LONDON (AP) — Over six decades of “Doctor Who,” the intergalactic adventurer’s adversaries have included evil robots, rampaging Yeti — and the BBC, which erased many early episodes of the now-iconic sci-fi TV series.
A film charity announced Friday that it has found two previously lost 1960s episodes in film cans wrapped in plastic bags among the possessions of a deceased collector. They have been restored by BBC archivists and will be available next month on the broadcaster’s streaming service.
The discovery leaves 95 episodes still missing from the adventures of a galaxy-hopping alien known as the Doctor that debuted in 1963.
I wonder how many of the remaining 95 missing episodes even still exist at all. It’s amazing to find them so long after they were created and destroyed, I just wonder if it’s even possible to finish out the collection. 95 is a lot to maybe find one or two at a time, when the search is global.
Apparently there were 4-6 more episodes found recently, but so far there’s no plan when they will be released.
Hard to tell, really. It sounds like the people who have copies aren’t even aware of it, so they may still exist somewhere waiting to be discovered in an estate sale or something.
If it was a bit later in time, we might have had someone like Marion Stokes with at least VHS copies of the broadcasts.