Review of The Daleks in Colour by IceAgeComing
5 June 2024
This review contains spoilers
I'll not repeat my thoughts on the initial story in detail - but in short I think the Daleks is a great story (rated 4 stars); hurt by some bad pacing issues. That made me incredibly interested in this story - how does this modern remastering impact the story. I think there are two main positives that help to make this story a slight improvement; but also some negatives.
The colourisation is the main appeal of this and is a total success - a lot of colourisations don't look nice but this looked entirely natural as a piece of early colour TV. Flesh tones looked natural (often a sign of substandard colourisations); the choices of colours for the set and costumes were often accurate to existing photos; and where they didn't exist (or slightly adapted) it was in a way that feels natural for late 60s/early 70s colour television. If they were minded to do more like this I would not object seeing this - in particular this makes me interested in seeing what something with more on location scenes like Dalek Invasion of Earth would look like.
The editing also worked to improve the pacing. I wasn't a big fan of the flashback focuses but I understand why they were used - to cover up edits - and the plot points that were removed were noticeable for those of us who've seen the original but I don't think that obvious outside. I think the one point that might be questionable would be the Doctor/Susan/Alydon going to the city but they needed to show why the Doctor and Susan ended up captured.
The sound design is more mixed in my eyes. The way that they re-recorded a number of the Dalek scenes to speed up the edit or make some slight edits to the show (replacing the 'can't build a neutron bomb in time so need to cause the reactor to vent' story with just a neutron bomb one is an example) I thought worked very well; and bringing back David Graham (at 98 years old!) to record some of these new lines alongside Nicholas Briggs worked very well - you could tell a slight difference between the older and newer lines of Graham but it matched well; and really it was Briggs' well developed voice that stood out here. Where I felt the sound design didn't work quite as well was the new soundtrack - areas of it worked very well (and Mark Ayres always does a good job) but elements seemed slightly over the top and it also covered up voices at points which I suspect was as much because they needed to cover edits/the old soundtrack. I think they needed to do something for this show; but the limitations of what they were working from shows up.
Overall very much worth a watch - and I think a slight improvement on the original version. I see reasons to watch either of them but I think today I'd pick the colourised version as my favourite.