It seemed like it was years before my PBS station got around to airing the Jon Pertwee episodes. I have a vague memory of his episodes starting and me asking "Who the hell is this guy?", "What did they did do to my opening credits?", "Where's my TARDIS??". It was a delightfully confusing time but I quickly got up to speed and by the time we hit the regeneration scene in The Planet of the Spiders, it all made sense. Of course by time we hit the 80's, we go through a (5 rounds) rapid succession of Doctors from 5 to 6 to 7. And at some point, they went back and aired all the 1st and 2nd Doctor episodes that still exist, which blew my mind because they were NOT in color!
I don't think I was every frightened by Doctor Who, but that Wirrn falling out of the cupboard in The Ark in Space did give me a startle. I was more fascinated by the concepts of time and space, the origins of the aliens, dimensional transendentalism, etc. Easy concepts for a 5 year old to wrap his head around. I lost track of the number of times I built the TARDIS console room out of paper and cardboard. It had fully functional door, view screen, even a time rotor that went up and down. Now a days kids can buy toy replicas of the console room (which I have, of course). But when we were kids, we had to use blood, sweat, tears, rice paste and scraps to build our own!
And oh the VCR tapes I had! When we finally got our first VCR, I must have bought tapes in bulk to record every episode off TV. What an ordeal! It must have taken me the better part of the 80's the get them all. Mine too are stashed somewhere in a drawer or closet in my parents house. Who knew that they'd release them officially on VHS, then DVD, then special edition DVD, some now on BluRay, and instantly on iTunes. What's next?
[Sidenote: I also sometimes recorded the audio from the TV onto cassette so I could listen to them later. Thus was born my Doctor Who audio obsession..... but that's a story for another time.]
-Michael
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