"EXGERMINATE"

I’ve been simulcasting backwards into nostalgia and into the future over the new BBC teaser trailer for "Doctor Who" Series Six, starring Matt Smith as Doctor #11. Fresh from my recent foray into Lovecraftian worlds, a warm-up doodle spawned this piece after idly sketching the iconic Dalek monsters. 

(more under the fold) 

Initially this was a diptych: with one half being a black and white panel of a drawing of an original "exterminate" cyborg perched on the planet Mercury (using the spiffy new images here), but now temporarily stuck on the back-burner. However, the concept of an organic Dalek underwent several metamorphoses, and after dropping a cartoon thought-balloon of "exgerminate" in lieu of typesetting it as a caption, this color half took off on its own as a stand-alone piece.

Via Boing Boing the backdrop came compliments of NASA's “WISE” (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) image of the Rho Ophiuch dark nebula cloud complex - where I suspect the planet Yuggoth is located - plus a groovy mushroom spore print run through some Photoshop filters. Bonus Trivia: studio background soundtrack = Jerry Goldsmith's "Star Trek - Nemesis" opening sequence.

So when Tom Baker was the Doctor (#4), I was ten years old, and while the other kids might have had Farrah Fawcett, Catherine Bach and Lynda Carter: me, I was obsessed with the Sarah Jane Smith (no relation) character, played by the actress Elisabeth Sladen. Later on in life, my Aunt, a champion knitter, actually hand-made a 10’ replica of his trademark scarf - mind you, not the full-length 14-20’ version - for my sixteenth birthday. Have I ever mentioned just how damned cool I was considered in high-school? Yeah. Anyways, if you think the whole scarf thing is nuts, check out this website devoted to documenting all them over the relevant seasons, right down to the patterns. Meanwhile, I was religiously holding up my old-school Panasonic shoebox-style cassette recorder right up next to the TV speaker, so as to actually tape the intro music to this show whenever it played. Over and over. Eventually I filled up most of one side of a sixty-minute cassette tape so I could replay it at leisure. Fast-forward over thirty years later, and now I can watch every theme from 1963 – 2010... all compiled together into one video. It still doesn’t get old, and neither do I.