The Abominable Snowmen-BFI London Southbank Report

After 16 years of missing episodes from classic Doctor Who seasons one to six receiving the animation treatment the news that the BBC had cancelled the animation project, due to an apparent withdrawal of funding by BBC America, I’m sure disappointed many people. Animations really don’t replace live-action episodes but can provide an alternative option to discovering the early classics. The project also creates accessibility to missing stories for a wider audience who haven’t had the time or interest to view existing material as a telesnap reconstruction.

To mark the last animation release for the moment the BFI (British Film Institute) at London Southbank ran a screening of The Abominable Snowmen on the 3rd of September. The new animation of this 6 -part serial is taken from Troughton’s second season where I feel Patrick Troughton has become really comfortable as the Doctor. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric story within this “monster-led” season with the classic team of Troughton’s Doctor, Jamie and Victoria.

Hosts Justin Johnson (Lead Programmer for BFI) and Dick Fiddy (BFI Archive Television Programmer) opened the event to an almost full auditorium. There is such a familiarity now to this double act they present with Dick Fiddy as the straight man and Justin Johnson as the comedic one which really helps to welcome everyone there to have a good time. Besides doing the traditional quiz with some prize giveaways (quick thinking and answering is a must to attempt to win!)  with much bonhomie and good cheer Dick Fiddy shared his personal memories of watching The Abominable Snowmen on the original transmission. How the Yetis seemed quite “cuddly” and probably were scarier in their next story being set in the underground The Web of Fear.

Before the episodes aired there was also a moment to acknowledge the recent death of Bernard Cribbens. Justin Johnson shared a couple of anecdotes from his time as part of the BAFTA children’s committee about Bernard and how they kept in touch after Bernard received the BAFTA Special Award at the 2009 Children’s Awards.  Both hosts acknowledged the warmth and jolliness of Bernard Cribbens as the audience shared a rose of applause.

Composer Interview with Jess Jurkovic

One of the pleasures of these BFI events is you get surprise guests that you wouldn’t normally hear from. Jess Jurkovic is a United States composer and a jazz pianist who discovered Doctor Who at the age of eight and is the creator and curator of the Dudley Simpson IS Doctor Who Project on his  You tube channel. When Dudley Simpson died in 2017 Jess realised how much his music meant to him personally. Jess then decided to try as a curiosity to transcribe Dudley’s score for the Master for piano by ear and put the notes onto sheet music. It soon became a larger project where over forty-one separate scores were recorded.

These were not only recording clips but assembling the music together. The BFI kindly placed a piano in the auditorium, so Jess played some of the incidental music from The Abominable Snowmen.  For anyone interested in hearing more from Jess Jurkovic there is an excellent recent podcast on Spotify from Canadian Doctor Who podcasters Radio Free Skaro where he analyses the music from Doctor Who composer Carey Blyton

Documentary interview with Chris Chapman

Chris Chapman who creates the documentaries as part of the special features for the Blu rays has filmed a new documentary as a special feature. It is called Troughton in Tibet and at the screening, they showed approx. 6 minutes of the 40-minute documentary featuring Frazer Hines being interviewed by Toby Hadoke. Chris explained he had pitched for doing the behind-the-scenes documentary straightaway to Gary Russell for this story which meant going back to Tibet (…well it was really Snowdonia in Wales). As Chris said he has greatly enjoyed doing the additional documentaries due to the animations project.

What comes across is he has a real love for his work and relished going to Wales again. It’s a point in the 2^nd Doctor’s era where he felt there is more of an attempt to bring more realism to the location work on Doctor Who and the location is really stunning. Regarding the story itself, he felt very excited watching the animation and enjoying the “slow burn” of the story. He especially liked the look of the mountains created by Gary Russell’s team,

There are eight new interviews for the documentary. One of his interviewees was actor John Hogan, who was one of the last of the Yetis. He sadly passed away in January. Chris mentioned that was unaware of it until just before this event but wanted the audience to imagine the documentary was in memory of him.

Animation Team Interview with Garry Russell (Executive Producer), Rob Ritchie, and Ioan Morris (Animators)

Gary Russell has been credited for this production and revealed that he directed the animation for The Abominable Snowmen which took fifteen months to complete. This timescale he explained for an animation feature was pretty fast. It is the final animation for the team for the time being, but it is something that Gary Russell sees as a cyclical decision so could possibly return as a project at some point. He revealed that The Abominable Snowmen was proposed as a project whilst they were working on Fury from the Deep (released 2019). There was already an agreement to animate episode 3 of The Web of Fear but then it was requested if he could animate Galaxy 4 also, so Gary became very busy at one time on all four projects.

Describing how he felt watching the serial on a large screen with an audience Gary said was a mixed experience. On the one hand, he observed each episode with a critical eye noting what seemed to be technical errors and mistakes made during the animation process production. He did not notice these before due to the nature of animation which is created in second or minute clips. But Garry then took great delight in hearing tickled laughter from the audience, with a sequence added at his request towards the end of the story, of a Yeti falling in a crevasse. Poor Yeti! But he had insisted he wanted it as in Galaxy 4 there was a sequence of a Chumbley falling into a fissure at the story climax when the planet explodes (sorry spoilers!).

Garry Russell praised the dialogue of The Abominable Snowmen and cited his favourite humorous scene for this particularly strong Tardis team as when Jamie approaches the Doctor with an idea to capture a Yeti. The Doctor grabs Victoria’s hand and quickly pulls away exclaiming in mock panic “Jamie has an idea!”

There was a discussion on the design. Rob Ritchie has worked on a few animation projects being part of the second team at BBC Studios headed by Animation director Anne Marie Walsh. Rob Ritchie’s last big project was Evil of the Daleks and for this project, he created the Tardis look. Ioan Morris, the other animator, described some of the first draft character design work he did with Gary Russell.

Looking at the existing episode 2 they felt the dress of the llamas is quite plain so for the animation they looked for inspiration from a third Doctor story Planet of the Spiders. They took the look of the deputy abbot, Cho-Je and the abbot K’anpo and created a burgundy-style uniform.

The animation team for The Abominable Snowmen Digitoonz are India based and reused the same designs for Victoria, Jamie and the 2^nd Doctor from Fury from the Deep. The India team faithfully re-drew Ioan Morris’s background designs of the skies with stars. Gary Russell also created a script for animation detailing what happens in each scene. One of the longest scenes was when Victoria pretends to faint to escape her cells and is a continuous shot scene of over one minute.

There was an acknowledgement that animation and live action are different mediums and that to replicate live action is a futile endeavour because live action involves human movement and tone, facial expressions and body language. One of the biggest challenges Gary Russell explained is how the story has lots of silences, people walking etc and how tough that could be to be animated. He joked about the scenes of Wolfe Morris as abbot Padmasambhava who speaks distinctively very slowly compared to everyone else.

There were creative decisions with the animation which differ from the live episode: scenes such as showing Padmasambhava as a young man at one point where he encountered the Great Intelligence on the astral plane. This included a subtle nod with some sound layering from composer Mark Ayres using the soundtrack from Web of Fear. Another decision Gary took due to his love of DC comics was the animated look of Padmasambhava as a skeletal “floating cadaver”.

An interesting discussion came from the question and answer from the audience regarding the representation of ethnicity within the serial.

“It’s actually my only real bugbear about Gerald Blake’s directing: what was he thinking? Why did he cast white people to play Asian characters?

Garry Russell

It is something that has been highlighted in other stories such as The Talons of Weng Chiang in the use of white actors to represent East Asian actors. Garry Russell doesn’t believe there weren’t the appropriate actors available in the late 1960s to play the numerous monks. It’s a spurious argument and something he felt very keenly he needed to correct. Researching actual Tibetan monks of the time the animation reflects the Chinese, Korean, Pakistani and Tibetan heritage of the geographical area.

The event finished with rapturous applause for all the guests. It was announced there will be a screening of The Time Meddler at BFI on the 29th of October as part of the Doctor Who The Collection Season 2 Limited Edition starring William Hartnell release.

Doctor Who The Abominable Snowmen was released on DVD, Blu-ray and an exclusive Steel book on the 5th of September. The three-disc release gives fans the opportunity to enjoy the following

• Episodes 1-6 (Animated Black & White)
• Episodes 1-6 (Animated Colour)
• Restored Surviving Original Episode 2
• Photographic Reconstructions of Episodes 1, 3, 4, 5 & 6
• Making-of Documentary
• Audio Commentaries
• 8mm Home Movie Footage
• Archive interview with writer Mervyn Haisman
• Photo Gallery
• Teaser Trailer
• PDF ROM Content

Did you see the original transmission? Post your thoughts here, on the Big Blue Box Podcast Discord Server or on Twitter. Let’s talk.