Saturday 18 December 2010

Doctor Who: The Wheel in Space (1968)

What a difference a year makes.
Arriving in the future, The Doctor and his companions find themselves on an Earth space station in time to thwart yet another Cyberman invasion.  That’s about it really!
Whilst not considered to be one of the classic stories in the shows history, it does however feature what is probably its most realistic space suite to date.
Yes, that is indeed a Windak high altitude pressure suit, developed for the RAF and first seen embarking on an acting career in the 1964 film version of The First Men in the Moon.
I’ll make a couple of assumptions at this point and say that the BBC hired these from a costume suppliers rather than recreating them in house and that these are therefore most probably the very same suits to feature in the HG Well’s classic.
Although there are only black and white reference pictures, you can still see the tonal difference between the two suits, suggesting to me that these are the dark blue/black one and the yellow one. 
We’ll catch up with these two again in the future in a galaxy far, far away where they’ll be keeping company with some equally starry space suits from across the pond.

Steve

6 comments:

  1. Its like the story about the haunted house of a California amusement park that actually had a 'prospector's skeleton' in one of the gag effects for visitors. Just goes to show, that if anything is interesting enough it will end up in show business.

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  2. Thanks for the comments tom. Doctor Who has a long history of recycling real world stuff into the future. There's one background bit of space age prop that has been in a half a dozen stories over the years that is actually the end bit of the fuel pipe for refuelling planes in mid air. And thats not to mention the condoms that became giant maggots.

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  3. Lets hope they animate the missing episodes and throw it out on DVD.

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  4. Hi Steve,

    "We’ve only seen three previously and one of those is now MIA"

    The third suit is in Wheel In Space too - you can see it in episode 6:

    Telesnaps: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/wheelinspace/six/contactsheet.shtml

    Pictures:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/wheelinspace/six/41.shtml

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/wheelinspace/six/43.shtml

    Here's a clearer photo of all three which I screencapped from the Lost In Time DVD:

    https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7308/26493733393_612b2d5222.jpg

    The suit on the left has some slight differences from the other two.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much, Phillip. That's a fantastic revelation. Nothing I had watched or researched previously had shown me all three of the suits together. I'll do a re-edit of the above post but feel this is worth an update of its own. Tracking the Windak suits was one of the main aims of this blog at the very beginning all those years ago, along with the Moon Zero Two and Doppelganger suits. Just brilliant and much appreciated

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