No! “Celestials” was an old-timey slur for Chinese people. This figure, who then pulls some clown dolls from a dollhouse and has them grow into full-sized clown footsoldiers, is revealed to be the Celestial Toymaker, an old adversary of the Doctor. Obviously, Doctor Who is 60 years old and things change and some elements that were of its time when broadcast are completely unacceptable now. The Doctor’s invisibility, it turns out, is the result of a mysterious and powerful entity dressed as a… (Controversially, there were plans to have the Doctor become visible with a completely different appearance, before it was decided that audiences would never accept the show recasting its main character.) Who is The Celestial Toymaker and What Happens in the 1966 Story?ĭetailed plot summaries of Doctor Who episodes are easy to find here on the Internet, but the high points of the story are: the Doctor is invisible following a cliffhanger at the end of the previous episode “ The Ark”, which you can still find on DVD. This handily allows Purves to talk over a plot point that revolves around the children’s rhyme “Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Moe”. Released in 1986, the book was based on the original scripts for the episode, including some material that never made it to film. To begin with, there is the novelisation by Target Books, which for years was fans’ only way of reliving old stories after they were originally broadcast. Of course, Doctor Who fans being what they are, “ The Celestial Toymaker” has not been completely expunged from existence. ![]() Of the four episodes, three are lost, with the final episode allegedly only surviving because its title “The Final Test” led to it being filed with Cricket footage by an Australian broadcaster. One such story was “The Celestial Toymaker”, the serial in which Neil Patrick Harris’s character originates. Of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s 253 episodes of Doctor Who filmed during the show’s original run, 106 were lost or recorded over in this way, and even today 97 episodes are still missing, although the search continues. ![]() The tapes were recorded over and lost forever. So, much like a modern-day streaming service in search of a tax break, the BBC ditched them. Repeats were uncommon, the home video market was non-existent, and recordings of old episodes of a children’s TV programme were mainly just taking up space. While these days we assume high-definition recordings of all episodes of Doctor Who are immediately stored in a lead-lined, underground vault not dissimilar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the BBC was not always so precious with its recordings. Even Russell T Davies, if he has seen the story that originated the character, did so when he was two years old. “The Toymaker” is a villain from the First Doctor (William Hartnell)-era story, “The Celestial Toymaker”, broadcast in 1966.
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