The Abominable Snowmen

Chapter The 240th, the abominable finally became animatable. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in 1930s Tibet, the TARDIS landing on a Himalayan mountainside near the Detsen monastery. The Doctor has been here before many years previously. Four monks have recently been killed, as has the expedition-mate of a Professor Travers, who is trying to discover the elusive yeti creatures believed to live in the area. The yeti are suspected of the killings. The Doctor and his friends, helped by the monks, manage to capture a Yeti and find it is a robot, with a gap in its chest for a control sphere. The spheres can move on their own to fill the gap in the robot Yeti and activate it. The Doctor rigs up a device to track the transmissions controlling the spheres, while Yetis menace people inside and outside the monastery. The master Padmasambhava is behind the Yeti plot; a floating bodiless entity called the Great Intelligence has been communicating mentally with the master for years, keeping him alive; Padmasambhava has built a glass pyramid, which is taken to a cave and starts to change the Intelligence into a physical form there. Travers witnesses all this but goes into shock and can't remember it until it's dramatic to do so later in the story. The master orders that the monks abandon the monastery as the Yeti are too powerful. The Doctor tracks the control signal transmissions to inside the monastery itself. Padmasambhava struggles against the Intelligence's control. The Doctor confronts the Intelligence in a secret room behind the throne in the sanctum, and they battle mentally. During this, Jamie and the others destroy the control equipment including another pyramid. The Yeti are deactivated and the old monk is released from the Intelligence's power and dies. The TARDIS team leave the monastery accompanied by Travers; he spots a real yeti and rushes off to track it.

Context:

Before the BFI screening of the new animation (see Deeper Thoughts section below for full details), I thought about first listening to the audio version, but I decided against. Instead, I watched the surviving episode two on DVD from the Lost In Time box set (on my own one evening, with a glass of wine). The Better Half came in briefly, and watched for a while without making any sarcastic comments (so that's got to be a plus). To me, the episode was as fun and engaging as I found it on first watch (see immediately below). On the day of the 3rd September, I arrived at London Bridge station and then walked along the waterfront to the BFI; the sun was shining, the Southwark Cathedral bells were ringing, people were happy and smiling, buskers were playing nice tunes. I was in a very good mood, and meeting up with friends; what could be better? I met up with David, Trevor and Alan at the BFI. Scott and Chris were intending to attend also, but had to drop out at the last minute. When I enquired at the box office about whether anyone might want these tickets, I was surprised to find that they still had some left themselves. These events are usually sell-outs. That may not have been a reflection on the story. There were two other fan events going on during the weekend (Whooverville and Collectormania) and the panel that accompanied the BFI screening didn't include any stars of the show. Still, the auditorium was pretty full as we all sat down to watch what documentary maker Chris Chapman described in an on-stage interview later as "Doctor Who does Black Narcissus with teddy bears chasing people".

First Time Round:

Only the second of the six episodes of The Abominable Snowmen is present in the archives. The rest are not known to exist, though audio recordings of all the episodes are held because young fans in the 1960s taped them off their tellies. These audio recordings of course allowed for the animation to eventually be made as shown at the BFI, with images matched to those home-made soundtracks. Before animations were feasible, though, releasing these 'orphaned' episodes and mostly pictureless soundtracks presented a challenge. John Nathan-Turner, former producer of the show in the 1980s, worked as a consultant on the BBC Doctor Who ranges in the 1990s, and attempted to tackle these challenges. He was responsible for the first official audio tapes of various story soundtracks with linking narration; from that start a full range on CD (with better source audio and restoration) became a reality later, after his time as a consultant had ended; The Abominable Snowmen came out on CD in 2001. A decade earlier, in June 1991, a time when the Doctor Who VHS range was just getting going, there was a release called The Troughton Years. This was one of an initial brace of 'Years' tapes that provided a way to get the orphaned material released. The presentation style did not catch on as well as narrated audios eventually did. As was probably inevitable based on his style, Nathan-Turner presented the episodes within an inexpensive framing documentary about the lead actor of the show; it was showbiz biography and a little dash of trivia, but little attempt was made to present the wider story either side of the episode shown. With less availability of plot synopses in those days, it was tantalising and somewhat frustrating to get these 25-minute glimpses into stories, but then no more. I defy any Doctor Who fan to watch the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen, with its intriguing set-up and fun interactions between the regular cast, and not want to see what happens next. Curiously, when I finally experienced the full story 10 years later as an audio experience, it was not nearly as engaging as a whole.

Reaction:

The Abominable Snowmen doesn't have any music, just special sounds and background atmosphere tracks, which in the exterior scenes is mostly whistling winds and in the interiors, the chanting of monks. This might be why I struggled to engage with the story on audio - deprived as I was of the energy boost of music or much differentiation between the voices - apart from Victoria and the half-ethereal half-raspy performance of Wolfe Morris as Padmasambhava, it's just the sound of a lot of earnest blokes. If you're able to know which of the lamas dies midway through when just listening to voices - is it Rinchen? is it Sapan? - then you've got better ears than me. As such, it's negatively impacted more than other stories by the absence of visuals, and so was a good candidate for what was confirmed at the BFI to be the last animation, at least for a while. A few people who were lucky enough to watch the episodes first go out in the 1960s will know how the story worked with visuals, and how closely the cartoon version captures the feel. It must have gone down well at the time, though, as the writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were rapidly commissioned for a sequel that was broadcast after only two stories had gone by in the interim. The Yeti were probably the main reason; they clearly struck a chord with the audience, even though they are cuddly and unthreatening. In that sequel, The Web of Fear, the Yeti design is tweaked to make them more monstrous and less teddy bear, and the animation succeeds with a very slightly tweaked design in that direction too.

Another thing that probably appeals to audiences is all the paraphernalia that comes with the creatures - the mini-Yeti that can be moved around a map to remote control the full-size versions, the control spheres with their distinctive beeping, the mysterious pyramids of power. I suspect that there have been some tweaks to how some of these are depicted in the animation, but I haven't seen any offscreen pictures of the original for a while. Despite any changes, and there a more emphatic changes that I'll cover in a moment, these new visuals still feel pretty faithful. The paraphernalia, effective though it all is, does create some implausibility in the story, though. One poor ageing monk working away over centuries has apparently built all this, and several fur-coated robots, and potentially excavated a cave (it's not 100% clear): no wonder he's secretly wishing for death. It would have been a lot more efficient for the Great Intelligence to commune mentally with someone who owned a factory, Nestene-style. Nevertheless, the Tibetan (well, ish) style is original and engaging. With the new visuals those watching are taken more nimbly through a plot that - if one stops to think about for even a few seconds, or if one is just listening to the sparse audio where it's more obvious  - is slight. There's lot of walking back and forth between places to pad out the running time, and suspicion falls on different people pointlessly as the audience have already been clued in to who's behind the plot. On stage later, animation exec and director Gary Russell was a cheerleader for the original story, saying that nothing repetitious happens in The Abominable Snowmen, and that every moment propels the plot along. His comments were definitely heartfelt, but I can't alas agree with him completely.

The plot works - albeit slowly - but the structure of the plot is just to delay the inevitable confrontation between Doctor and master (with a small 'm'), and it is easy to get frustrated when experiencing the story that the obvious final act is put off so long. Russell and all the talented people involved have succeeded in putting off the point where I got restless and annoyed as late as humanly possible, but it did still occur. Maybe somewhere around the time that the Doctor said he needed another bearing when using his gizmo; if the Doctor thought about it for a second, he'd realise that the only reason that Padmasambhava would want to evacuate the monastery is if the control centre was in there somewhere. Anyway, the audience have known since episode two who the bad guy is, and scenes of him hypnotising people left, right and centre are continually being intercut with the actions of the good guys.The writers tweaked the structure for next Yeti story The Web of Fear and held back from revealing who was under the Great Intellignece's influence until the end, and that worked a lot better. When the confrontation happens, it is greatly enhanced by the new visuals. The Scooby Doo look (in a good way) for Padmasambhava is nice for a start. (This is just one of some great character redesigns including the guest cast's ethnicities being updated to be more in keeping with the Tibetan setting; this story - probably because of the visuals mostly being missing - doesn't come in for as much criticism as The Talons of Weng-Chiang for 'yellowing up' white actors, but it really should do.) In the final scenes, the master of the monastery can levitate and his eyes glow, and it's very impressive. All the sanctum scenes, when Padmasambhava is at first hidden behind a gauze curtain, then gradually revealed, are effective too, but they held back some animated spectacle for this final confrontation.

The sequences of Jamie wrecking the machinery in the background also work, and this is itself a minor triumph; this style (and time and budget) of animation finds scenes with rapid movement a challenge. This has been most often obvious when characters have to run in previous animations, but most of the running scenes in The Abominable Snowmen animation work perfectly well. There was one moment of audience mirth when Jamie shouts "Come on!" at Victoria as they escape a Yeti followed by the animated characters moving very slowly out of frame; but, these moments of pacing (as explained by Gary Russell later) are inherited from the soundtrack source material, and the purists in the target market don't like anything to be cut. Action sequences that go beyond running were mostly successful too, well at least for me. The scene where the Yeti is caught in a rope trap and prodded by various warrior monks' spears worked really well, but got a huge laugh from the assembled fans in the BFI, ungrateful so-and-sos. The intended moments of comedy also went down well for the audience, like Troughton's line "I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of valour - Jamie has an idea" and many other moments. The background pictures of all the locales are grand and give the story more scale than could be achieved in a television studio. There's also a nice background Easter egg tying this first ever Yeti story to the new series appearances of the Great Intelligence. Most of my quibbles are with the original material rather than the animation. The script seems to contradict itself as to how long it's been since the Doctor and Padmasambhava last saw each other. It should be three hundred years, but it's sometimes stated to be two hundred. There's a few too many instances where the Yeti just stand in place not doing anything; for instance, the Doctor is allowed to go up to one and remove its control sphere. As they already look cuddly, having them be static does remove any last vestiges of threat. Overall, though, the plusses of the original outweigh the minusses, and this new version makes it even better. 

Connectivity: 

The Doctor finds himself in a place surrounded by mostly men in silly robes in both The Abominable Snowmen and Hell Bent. In both stories, someone gets their memory selectively wiped too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Professor Travers's 1935 Expedition Journal: BFI screening of The Abominable Snowmen, 3rd September 2022. The structure of the day was similar to previous BFI screenings. Our hosts were as ever Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, Johnson joked early on that Dick had come as the aged Professor Travers from The Web of Fear and that he himself had come as a Yeti. The session kicked off with a quiz and a cheeky round-up of the social media comments of people attending, there followed the first three episodes, then an onstage interview, the final three episodes, another onstage interview and a sneak peak at some of the Value Added Material from the disc release of the animation, then the final panel. Before all that, as has become a tradition, Fiddy paid tribute to one of the Doctor Who family who had sadly left us all recently - Bernard Cribbins. Johnson knew Cribbins from a Bafta committee, and told an anecdote about Elaine Page unexpectedly calling him (she was wanting to sort out BFI membership for a relative), and Cribbins being in the room with her. They were at the time both working on Russell T Davies's BBC version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Tell Justin I'm in my pants!" Cribbins shouted in the background. Another scoop (which someone tweeted during the showing of the first episode, which Johnson comically upbraided them for at the intermission) was the reveal that the next BFI screening would be The Time Meddler on the 29th October 2022 as a tie-in for the next Blu-ray boxset release of season two (William Hartnell's second year). The prizes for the quiz were all general - rather than Doctor Who specific - Abominable Snowman tat, so I didn't 'shout for Dick' (Johnson: "Some of you are more used to shouting that than others") despite knowing most of the answers. One social media comment Johnson read out was someone asking if any gay people would be attending - huge laugh from the crowd - Johnson: "Statistically speaking, maybe one or two"; another tweeter didn't know what the BFI was and speculated that it stood for "Best Friends' Institute".

Fiddy (L), Johnson (R)

Throughout the opening, Johnson kept referring to the story as The Abominable Snowman, effectively reducing the threat level by three quarters, and I just thought he was having an off day; but, Alan, who was sitting next to me pointed out to me that it was a typo on the screen-saver behind him, so maybe Johnson was persuaded by this mistake that it was the correct name for the story. In the break between the two halves of the story, the interviewee was Jess Jurkovic. He is a New York based fan and pianist who has an interesting youtube account where he works out, transcribes and then performs Dudley Simpson incidental music from Doctor Who. Simpson was the most prolific composer for the classic years of Doctor Who, but very little of his music survives as isolated tracks or sheet music. Jurkovic looked ecstatic just to be in London, let alone on stage; he talked about how he became a fan in 1982 watching stories on PBS, jokingly teased the Brits in the audience saying that he got The Five Doctors a few days before them across the pond (it's true!), and talked warmly about how the videos he's made have reconnected him to the fan community; he'd attended the Gallifrey One convention in the US recently, thirty years after attending his first convention as a youngster. A grand piano was set up in one corner of NFT1, and we were treated to a brief tinkle of the ivories. This started with a rather funny tribute to the music of The Abominable Snowmen (a story famous for having no music). The "first movement" of this was a snatch of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which the Doctor plays on his recorder when imprisoned in the monastery in episode two). The second movement was just two notes played over and over, to replicate the sound effect of the control sphere. This was followed by Jurkovic playing a memorable cue from later Troughton story The Seeds of Death. Support his Patreon, people.

Jurkovic at the piano

After the second half of the story had finished, Chris Chapman was welcomed onto the stage. He has been responsible for many documentaries on Doctor Who DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, and has made one called Troughton in Tibet (the title inspired by a Hergé Tintin book) for the disc release of The Abominable Snowmen. This involved taking presenter Toby Hadoke and Jamie actor Frazer Hines to the area of Snowdonia used for the original filming. He did a recce with Doctor Who locations expert and researcher Richard Bignell, and his first impression was that this should be a site of pilgrimage for Doctor Who fans. A shot of the same place is also coincidentally a backdrop used behind the logo on every episode of Countryfile (a series that Chapman works on). This was obvious when the opening shots of the documentary were shown after Chapman left the stage. Fiddy mused that it will probably surprise the Countryfile producers when next week's episode gets a spike in viewers. Chapman detailed that despite there being not many people still alive from the original cast or production, they managed to get eight new interviews and also used five archive interviews from people no longer with us. One of the new interviews was with last surviving Yeti actor from the story John Hogan, who has sadly died since the filming was done last year. Chapman paid him a brief tribute from the stage. The first six minutes of the documentary were then shown, and it looks amazing: some stunning drone shots of the vistas of the mountain and valleys. As in another of Chapman's Who documentaries, they took a TARDIS prop to the location to recreate an image from the original story, and Hines's reaction when first seeing it is lovely to witness.

Fiddy (L), Chapman (R)

The final panel featured three people involved in the animation: Gary Russell (executive producer and director), Rob Ritchie (3D animator) and Ioan Morris (Concept Designer). It's fair to say that it was the first of these three that did most of the talking. The animation has been in production for sixteen months, and Morris's work is all up front doing the first drafts of character designs. He said that when watching the screening his was a surprised reaction of "Oh yeah, I worked on this". Ritchie modestly said that his contribution was merely to send over to Russell "Four renders of a TARDIS". Russell explained that Ritchie works for "the other team". Gary Russell's animated productions are Fury from the Deep, the Web of Fear episode 3, Galaxy 4 and The Abominable Snowmen; the other team led by AnneMarie Walsh created The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks. The two teams do occasionally collaborate; Russell thought it was important for the range as a whole to have consistent elements and not reinvent the wheel, so Ritchie's season five TARDIS and his beginning credits sequence was shared. The decision to change the ethnicities of the monastery inhabitants was a deliberate one, which Russell and Morris worked on early on in the process. Russell talked passionately about this, disagreeing with the usual line that there weren't sufficient actors of the correct ethnicities to play the roles back then, and saying it was his one big bugbear with original director Gerald Blake's work; "We were going to rectify that decision from 1967 because frankly it's bloody insulting".

(L to R) Johnson, Russell, Ritchie, Morris

For the warrior monk costumes, even though no monk in history has ever worn such a design or colour combination, the designs used in the animation stayed faithful. For the lamas' robes, which were a bit dull in the original, they took inspiration from another Doctor Who story featuring Buddhism, Jon Pertwee's swansong Planet of the Spiders: the colour scheme is based on the costume worn by the character Cho-Je in that later story. Script and designs are sent to Digitoonz Media & Entertainment, the animators based in India, and they create the finished product in small chunks (you might get 15 seconds a day if you're lucky according to Russell, although the longest sequence was the 1.5 minute section where Victoria feigns being poisoned to escape from a locked room, and that took ages to download, the file size was phenomenal). There was a brief to everyone working on the animation not to view the surviving episode two for reference. The six episodes of the animation had to all be of a piece and work as a coherent whole; anyway, the approach and techniques of animation are very different to live action. Part of the reason why it took so long to get The Abominable Snowmen finished was that the same team were asked to do Galaxy 4 simultaneously, to which they couldn't really say no. Russell said that it was accomplished at the cost of only one nervous breakdown, which he counted as a win. He was generally quite dismissive of  Galaxy 4 as a choice for an animation because of the quality of the story ("Who would want to make that? Who would want to watch it?!"), but Russell and his team created something more than adequate (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this post for more details).

Note the typo

There was time for only a couple of audience questions. Doctor Who historian Jeremy Bentham asked a question about the new look for Padmasambhava. Russell said his inspiration was EC Comics character the Crypt Keeper, rather than from Scooby Doo as I'd thought. He believed that the actor Wolfe Morris's build wasn't right for the script's description of the desiccated guru, so they diverged from faithfulness at this point. They may also have embellished with the scene towards the end when the artificially long-lived Padmasambhava, freed from the Great Intelligence, disintegrates. The surviving off screen photos don't confirm either way, and memories differ as to whether the scene was excised from the final version in 1967 or not. Russell's memory from originally watching the story is that the disintegration moment was in there, and Bentham, also of an age to have seen it first time round, agreed with his recall. The final audience question was niche, but to be fair the questioner prefaced his question with a disclaimer about its potential to invoke a rolling of the eyes. Why do Gary Russell's team's animations show Patrick Troughton with green eyes when he had blue eyes in real life? Russell explained that he'd asked all of Troughton's co-stars what their Doctor's eye colour was, and was told by all of them that they were blue-green. This was research long before the animations for his novel Invasion of the Cat People ("It's terrible" its author added as an aside, sotto voce), where the eye colour was a plot point. He chose the green rather than the blue end of the range in the animations because it would make the Doctor seem more alien and would stand out from the rest of the cast that would be mainly blue and brown-eyed. Earlier in the panel discussion, Russell confirmed that this is their last animation for now, and they're not working on any more. This was expected, but still a shame. He did add, though, that the animated releases to date have come in waves with gaps in between: "These things are cyclical". On the evidence of The Abominable Snowmen, and all the wonderful animations of recent years, I hope the next wave isn't too long.

In Summary:

It's not abominable. It's mostly pretty bominable, actually, particularly now one can see it move.