Lost 'Doctor Who' Adventure "The Savages" Latest To Be Released as Animation

As a show rolling into its 62nd year, Doctor Who has a few singular issues due to its long run. The most obvious is the number of seasons, as the program has started over with Season 1 twice since its original 1963 debut; slightly less well known is the "Lost Episode" problem. Most shows that have been on the air since the early 1960s are soap operas, so the fact that there were no archival standards in place (in the U.K. or the U.S.) until the 1970s isn't something viewers can about overmuch, it's not like anyone is going to go back and watch the black and white episodes of General Hospital or Coronation Street. However, as a science fiction program, Doctor Who tends to attract completionist fans*. At the time, the BBC did not consider this, and reused master tapes as a cost-saving measure, recording over several episodes of the show's first six seasons. Luckily, the audio part of the recordings remained, and since 2006 there has been a slow push to "restore" these episodes via animation.

(*The number of people who worriedly ask if they need to watch the Classic Doctor Who to "get" the new series on Disney+ would be hilarious if it weren't sad that's what's holding them back.)

The latest serial to be recovered from the rubbish bin of BBC history is "The Savages," which had all four episodes taped over after airing in 1966. The serial aired towards the end of the First Doctor's run, as part of Doctor Who's original third season. This was also during the period where the show first traded out companions, as original cast members Carole Ann Ford (Susan Foreman), William Russell (Ian Chesterton) and Jacqueline Hill (Barbara Wright) all left during Season 2, and Ford's initial replacement Maureen O'Brien (Vicki) only lasted eight adventures. At this point in the series, short-timer companions Steven Taylor and Dodo are traveling in the TARDIS, and "The Savages" marks Taylor's exit from the series, whereupon the show cast Michael Craze and Anneke Wills as Ben and Polly, who remained the show's companions through the show's first transition of Doctors from Hartnell to Second Doctor Patrick Troughton.

Notably, this is the second Season 3 adventure with the First Doctor to get the restoration treatment in a row; in 2024, the 1966 adventure "The Celestial Toymaker," with the late Michael Gough in the title role, was fully animated, partly due to the renewed interest in the story brought on by the 60th Anniversary reviving the character for the 21st-century with Neil Patrick Harris. This is the 16th time the BBC has commissioned an animated restoration of a serial with lost episodes, but only the fourth "completely missing" story to be given this treatment. Out of the total 97 episodes that are lost from the show's first six seasons, 48 have now been restored via animation.

Considering the current Doctor Who revival happening in the U.S., now that the show is streaming on Disney+, instead of lost on a combination of BBC America, AMC+, and Max, it's not surprising that these restorations are in demand, especially the ones like "The Celestial Toymaker" which tie into the show's current iteration. Also, the project is nearly half complete, thanks to the studio that took over doing the animations for the BBC in 2013. (The first "animation restoration" was for two episodes out of the eight-installment Second Doctor episode "The Invasion" during Russell T Davies' first reboot of the series in 2006. It functioned as a "proof of concept" that animating the lost footage would result in a satisfactory substitution. Still, it took until the 50th anniversary for the project to start up in earnest.) 

With that in mind, as well as the reupping of the BBC's charter, the executive producer behind animating the lost episodes, Paul Hembury, recently said during a BFI event he was working on a new agreement with BBC Studios that would allow the team to work on multiple missing stories at once, since each one takes about a year to recreate. "Rather than one at a time, what we want to do is actually to accelerate the rate at which we make them. What we want to do – and I believe at this stage we will do – is to get the next one started reasonably soon, but before completing that one, we start the one after that... that's the goal. Things are coming together quite well. We don't have a signed agreement, but we're very hopeful of being able to do more."

Here's the four-part serial's synopsis:

In The Savages, the Doctor and his travelling companions, Steven and Dodo, arrive on an unnamed planet where they encounter two distinct people - the Elders and the Savages. They soon discover the Elders are the evil, draining the primitive Savages for their life source to remain young and powerful forever.

This Classic Doctor adventure stars original First Doctor, the late William Hartnell, with Peter Purves (recently seen in Tales of the TARDIS) as exiting companion Steve Taylor and the late Jackie Lane as relative newcomer to the TARDIS, Dodo Chaplet. The rest of the cast includes Patrick Godfrey (Foyle's War), and the late actors Frederick Jaeger, Norman Henry, Ewen Solon, Peter Thomas, Robert Sidaway, Edward Caddick, and Tony Holland. Hembury is the executive producer behind the Doctor Who animation project.

Doctor Who: "The Savages" will be released as an animation on DVD and Blu-ray and stream on iPlayer on March 24, 2025. It is expected to eventually join the rest of the Classic Who episodes streaming on BritBox.