laugh at the cheap sets and bad effects over here, being used to higher budget shows. (The years Troughton was piping about in black and white, we were getting Shatner swaggering in full color) And the switch between video and film was always worth a giggle, American dramas being all film regardless of indoors or out.
Still, if they’d used the actual scenes, no one who lived in a town where they didn’t show it would have purchased the books, so it was probably a good idea from a publisher standpoint.
Even Americans were suspicious of the revival. “It’s got a budget. Not sure that’s proper.” It has led to record popularity, though — the fact that the sets don’t wobble and the foreign planet isn’t always a quarry makes it easier to introduce to new viewers. Even though it’s on a pay channel instead of free now.
But as someone who used to have to wait a year or more for the episodes to make their way across the pond, getting them on the same day is a joy!