When they were bringing back Dr. Who, I groused to my husband: "It won't be the same with high-end special effects!" I absolutely LOVE scenes like this...truly and unreservedly.

You know if the camera swerved a foot to the left, you'd see a bored guy standing there, eating a sandwich.

I knew I went into the wrong line of work.

What are you guys talking about? Those special effects were awesome? The way the space monsters just appeared out of nowhere, plus the fog. It's totally believable.

Awesome. Just plain awesome.

looks like a load of fun, jesus why would you want to work in CGI when you can get your hands dirty?

This is the reason why films like ALIEN and 2001 look better than any CGI !!!

CGI can't create a real cloud that really really looks real.

Your brain knows it's not a real cloud in a real setting.

Dry Ice, well, looks mreo 'real' even if it's a cheap effect.

Besides you know how much a company wold quote for a a cloud effect? Shed loads.

I'd rather have the dry ice.

They are not the worst special effects I've ever seen seen. have any of you had the miss fortune of seeing Dragon Wars?

I love that somebody coughs during the cloud explanation.

I'm not sure what's worse, the effects or the acting. :) Good behind the scenes clip though.

Humpf, they didn't even film it in a disused quarry.

I don't think the argument is that the effects weren't bad, I think the argument is that it doesn't matter. As with several people, yeah, I thought that was totally cool. I like people having to be inventive and rig up things much better than slick effects.

The way I look at these things is that it's like watching a stage production.

Timeflight was good fun all the way through. I love the, uh, bad guy reveal and the, uh... Mandarin character?
You know it if you've seen it.

LOL my little sister was scared of Dr Who because some trash bag monster.

Ah, Old School Who *hearts so much*

@seldon452: i saw the trailer for it... looked to me like someone added $10,000 worth of CGI dragons to some unused scenes from Transformers.

@smokyburnout: You say that like it's a bad thing. Dragon wars has dragons fighting helicopters. What more could you possibly want?

@B: Coherent plot.

@Ghede: Coherence is overrated.

That's officially the first clip of old Dr Who I've ever seen. While I've been obsessed with new Who for, oh, about three months now, I've been a bit scared of tackling the 35 years worth of reruns. This clip doesn't make the prospect seem any less daunting. ...but then, it's gonna be a looong wait till 2010.

I think this old school stuff rocks. Can anybody tell me they weren't freaked out by these turd-monsters when they watched as kids? And the daleks?? Only on Doctor Who can you get roundy-topped trashcans with toilet plunger arms that look TRULY scary.

I always thought the hefty garbage bag monster on a string was the worst special effect in Dr Who history. But that's just me.

I need to get my hands on a 2 stage dry ice pump machine.

A 2 Stage Dry Ice pump still isn't as cool as a Cloud Tank... see Close Encounters Of The 3rd Kind for the 1st use of one.

There was an infamous "wriggling man wrapped in green-painted bubble wrap" monster in the Tom Baker Era story The Ark in Space. Youtube isn't obliging sadly and the transformation pic on the Wikipedia doesn't do it justice, by dint of looking quite good.

I think it's seeing the effort that's gone into the Time Flight fx which makes them feel worse.

@Lizzie24601: Huh. Maybe I should do a post about how to get into old Doctor Who, for people who have only watched new Who? Short version: Robots of Death and Curse of Fenric are both on DVD, and one of those should probably spark your interest.

@monster_delivers_msg: There's a lot of discussion on the Arc In Space DVD about how bubble wrap was this new substance that nobody had seen before in 1975, and it looked foreign and amazingly cool. And jus ta year or two later, everybody was using it for shipping, and you would just take one look at that special effect and go, "oh, it's bubble wrap."

@Charlie Jane Anders: Hilarious! Time makes fools of us all.

Another vote for Robots of Death here too. Spearhead from Space might make a good old Who introduction, as its status as an Earth-centric relaunch of sorts parallels Rose. Been a long time since I last saw it though, so I'm not sure how well it stands up.

This is still not as bad as the sock puppet that served as an alien in Timelash. I watched that the DVD of that the other day, and oh my, the effects were rubbish.

One of the things that I really loved about the older Dr.Who episodes (I'm a Baker-era dinosaur) WAS the crappy special-effects. It was as if they were left as a last priority to say to the audience:
"What are you paying attention to THIS for?, the STORY is the important-bit, use your bloomin' imagination, you DO have one of those, don't you...?"
And besides, the garbage-bag monsters, big bolt headed Cybermen, clunking-about Daleks were all good fun...

Oh and btw...

That effect was actually nicely done until it was over done with the smoke effect... if they had just appeared without the smoke it would have been fine...

It actually looked pretty cool and its amazing how long the actors were able to freeze their poses while the scene was composed and set up to run again.

Come off it, that's not the worst, show us the Myrka, from "Warriors of the Deep" if you want to be serious, or maybe Erato from "Creature from the Pit".

Sure, the older "Dr. Who" had tinfoil and string effects.

At least they didn't have "pig men" or Dalek-human hybrids in pinstripe suits looking like Cthulhu's retarded cousin.

I loved the old Who campy effects. Most of the time, the stories made up for it.

I'll second the vote for Spearhead from Space (1st appearance 3rd Doctor). I just saw it a couple weeks ago and it's still pretty good.

@Charlie Jane Anders: I would definitely appreciate a post on how to get into old Who and related media. The sheer quantity of material out there is overwhelming. Maybe something for July after this season ends and we go into withdrawal?

@Charlie Jane Anders: I started with the Key to Time arc, and I'd say it's a great place to start. Robots of Death is good if you don't want to devote yourself to that many episodes right off.

Worse Special Effects in Doctor Who history has to be from The Invasion of the Dinosaurs. They had a fight between two dinosaurs that basically was two rubber figurines shoved at each other from off the screen. The whole episode is on Youtube.

I remember seeing one Tom Baker episode that had the music and sound effects completely left out. I don't remember exactly which one ... maybe The Brain of Morbius, Part One. They all blur together after this long.

For promoting old skool Who, I suggest City of Death. Excellent story (by Douglas Adams!) featuring multiple copies of the Mona Lisa, and a hilariously bad rubber mask for the monster.

Oh, and as bad as the effects in this clip may be, how can you not love the line, "Look, old chap, this is all a bit of a snare and a delusion!"

@laughingacademy: This clip actually left me craving Indonesian food.

This kind of thing just makes me love and respect classic Who all the more. They had no money, and mere weeks to prepare - and each episode was shot in two days. And yet the ambition of it all staggers the mind! They counted on the viewers to be imaginative enough to see past the reality of the FX and grasp what was being indicated, to fill in the blanks with dreaming. And that's just what we did, and that's just why Who fan-fic was such high quality and why fans are now making the show.

That said, this is a terrible episode with completely un-memorable walking turd monsters. Avoid like the plague.

This is just unfair -- looking at behind-the-scenes footage of how an effect was done and then claiming that the effect was crap is ridiculous. NO effect looks good when you watch the raw footage. They aren't meant to.
In fact, after watching this footage and realizing how much nonsense they had to go through in 1982 to create it all, one is left with a sense of how ingenious they had to be in that era. Today, they just say "there's a monster in front of you" and stick it in later with CGI.