Monster of the Day #12

Updated on April 22, 2010 By Ken Begg 31 Comments

This one’s pretty obscure.  I’ve only seen this beastie in action one time, and that was briefly.  I’d like to see more of them, but apparently that’s all but impossible.  Boooo!  This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had a time machine.  (Yes, that’s the sort of reason why I want one.  Pretty sad, eh?)

Anyway, kudos to whoever can identify it.

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  • my first ever comment here! and it’s a yeti from, i think, “the web of fear” rather than “the abominable snowman”. doctor who, patrick troughton vintage though, all the way…

  • Ericb

    The Yeti from Doctor Who?

  • Jim

    Yeah, it’s the Yeti.

    They do show up in a later special, very briefly. One of the ones with the Seventh Doctor where The Rani summons up a bunch of the Doctor’s old foes.

  • Ericb

    The ones I really wish I could see but never will are the Macra. There’s even less footage of them than there is of the Yeti.

  • GalaxyJane

    There is a surviving episode from “The Abominable Snowmen” on the Lost in Time collection. They basically rounded up all the single episodes and other bits of surviving footage from the incomplete episodes and released them as a single collection. Well worth a look for all Classic Who fans.

    I want to cry every time I think about the casual way the Beeb junked the overwhelming majority of Patrick Troughton’s stories. He has actually become one of my favorite Doctors and it’s heartbreaking how little we have to judge him by. But hope spring eternal that more things might still turn up.

  • GalaxyJane

    And, don’t forget this is the Brig’s first appearance (as Lethbridge-Stewart, he played a different character in another mostly lost William Hartnell Dalek story). I think he’s just a colonel here though.

  • Ha, no fooling you guys! The only time I saw the Yeti was in The Five Doctors, where if I remember correctly one briefly chases Sarah Jane and the Brigadier into a cave. Something like that. Anyone, that old still REALLY makes me wish I could see one of its full adventures.

  • Luke Blanchard

    For what it’s worth, audio recordings exist of all the missing episodes.

    Reportly the first episode of Web of Fear is extant, and clips cut out of later episodes by the New Zealand censors. If my memory isn’t playing me false one of these is a short sequence showing the Yeti fighting with UNIT troops.

    The BBC has a “photonovel” which tells the story of the serial using production photographs at http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/weboffear/ .

  • BeckoningChasm

    As I recall, the Yeti (briefly and not very clearly) menaces the Brigadier and Patrick Traughton in that cave. The only way you would know it was a Yeti was that the Brig yells out, “It’s a Yeti!”

    I hope Jason gets to be Monster 13.

  • The BBC released a whole series of Missing Doctor Who episodes on CD a few years back (the audio having been recorded by fans during the original runs). The only one of the bunch I owe happens to be “Web of Fear”, the second Yeti series. Very entertaining.

    I kinda wish the BBC would snag some animation studio or another and release the audios in cartoon form. Probably would cost an arm and a leg to do it right, and for little gain on their part. Still, a man can dream, right?

  • Rock Baker

    I’ll be interested to see which picture you pick when you eventually get around to Bigfoot. Since he was a movie fad in the 70s, there’s plenty of versions to pick from. My vote goes to a shot from 1968/72’s Bigfoot! One of these days, you’re going to have to review that one, Ken! I’m looking forward to reading the intro where you overview the history of Bigfoot movies. (And what a cast that one had! A movie-nut’s dream come true!)

  • Yeah, Bigfoot’s pretty spectacular. I wish somebody would release that on DVD.

  • The Beeb actually did do an animated version of the Doctor for one of the Patrick Troughton adventures – it was just for one episode though (I own it, but can’t recall which one). I thought that was a great idea, but my buddy in England says that they are unlikely to do any more. I hate them.

    Patrick Troughton’s doctor languishes in obscurity. It’s horrible and is my number one argument against publicly funded TV – it’s clear to me that if the BBC was commercial, they’d have saved everything, just like American networks did. Of course the dark side of commercial TV is that I can get the complete series of “My Favorite Martian” on dvd, but on the other hand, I don’t have to. I can buy “The Untouchables” instead.

  • fish eye no miko

    This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had a time machine.

    I see what you did there!

  • GalaxyJane

    Sandy-

    It was episodes 1 and 4 of the Patrick Trougton Cybermen story “The Invasion”. Since 4 of the 6 episodes are extant it was a pretty convenient way to bridge the gap. Frankly, although I think the idea was brilliant, I felt like it didn’t work quite as well in execution.

    Then again, I am pretty lukewarm towards all the Cosgrove-Hall animation I’ve seen in the post-Dangermouse years. At least it turned out better than their beautifully voice-acted yet nevertheless dismal Discworld adaptations.

  • Fish Eye — *wink, wink*

  • I agree the animation in The Invasion was not stellar, but if you’re thirsty, you’ll drink out of a mud puddle. .

  • BeckoningChasm

    Ericb–Actually, didn’t the Macra make a brief (and rather pointless) appearance in one of David Tennant’s stories, about some giant traffic jam?

  • GalaxyJane

    I think you left out “badly CGIed”. Otherwise agree with the description totally.

  • Ericb

    BeckoningChasm – yeah, I know but that doesn’t really count.

    Troughton is one of my favorate Doctors.

  • Joe

    “Five Plates” Hamilton has never looked more terrifying.

    Or hungry.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Patrick Troughton was a delight. “The Two Doctors” is one of my favorites, and he kept the theme when he made a pitch-plea for Maryland Public Television (back when I lived there). He asked viewers to donate, “or I’ll turn into an Angrogum and eat you!”

  • Jimmy

    The way the new series has a tendency to bring out new versions of the classic monsters/villains generally one per series maybe it’s only a matter of time before they get to the Yeti.

    It’s a shame there is so little Troughton material left but a fair few episodes from his last series (Series 6) survived with a number of complete stories intact.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Whilst trolling around YouTube, I found this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh5c5ovfSJQ&NR=1

    At three minutes in, they have the only surviving bit of “The Abominable Snowmen.”

  • Killer Meteor

    Four more episodes of this story were found in 2013 – one is still missing!

  • Are you regretting that wish now? Because the animations have been universally awful. I prefer the audio-only releases to watching the cartoons.

    Just got the new BluRay of The Faceless Ones and it is barely above the level of Clutch Cargo. Pauline Collins is so off model you’d think she was a not very convincing drag queen rather than the petite cutie we all came to love in spite of herself in Upstairs Downstairs (the real one I mean, not the awful 1940s remake).

  • It’s the finds like that that keep me hoping we will one day get The Power of the Daleks back.

  • The copy of Macra Terror sitting on my desk points to no. I also don’t regret seeing Power of the Daleks in theaters and am hoping against hope for a Dalek Master Plan.

    Never once in all my time here have I said I had any taste.

    (Eleven years! Where did the time go!)

  • All of the missing Daleks would be perfect.

  • I think it ran off and disappeared with my figure and my near vision.

  • Ken_Begg

    History indicates otherwise. American broadcasting companies did the same thing (although perhaps not quite as late as this). Especially in terms of classic radio shows like Jack Benny. They would often trash all the recordings just to free up warehouse space. But yes, definitely more of an issue in a non-profit institution. If anything, the trashing of the entire series occurring right now is just as horrible.