I suppose if I’m going to review fan films, there’s no way to really cover the ground without acknowledging Ian Levine’s bizarre hidden mountain of work.

Now many of you might be familiar with Ian Levine. For those who aren’t, I’m probably doing you no favour by talking about him.

Ian Levine is one of these people who are best appreciated from a great distance – temporal, social, physical. Sadly, all too often, getting up close can be a profoundly unpleasant experience. Levine was possessed of a tempestuous personality which on occasion tended to run away with him and lead to him saying or doing unpleasant and possibly unforgiveable things. People are inclined to violently dislike him, and I gather they might have a point.

But like it or not, he’s an essential  part of Who history.  In 1978 he was instrumental in salvaging or helping to salvage as many as 79 of the Hartnell and Troughton serials at a critical point, and saving them from destruction, and for years lead searches or helped negotiate the recovery of as many as 19 more lost episodes. He was an unofficial continuity advisor for the series in the early 80’s, though he went on to have a major falling out with John Nathan-Turner. He’s unofficially credited with the story/plot for the Colin Baker serial Attack of the Cybermen. He did the music for the K9 and Company pilot, and he helped to produce and did the sound mix for Downtime. As late as 2013 he informally competed with Philip Morris in a search for lost episodes – Morris struck gold in Africa, Levine actually discovered as many as ten episodes in Taiwan, but they were already existing.

He suffered a stroke in 2014, at the age of 61, which has left him with paralysed on his left side, with limited ability to speak or write. I think for that alone, whatever his sins and outrages, he’s deserving a certain amount of compassion.

So what are we talking about here? Well, somewhere along the line, probably after 1989, Levine got the bug to do his own Doctor Who. The results were twelve fan films, and what fan films they were – new editions of Shada and Downtime, lost episodes like Mission to the Unknown recreated, productions of unmade serials like Gallifrey or Yellow Fever and How to Cure It or the fabled Dark Dimension. And what casts – Sylvester McCoy appeared a couple of times, Lalla Ward, Carole Ann Ford, Frazier Hines, William Russel have all shown up in person or on voice.

Even if it was all complete tosh, it would be an amazing body of work – several hours worth of material across twelve productions, with some very impressive creative talent It speaks, I think, to Levine’s deep pockets that he was able to do it, able to hire or recruit the cast members that he did, hire the animation, do the production. Maybe he got other people to volunteer money, maybe he did it all himself.

Regardless, it’s a remarkable and incredibly expensive collection. Even if Levine is rich, well, a professional television season is millions of dollars. I don’t think Levine had or put in close to that, so shouldn’t expect to get professional quality. If you’re lucky, you might get some interesting stuff – the possibility of precocious or even brilliant amateur work.

Now, the thing is, it’s not released. It’s hidden away. Levine did all this stuff for his own and perhaps for his friends enjoyment. Perhaps for the fun of doing it.

There’s talk that he’s offered some of this to the BBC. That seems to be the recurring word, particularly with his version of Shada. But if he has, that speaks to a profound and abyssal ignorance of how the video and television business works. It just doesn’t work that way. The BBC doesn’t accept unsolicited fan videos, particularly of products that it owns the copyrights to anyway.

Hell, if it did, I’d be waiting in line for the Rupert Booth and Barbara Benedetti DVD releases with high end post-production clean up and all the wonderful extras.

So there’s this huge body of work, and it’s inaccessible. Or mostly inaccessible. Why bother talking about it?

Well, a few bits of peaked out. Apparently, Levine’s reconstruction of Shada can be found online, or it used to be found online, for those who looked hard enough. And then there’s Mission to the Unknown, which was also released or temporarily available.

Then there’s a fifty minute compilation that Levine himself released to Youtube, containing excerpts, mostly three or four minutes apiece, of his various projects.

Who knows, maybe eventually, it’ll all show up on the net, after all, everything else is.

So what can we say about it? Generally, looking over the body of work from what we know of it, it’s all over the map.

On the whole, my feeling is that Levine is not a Director. When it’s live action stuff, the staging and shots are stiff and awkward, the performances seem talky and rather sterile. Too much of it seems to be people standing around stiffly, exchanging expositional dialogue, and that’s pretty tough going.

There’s several different styles and approaches to animation, there’s live action stuff with greenscreen, there’s things that look like telesnap reconstructions. The sheer diversity of visual styles and approaches makes it hard to assess.

Worse, because they’re all compiled together, they tend to run into each other, making a whole much less than the individual parts. Indeed, after sitting through fifty minutes, the dominant impression is exhaustion. I think he’d have done better to release them as a series of trailers, so they could each be appreciated on their own, without the accumulating fatigue factor.

Shada

Shada, of course, is the infamous ‘lost’ Tom Baker serial. It was partially filmed, but interrupted by labour action. The season ended, the actors went their separate ways, it was never completed. From there, it passed into legend.

For a lost serial, it sure got found a lot.

In the 1980’s, BBC Enterprises released a VHS edition of Shada, consisting of the existing footage, with linking narration from Tom Baker.

Then somewhere along the lines, Big Finish working with BBCi released a semi-animated version of Shada, with Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, returning to Gallifrey to pick up Ramona, played by Lalla Ward, to go back and work out some unfinished business. Both versions can be found on the DVD release of Shada.

Then of course, there was Douglas Adams, who cannibalized chunks of Shada for his Dirk Gently novels, before passing away, allowing his estate to recently turn a buck by having his script for Shada turned into a novel by Gareth Roberts.

After all that, Ian Levine’s commissioned his own version of Shada. This Shada consists of the live action scenes and footage, as per the VHS and DVD release. But here, instead of Tom Baker standing around in a museum and filling in the blank spots, we have the missing segments animated.

Visually, the animated segments aren’t bad. They’re full colour, full dimensions, slightly stiff, but the characters look like their live action counterparts, the mouth movements match up to the dialogue. It’s not at all bad. It even improves on some things – the villain, Skagra’s costume looks a lot better as a drawing than on a real person, and the monsters probably work better as animated slabs than they ever would have in live action.

If I have a criticism, it’s that the pacing of the animated sections needs to be faster. Stiff limited animation is nothing new. Hell, it was Hanna Barbera’s stock in trade. But they also worked hard to hide the limitations of their animation with cuts, close ups, and a rapid back and forth of dialogue. Japanese Anime often works hard to sneak you past the fact that a lot of times, their animation characters aren’t actually animated – just staring off soulfully or something. Here there are long shots when there need to be close ups, lingering shots when they need to cut quick, and there are subliminally painful pauses between lines of dialogue.

Basically, the animation is fine, even impressive. I’ve seen television productions that are worse. They are just not cheating the way that they need to, and the way that animators typically cheat. I think perhaps there’s a little too much fidelity to the original shooting script which was for live action. Part of it might be that the voice actors recorded their dialogue separately and been edited together.

What’s really remarkable is that Levine’s managed to reunite almost the entire cast, including Lalla Ward, except for Tom Baker, to reprise their roles. Baker’s voice is done by Paul Jones, who does a credible impersonation. That in itself is impressive.

I believe that Levine’s Shada is or was available via torrent on Pirate Bay. It’s possible that one might find it online if one hunted hard enough. If not, there’s the snippet on Levine’s compilation, running from 1:27 to 5:24.

Is it any good or not? Hard question, some people love it, some hate it. I think that perhaps for Ian Levine, it might be his personal masterpiece, the thing he’s most proud of. He actually offered it free to the BBC. It’s gotten some media attention, you can find articles and reviews on it, it’s quite well known. But then again, Levine is hated in some circles and it can be hard to separate out a loathing for the man, from the merits of his work. Then there are the purists who can turn their nose up at the classic star wars because you can spot the matte lines – those people are hard to satisfy. I don’t have a dog in the fight. So I’d like to say it’s worthwhile.

Evil of the Daleks

Starts at 5:25 to 8:15 An animated recreation of the Patrick Troughton serial. Black and White. This resembles those animated ‘fill ins’ for missing episodes you see on some of the Troughton and Hartnell DVD releases.

The original Evil of the Daleks was a seven episode serial, that aired from May 20 to July 1, 1967, the ninth and final story of the Fourth Season. Today, only episode two survives, the remaining six episodes are lost, possibly forever.

The story is notable for introducing the companion, Victoria Waterfield. It was originally intended to be the big send off for the Daleks, Terry Nation had hopes of selling them in the U.S., so they were thought to be about to move on to bigger and better things. So the story involved a sort of steampunk Time travel, shenanigans with antiques, and the Daleks trying to improve themselves with a lost ‘human factor’ that ultimately leads to their destruction. Back in 1993 it was voted as the best Doctor Who story ever by fans. It is probably the foremost lost Troughton story, the one everyone wishes most to find, and perhaps one of the best Troughton stories, period.

So what Levine seems to have done is taken the sound track, and the collection of still photos as a reference guide, and tried to animate at least six, maybe the entire seven. Again, I have the feeling that it suffers from being a two faithful adaptation of the live action stuff. With Shada, you have the sense that the directors notes and storyboard confined the adaptation, forcing them into making choices that weren’t necessarily the best options for limited animation. Here it may be even worse, because they may be referencing off of a series of actual photographs.

Look, I’ll say it again: Animation is hard. Animation is difficult and time consuming. It’s expensive. It’s thousands and thousands of drawings. So often what we get is limited animation. There’s nothing wrong with limited animation – we all grew up with it, from Fred Flintstone to Captain Harlock.

But here’s the thing with limited animation. To make it work, you have to learn to cheat your shots. You pan and scan, close ups, freeze frames, you do a bunch of things to distract from the fact that your characters don’t move much and move in limited ways.

Evil of the Daleks features limited animation, married to the original actor’s voices. That’s terrific. On the other hand, they don’t cheat at all, and that’s deathly. Instead, the images are framed the way the live action is shot, and that really draws attention to the limits of the animation. No way of getting around it. I understand why Levine did it this way, I can even respect that choice and get past it. For a layperson, might be harder.

Mission to the Unknown –

8:18 to 9:50. This was the only single episode story in Classic Who history (apart from Feast of Steven – if that counts),  from October 9, 1965, in the third season, which served as a kind of backdoor pilot for Terry Nation’s proposed Dalek series, and an introduction for the Dalek Masterplan. It didn’t feature Hartnell or any of the regular cast. Instead, we meet two Earth space agents on some lost world dealing with Dalek machinations. Like large parts of the Hartnell and Troughton era’s, it is lost forever.

This one we actually have a bit of provenance for, courtesy of Starburst magazine. It begins with David Busch, who had been a production manager for Adult Swim’s Metalocalpse and a producer and voice artist on Marvel’s Black Panther cartoon series. Back in 2008, he was working in L.A. for an animation company called Titmouse and decided to take advantage of exchange rates between the UK and US to make a pitch for animating some of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. He created a ‘trailer’ and made a pitch, but nothing came of it. So he posted the trailer to Youtube and moved on.

In 2010, Ian Levine came across the trailer and rang him up. By this time, Busch was free lance, and since Levine was offering to fund the production, they struck a deal. Busch brought in Melissa Levengood to design the characters, Pam Friend for the backgrounds and Derek Handley provided photographic reference. They did a 90 second demo, Ian secured investors, and then they went with the project. By all accounts, this seems to have been an actual commercial demo – a half hour, self contained, proof of concept that was intended to pave the way to bigger and more ambitious things. It didn’t turn out that way.

This is one of the shortest fragments on Levine’s compilation. It’s not bad. The animation quality seems to be at the level of adult swim, there’s more motion, and more fluid motion, and even within the limitation of animation, the cheating is more effective.

Along with Shada, this seems to be the other piece or project of Levine’s that was released to the internet in its entirety. You can find it on Youtube.

The Dalek’s Master Plan –

9:54 to 10:45. For a serial that ran twelve episodes, Levine’s put up a comparatively tiny clip. I’m not sure that this is a finished work. Levine seems to have commissioned it, or started in on it, within the last few years. I suspect that what has been animated is not the whole 10 episodes, but simply the missing ones.

So what have we got? Black and white, as per the original. He seems to use photographs or telesnaps for some of the backgrounds, and uses the original dialogue and sound track. The animation is much more fluid and the ‘camera’ more lively than Evil of the Daleks.

Honest to god, I could get used to this. The learning curve is there, Levine, or whoever he’s got working for him or with him, have mastered a lot of the art of cheating within the limitations of animation. It’s helped by the fact that Levine’s snippet contains a piece of lively dialogue by Hartnell, and the animator’s managed to capture Hartnell’s mischievousness. So there’s actually a bit of soul on display. That’s tricky – it shouldn’t matter, but you can spot the difference between an animation with a bit of soul and one without.

The Dalek’s Master Plan needs no introduction, but for the record… The original live action serial was one of the longest in Doctor Who’s history, running between November 13, 1965, to January 29, 1966. It featured the Doctor and his new companions battling the Dalek’s across time, from ancient Egypt all the way to the Interstellar Empire of Mavic Chen. Along the way, the Meddling Monk returned, looking for payback from his last run in with the Doctor, and the death of the Doctor’s companions, Katarina of Troy and Sarah Kingdom. It’s epic.

Most of it is now lost. Only three of the twelve episodes – numbers two, five and ten remain. The remaining nine are lost. As far as Doctor Who lost serials go, this one really is the holy grail.

That said, there are at least two other fan versions of the Dalek’s Master Plan extant out there. One is a telesnaps/audio reconstruction by Loose Cannon, a fan group that seems to be the leading light of the telesnap reconstruction genre. The other is a photo-animation by Josh Snares, a hardcore fan, who uses photo collages to move and pan and scan images.

This is a recurring theme – there are at least two other versions of Shada, another version of Dark Dimensions, two versions of Master Plan, another Loose Cannon reconstruction of Evil of the Daleks. Do the presence or existence of these other versions undermine Levine’s. I don’t know. I’d prefer to think of it as evidence that there’s something compelling about these works that draws people.

I have the impression that this is one of Levine’s final works, it seems to date from around 2012/2013. It definitely follows after Mission to the Unknown. It’s not clear though, whether David Busch was involved this time or whether his relationship with Levine continued.   Levine’s apparently arranged his videos by subject matter, not chronological order, so it’s difficult to assess artistic or technical progression, or gauge who else was involved.

Still, given the significance of Master Plan in Doctor Who’s classic history, this seems a worthy effort.