Doctor Who: Adventures (TV Series)

Doctor Who: Adventures was a Doctor Who television animated-spinoff series. It was produced by CBS Eye Animation Productions for the BBC and ViacomCBS. It featured Samantha Bond, reprising her role as the Fourteenth Doctor, alongside Montserrat Lombard, as Erin Stevenson, and William Moseley as Kyle Harrison.

Origins
The show was the third revival of a former Doctor to the screen in just a year and a half, with the Twelfth Doctor returning to the big screen in 2018 and the Eleventh Doctor getting his own adult oriented spinoff series. Jane Espenson, the Franchise Executive, in the wake of a lot of brand uncertainty, was looking to double-down on, what had initially just been a result of studio hostility, different doctors leading each show. She’d already had CBBC onto her office, several times over the past few years, about providing some sort of Doctor Who content for them.

On top of this, Espenson was well aware that over the past few years, lots of Doctor Who’s child audience had dropped off, with the programme going into some darker themes and places. With children being Doctor Who’s foundation audience, Espenson knew there was something she needed to do about this.

A cartoon featuring a former TARDIS team, who they’d easily be able to get the actors back to step into a recording studio, seemed the logical step. Espenson did consider inventing a new Doctor and companions just for the children to have, but believed they’d be more likely to get fans to also watch it, if they brought back an old TARDIS team. They considered a few different teams, but settled on 14, Erin and Kyle, especially as Samantha Bond was enthusiastic to come back and do more, especially as she only had to read from a script, unlike the high-intensity work on the actual show.

Espenson appointed Phil Ford as the showrunner of the show, and left it to him, from that point on, to create the show and decide just what it was going to be. Ford immediately instigated several rules for writers of the show, to set the boundaries of what Doctor Who especially for kids was:


 * 1) No people dying on screen
 * 2) No sex references
 * 3) No realistic guns firing - only fantasy laser beams can fire - and they mustn’t hit anyone
 * 4) Must have moral message
 * 5) Monsters in Every Story
 * 6) Short, snappy and most of all Fun!

The show would only be 25 minutes in length, so the stories happened at a much faster pace than the show was used to. In addition, due to the fact that the show was animated, Espenson managed to fulfil one of her biggest pet peeves about the Samantha Bond era – which was the fact that it was set mainly in the 1970s, but every time they needed to do a proper alien invasion story, they had to go to the present day, as using 1970s UNIT would have meant using those characters. Now, they could set all those stories in the 1970s and have a few vocal cameos from some of the 1970s Doctor Who cast (which while it wouldn’t matter to kids, as they’d be just another character), it’d be a bit of a treat for Doctor Who fans watching along.

The animation style was a hybrid of 2D and 3D animation. The backgrounds and exterior space shots were all done with 3D animation; however all the character animation was 2D inserted over the 3D sets.

For the title sequence, it’s about 20 seconds long and sees the TARDIS whizzing past loads of different alien planets, with the Doctor, Erin and Kyle sticking their heads out of the door, looking around. The theme tune is a new short and lighter arrangement of the 14th Doctor’s theme (by Bear McCreary), with the main Doctor Who ‘ooo-wee-ooo’ riff playing at the end over the title card.

Premise
To be added.

Main Cast

 * The Doctor - Samantha Bond
 * Erin Stevenson - Montserrat Lombard
 * Kyle Harrison - William Moseley

Recurring Cast

 * Danielle Stevenson - Susannah Harker
 * Roger Stevenson - Trevor Cooper

Home Media Releases
To be added.