"Banal, beaten to death ideas"? I assume you mean the CIA / conspiracy thriller angle, and not the "what would happen if suddenly nobody could die?" angle, which is minty fresh as far as I can recall.

This movie was being promoted when I was at DragonCon in 1986 (I was there to meet Peter Davison and JNT!). I still have a promotional flier for it someplace - but I never actually recall the movie coming out! LOL

I think it's worth noting that when Spielberg's Amblin was thinking of taking over the Doctor Who franchise in the 1990s, they commissioned new Dalek designs that looked like this:

So, you don't want much TV, but your beef is there's not enough Who, so you might rather have none at all?

Day for night much?

The Daleks are not made by the BBC Props Department, but a company called This Planet Earth. They are amazing - and no, they don't waste their time making replicas of the "new" Daleks.

It was a VINTAGE color-tinted print, it's not a Ted Turner Crayola job. Films back then were very often shown in hand-colored prints, and they always had musical accompaniment. What IS the problem here?

But...they tinted the movie THEN, not now. And they have always shown silent films with soundtracks (and even sound effects). What's the problem? Anyway, have you heard Air? Their music will be perfect for this.

How about the giant-sized Audrey IIs from the deleted ending of "Little Shop of Horrors"? They show it getting large enough to easily eat the Brooklyn Bridge.

One might say that the Mail is actually trying to boost those ratings...cause everybody knows that stories about how Doctor Who is "too scary" have been going on since about 1964, and they can only improve, not hurt, its audience share!

Just click it, and it should expand.

The United Artists logo always freaked me out. It's so creepy! The ominous music, the slowly rotating letters, I don't know, it just always unnerved me.

Scary stuff!

Awesome intro - designed by Bernard Lodge of Doctor Who fame, with music by Dudley Simpson, also of Doctor Who fame. :)

Agreed on both counts!

And, um, Liberty?

They really look great on screen - but weirdly enough the spidery puppet one looks terrible in real life. It's on display in the Berlin Cinema Museum and it is a weird plastic puppet that would never stand up to scrutiny - unless backlit, surrounded by fog, and filmed by Spielberg, of course!

Plus being on at the ridiculously early time of 6:30 in the afternoon!

I have a sneaky suspicion that his future TARDIS is disguised as the red vintage car.

The episode was the standard length, which is about 45 minutes without commercials. It's the 60 minutes episodes that are the exception.