Cheap Doctor Who - Robot (Episode 75) (DVD) Price

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Customer Reviews of Doctor Who - Robot (Episode 75)

Revenge of the Geeks
Tom Baker held the role of Doctor Who for 7 years and set his mark clearly on the program. "Robot" is his first adventure having taken over form the late Jon Pertee. Often an actor needs a little time to grow into the part and the first adventure is often lightly wirtten to give him a feel for it but Baker grabs on to the character from almost the first word and shines. <
> Dialogue and delivery are excellent and the sense of timing is such you easily believe he's been happily doing this for centuries. <
> Unfortunately the plot suffers as a little simplistic, scientists feel they can do a better job of running the world and plan to take over using a near indestructable robot. This is also an episode when you see UNIT put out a good number of combat troops instead of just the few principals and a driver. <
> While the robot is pretty standard Dr Who special effects- tall man in an ugly tin suit, the other notable FX are amazingly bad even by the standards of Dr Who. Sarah Jane being picked up is clearly a Barbie Doll and at one point the army brings up a tank to attack the robot. Instead of using stock army footage as they commonly did, an "Action Man" (the British G.I. Joe) tank is superimposed on the film. <
> Good sci-fi asked you to suspend disbelief, but this tank is like hanging a blue whale from dental floss with much the same effect. it crashes to the ground and takes the entire productino with it for several minutes. <
> If you're a Whovian, this is a good solid piece for your collection. If you're experimenting with the older shows having seen the newer ones on Sci-fi channel, This is good but you definately will see how the f/x have improved.

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Hannibal. No. Alexander the Great?
I cannot objectively review "Robot", because every line of dialogue from Part One has been burned into my memory since I was 11 years old. I came down with the flu one Tuesday morning in January the night after this story first aired on my PBS affiliate (following the much grimmer "Caves of Androzani"). Home sick from school, I watched the episode four consecutive times. Even now, 22 and a half years later, Tom Baker's clowning around in the opening minutes never fails to make me smile. <
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>"Robot" has always been regarded as a lightweight story, for several reasons. First, there's the context. It's a UNIT story sandwiched in between between several post-UNIT Jon Pertwee stories and the gothic horror that followed from producer Phillip Hinchcliffe. Coming behind "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" and "Planet of the Spiders", it's got a much higher comedy quotient that earlier and later stories didn't attempt. On the other side of "Robot" came a dozen classics running from "The Ark In Space" all the way down to "Horror of Fang Rock", all of which make this story look like an episode of the Teletubbies aired against the movie "28 Days Later...". <
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>What also harms "Robot" is what's right up there on screen. Producer Barry Letts, in his final outing as producer, had the sense to videotape this entire story so that the inevitable chromakey woes that dogged "Dinosaurs" wouldn't sink the giant robot. Unfortunately, it didn't work. The robot costume is huge and wobbly, and videotape chromakey doesn't look any better than film chromakey. The robot's ankles disappear as it grows large. A toy tank placed in the foreground for context, looks exactly like a toy tank. Barry would have loved the CGI revolution that allowed for much better results in all-chromakey stories like this past season's "Gridlock". Unfortunately, he retired 25 years too early. "Robot" looks badly dated and no DVD restoration can save that. <
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>So what's right about "Robot"? Just about everything else. Tom Baker is a breath of fresh air in this story and would remain so for years. He hits every mood except dark and foreboding, and that's just in the first 15 minutes. Physical comedy bits such as the costume changes and the jump-rope skipping and the legs up on the desk bit have aged pretty well. Of course it helps that there's a solid supporting cast in Nicholas Courtney, Lis Sladen and Ian Marter. <
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>The story is not deep, but Terrance Dicks writes it tightly. He's always been a good storyteller, even when writing derivative fifth-generation sequels for the BBC "Doctor Who" books a few years ago. "Robot" comes from his prime. Here we have absent-minded professors, fascist scientists and a tortured robot with a crush on a journalist, and Terrance writes it as if it were "Casablanca". And, for the reocrd, Terrance actually did write "Casablanca" 20 years later, for the BBC books. It's a book called "Casastrophea", which features the third Doctor, the Draconians, and Humphrey Bogart. <
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>The DVD presentation of "Robot" is solid. The commentary booth is quite crowded, with Baker, Sladen, Letts and Dicks talking over each other for all four episodes. The reminiscences come pretty fast, faster than even the strictly-average text commentary (from Richard Molesworth this time) can keep up. The 38-minute making-of documentary repeats a lot of ground from both the audio and text commentaries; the shorter featurette on the history of "Doctor Who" opening titles is more likly to stay with you the next morning. <
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>The easiest comparison to draw is between "Robot" and "Rose", which opened the new "Doctor Who" series in 2005. It's a fast, light-hearted premiere with little to recommend it after the technically far superior next episode ("The Ark In Space", "The End of the World")... except that it's funny and not too long, and that first impression of Baker, or of Eccleston, is charming enough to last a long time and to forgive a lot of missteps later on. Mind you, I think the nose is a definite improvement.

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"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes."
Among hundreds of fine "Doctor Who" storylines spanning decades, "Robot" will always hold a special place in my heart. Discovering this show as a younger teenager and remaining an avid fan throughout the days of my youth, I watched again and again as the saga of the Doctor started right here with an earthbound adventure involving a ruthlessly manipulated and rather tragic robot almost straight out of the novels of Asimov I was then reading. On and on the tales would unfold over the weeks as the Doctor faced other perhaps more exotic foes, finally defending his homeworld from a Sontaran takeover, and then it all started back again with "Robot"--but then kept going this time further on past "the Invasion of Time" until the fourth Doctor's curtain call in "Logopolis" and then sure enough "Robot" again. Third time around my local PBS station had enlarged upon its licenses and so continued on past "Logopolis" with the fifth and sixth Doctors and then all the way back to the third (and then came "Robot" yet again, this time in a new light and context), and my knowledge as a dedicated fan had likewise expanded and so I gradually became aware of my favorite show's pre-1974 history. But for the longest time Tom Baker was THE doctor and it all started here with "Robot"--and for an even longer time it was if nothing else the originary point of "Doctor Who" as I knew it. <
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>So it's almost futile to evaluate this story in the cold withering light of adult reason. Watching it just brings out the kid in me. Okay, it's not perfect, I admit. It follows the traces of some of its influences a wee bit too closely while underexploiting its one rather original idea, a scientific society bent on forcibly ordering our lives according to their ideals of reason, something along the lines of Plato's philosopher kings from "The Republic" but brought up to the Cold War present of the story. Upon reflection, too, their actions throughout the plotline don't quite make good sense: using a robot, the very pinnacle of human technological development, to steal the schematics and parts to make a disintegrator gun (instead of just using their scientific know-how to make their own) and then using this gun merely to crack open a safe and steal the computer codes for the world's nukes (couldn't they just hack into the world's defense systems a la "Wargames"?): Each segment of their plan is implausibly a major case of overkill as well as a showcase of inefficiency. Besides that, "Robot" has the distinguished honor of including not one but two of the most pitifully unconvincing special effects in Doctor Who history (and as any dedicated fan'll know, that's saying a lot), in both cases to realize scenes that ultimately could've been excised from the plot without harming it, too. And so on and so forth. <
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>But you know what? Nyah nyah, so what! I'm giving it five stars anyway, so there! Which isn't completely arbitrary, after all, it must be said. "Robot" also has a lot of very good strong points. It's a well-paced, solid science fiction adventure in many ways, with moments of real suspense and any number of clever touches: the first-person perspective as you witness the robot's crimes through his own eyes/monitors/whatnot are particularly effective, and this eponymous robot is very memorable as a tortured and vulnerable soul in a metallic frame too powerful for its own good. His relationship with the Doctor's companion Sarah Jane is moving and handled just about right throughout, the pathos lingering in your mind long after the DVD is back in its case. Many of the supporting cast members are quite memorable as well, especially the robot's inventor, Professor Kettlewell, a character who seems to have walked straight out of the math & science department of any university I've ever known of. <
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>Most memorable of all though is of course Tom Baker as the Doctor. As John Liosatos has so perceptively pointed out in another review here, "Robot" is very much a story in the style and mood of Baker's predecessor, a transition of sorts. And yet it's disarming--almost eerie--how very much Tom Baker's take on the character of the fourth Doctor bursts forth in full form, in all its wacky and eccentric glory, right here even in the first of the story's four episodes. Some actors take a while to ease into this role, some longer than others, and we always let them off the hook in this regard if their characters aren't so well defined at first. But the very first scene you see the fourth Doctor conscious, it's already undeniably him and no other. And quite simply, he's superb, and it's easy to see why he was voted most popular Doctor year after year, ceding that honor only recently to the Doctor's current tenth incarnation fresher in the memories of the show's newfound fans. Well, since my early days when he was the ONLY Doctor a lot has changed, I've seen nine other fine actors play the role before and after in their own magnificent fashions and I've thought highly of them all, and yet when it comes right down to it I have to admit that in this household anyway the crazy one with the trademark scarf whom my Dad used to call "Harpo Marx in Space" is still tops--and "Robot" still marks his illustrious entrance.