Search

The Revenge of the Cybermen

greatbigquiveringp
May 20, 1976
3 min read

In October 1983, Revenge of the Cybermen was the BBC's first Doctor Who video release and it's an extraordinary thing. As Richard Atkinson or Daniel O'Malley notes (http://www.timelash.com/tardis/display.php?863), it's got an Earthshock Cyberman and a Season 18 Tom Baker. It's also, less problematically, the 1983 logo and starfield titles (which had been going since Season 18).

To put that in a bit of context, 'Earthshock' had been broadcast in March 1982 and 'The Five Doctors' (with the same Cybermen) was coming up on 25 November 1983, so presumably there was some extent of wanting to make it as recognisable as possible in the context of the interest they presumably thought that was going to provoke. I rather like all that as a pleasant oddity. The only thing that would be better than all those elements was if they'd stuck Peter Davison on the cover too.

What I'm surprised by is how shoddy it is. It manages to make both the Doctor and the Cyberman peripheral, the true focus being the cluster of stars. The Longleat Convention, where the title was allegedly decided upon by popular consensus (http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/4d.html), had been in April 1983 (http://www.richardwho.co.uk/exhibitions/longleat1983/index.asp), so maybe it was a rush job and that explains the shoddiness. Indeed the May 1984 reissue (http://www.timelash.com/tardis/display.php?863) (or simultaneous Betamax release if http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Cybermen_(TV_story) is to be believed but I'm not sure it is) corrects the errors identified by Richiel O'Malkinson and the compositional wonkiness.

Now, this is a lovely bit of work but it is still odd. Just look at some of the other BBC Video covers of the era...

You get single-photo covers, like February 1982's The People's Champion (

http://www.pre-cert.co.uk/display.php?vId=UK00502) (much like the soon-to-come's 'Brain of Morbius' video's cover), photo-album covers like March 1984's All Creatures Great and Small (http://www.pre-cert.co.uk/display.php?vId=UK00401) or bits of logo-focused design like December 1983's Top of the Pops (http://www.pre-cert.co.uk/display.php?vId=UK00535).

Occasionally you got an audacious hybrid, like 1981's Delia Smith's Home Cooking (http://www.pre-cert.co.uk/display.php?vId=UK00424) but still nothing like the odd photo montage that both releases of Revenge of the Cybermen were going for.

Even if you look at films on video, the only addition you get to these formats is paintings of an arrangement of key characters and/or scenes (most often just the film poster or a detail from it reprinted) as seen for example on the front of March 1983's Diamonds are Forever (http://www.pre-cert.co.uk/display.php?vId=UK10395) - a style more akin to the one that comes in later during the video range or even the DVD range, though they'd reverted to using photos to create them by that point.

In a quick and far from thorough search, the only video cover that seems to employ the same technique that I could find was October 1983's Elvis on Tour (http://www.pre-cert.co.uk/display.php?vId=UK05237) in which Elvis takes the roles of both hero and monster.

So what was Sid Sutton up to? Well, have a look at Target's September 1983 release of Terminus as well as three earlier painted covers, all effectively two-image montages with a monster on the left and a hero on the right:

Were the video covers following in the stream of the Target books? It would make sense if Sutton decided that this was how the market visualised Who stories.

Anyway, for a look inside the book, click on the actual cover from 1976 below...