The Daleks invade England!
- Publication: Famous Monsters of Filmland
- Date: October 1976
- Author:
- Page: 48
- Language: English
British in a state of panic! "Who can save them?"
first dracula—then daleks!
It had been 13 years since Bela Lugosi had invaded England. since Count Dracula had swooped down on the unsuspecting populace and sent them scurrying in search of wolfbane & wooden stakes.
Now their lives were at stake once again.
When I visited London last September. to meet Boris Karloff & Christopher Lee, have dinner with Ray Harryhausen, attend the World Science Fiction Convention. etc.. I found that hundreds of thousands of British boys & girls were in a statement of fever & ferment.
Almost, you might say, panic.
No. not over the Beatles—
Over the Daleks!
the metal monsters
First off, how to pronounce Daleks: exactly like Doll X.
Second off, what are Daleks?
No one knows. exactly.
They may be horrible slug-like creatures like HG Wells' super-intelligences from Mars in "The War of the Worlds."
They could be huge hairy fuzzy frightening spider shapes.
They could be apes with 3 eyes and 4 arms!
Whatever they are. they are encased in mobile metal machines. with scanning eyes, suction graspers. death-ray tubes.
From somewhere inside them strange hollow electronic voices emanate, as tho from an echo-box.
They are as colorful as juke boxes or pinball machines but don't let their myriad rainbow colors deceive you—they're deadly dangerous.
And they hold a great portion of England in thrall, young & old alike: children and grown men & women-- an estimated 9 million of them.
9 million captives of the cathode tube!
9 million viewers who never miss an episode of DR. WHO (And The Daleks) when they are on TV.
hypnotic spell
The plain fact is, the Daleks have got the English tele-viewers in a mesmeric state.
They are like flies, captive in a spider's web.
The only difference is, whereas flies dread the spider and know they are already dead, the -victims" of the Daleks come alive every time their favorite foes make another public appearance!
Dr. Who, son of Dr. Fu?
You've heard of Dr. No.
Seen Fu Machu.
Now comes Dr. Who.
But he, unlike the villainous would-be world conquerors, he is a good doctor.
A little mad, perhaps; absentminded, at least. But not bad.
And he travels thru Time & Space in his incredible invention, the Tardis.
When I was in England I was told—by a 10-year-old fan—what T.A.R.D.I.S. stands for. Like The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. each initial stands for something. But now that I'm safely 6000 miles away from the Daleks. I'm darned if I can remember what the letters stood for!
I think it was something like Temporal And Ra. dial Disintegrator-Integrator System.
Or Time And Relativity Dimensional Integrator Selector.
Something like that.
Anyway, its effect is to whisk Dr. Who—and the watchers too—whee & away from the here & now to other worlds & other whens.
things from outer space
There've been a long line of cosmic creatures menacing Dr. Who & his crew.
Remember THEM?
Well, these giant ants would frighten the pants off even those formidable formic-creatures in THEM.
A Zarbi is a huge upright ant-like creature (the only thing missing is ant-tennae) that might be what would appear in an ant's nightmare if ants have dreams.
Koquillion!
Almost impossible to describe.
Fortunately, we have a foto—smuggled in from the planet Dido. A good picture is said to be worth 10,000 words, so we'll add only a very few more to say that it's the prickliest spiniest monster you ever saw, all quills & pointy things, with a pair of popping eyes that would have made Popeye the Sailor Man green with envy. The eyes, in fact. resemble very must those of snails. Stalk-eyes.
How Koquillions fall in love it would be difficult to imagine as it would appear that if one attempted to kiss another they would wind up with faces looking like shredded wheat.
But considering how bad Koquillions are. perhaps they never fall in love, they only fall in hate.
exciting adventure
A friend of mine in England, Joan Lomax, has a young son who is a typical Dalek-devotee, and from him I learned the story of Dr. Who & The Rescue.
Part 1 was called The Powerful Enemy".
Dr. Who & his young friends Ian & Barbara land on the planet Dido.
The space-traveling professor has been on Dido before and remembers it as a friendly planet. He is astonished, therefore, to find the lives of his party in immediate danger upon landing!
Exploration reveals a crashed rocketship from Earth with 2 survivors: a man named Bennett, a young girl named Vicki. They tell of Koquillion the terrible, a member of the native population who is keeping them prisoner.
The only hope for all of them is a rescue craft from Earth.
Will it arrive in time?
Unfortunately, I had to leave England before I learned the outcome of the final episode.
another cliffhanger
I didn't learn his age but there was a little boy named Billy Temple in a Zorro outfit who told me a bit about another episode called "Flash-point".
This time it seems Dr. Who & his fellow travelers had voyaged not in space but thru time . . . to the year 2164.
The Tardis materializes in London of the 22d Century to discover that the Earth has been invaded by the Daleks who have come to our planet to burrow thru the center and steal our magnetic core! (Rotten to the core, I'd say.)
Altho resistance groups do exist; intrepid bands of guerrilla warfare underground fighters: they are virtually powerless against the Dalek humanoids with their superior war machines that patrol the streets of stricken London.
To say nothing of the flying saucers that swoop from the skies above.
journey into fear
"The bosses of the British Broadcasting Corporation," our British correspondent Peter Jarman told me, "realizing early on that they had a hit on their hands with the Dr. Who Series, decided they must have a fresh batch of beasties to Carry On the bad work."
So writer Bill Strutton & designer John Wood were called into a conference. "More monsters!" said the men-in-charge.
Strutton promptly went home and started browsing thru his Encyclopaedia Britannica. Giant ants & butterflies came to mind.
Butterflies being gentle creatures, he patterned the peaceful Menoptera after them.
The menacing ant-like monsters became the Zarbies. Actually, he gives credit to his wife for coming up with the scary-sounding name.
The designer Wood had the job of building the ant-men. Fibre glass, leather & a substance called perspex went into their creation. The first one created cost nearly $1000. It turned, Shaun Usher told me, "sweating actors into human lobsters."
The Zarbies were immediately put to dirty work in an episode where Dr. Who (played by Wm. Hartnell) landed on a sci-fi type planet equipped with such creature comforts as acid pools, death-spitting grubs and of course the meek Menoptera & the vicious Zarbies.
the Wood work
Designer Wood gave journalist Shaun Usher some interesting insights about his work.
"The assignments are exciting & stimulating," he said. "The only limits in science fiction are those of ingenuity.
"I'm a married man with 2 young sons and I try out some of my new ideas on my family. David, who's a schoolboy, was a bit upset at first by the Daleks but his brother Damon was a keen fan from the first. When I took them to the studio to see how Daleks were made, David became a bit happier: both boys lost their awe once they touched the machines and realized they were just ordinary materials like hardboard & plastic."
But don't you touch a Dalek if you meet up with one—it might be real and not just a studio prop!
Caption: Koquillion, the kill-kill quill creature from the planet Dido, menaces Maureen O'Brien in the BBC's telecast of the Dr. Who series.
Caption: The dread Daleks, more than Gog-like automations: horrible creatures inhabit these mobile & lethal machines from another world.
Caption: Beware the planet Vortis, unless you want to become a man-sandwich for a hungry Zarbi!
Caption: At the mercy of a machine-thing from outer space is Ann Davis in the final episode of "Dalek Invasion of Earth".
Caption: Koquillon—"The Powerful Enemy"! One close-up is enough to convince us!
Caption: Friendly butterfly-man o "The Web Planet" Vortis. But beware the Zarbies, worse than Zombies!
Disclaimer: These citations are created on-the-fly using primitive parsing techniques. You should double-check all citations. Send feedback to whovian@cuttingsarchive.org
- APA 6th ed.: (October 1976). The Daleks invade England!. Famous Monsters of Filmland p. 48.
- MLA 7th ed.: "The Daleks invade England!." Famous Monsters of Filmland [add city] October 1976, 48. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: "The Daleks invade England!." Famous Monsters of Filmland, edition, sec., October 1976
- Turabian: "The Daleks invade England!." Famous Monsters of Filmland, October 1976, section, 48 edition.
- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=The Daleks invade England! | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Daleks_invade_England! | work=Famous Monsters of Filmland | pages=48 | date=October 1976 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=21 November 2024 }}</ref>
- Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=The Daleks invade England! | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Daleks_invade_England! | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=21 November 2024}}</ref>
