With its Atlantis setting, fish people and mad scientists, The Underwater Menace makes for a wonderfully comic book-esque instalment in Doctor Who‘s fourth season. By this time, Patrick Troughton had established himself as the new Doctor, Frazer Hines had been introduced as fan-favourite companion Jamie McCrimmon and the production team were experimenting with the new TARDIS team, also comprising of Anneke Wills‘ Polly and Michael Craze‘s Ben. Fans have been treated to many animated recreations from this season of adventures over the past few years, so it comes as no surprise that The Underwater Menace – in all its daft, campy glory – has been re-imagined in this new release from BBC Studios.

The story sees the TARDIS team arrive in Atlantis where they encounter the mad scientist Professor Zaroff, who has promised to lift the underwater city out of the ocean. What he hasn’t warned the Atlanteans though is that his plan involves the city being blown up. It’s up to the Doctor, Jamie, Ben and Polly stop Zaroff – otherwise…nothing in the world can stop him now!

‘Fun’ is the key word I think of when it comes to The Underwater Menace. Sure, a lot of it doesn’t make any sense, and tonally it’s something of an oddity in the Doctor Who canon, but Geoffrey Orme‘s script is full of bonkers ideas and at only four episodes the story never manages to overstay its welcome. Patrick Troughton is clearly having fun with his various disguises, while Joseph Fürst chews as much scenery as possible in his brilliantly over-the-top villainous role as Zaroff. It’s disappointing that the aforementioned fish people haven’t got anything to do, and this is by no means an all-time classic Who story, yet The Underwater Menace has a fantastic Saturday morning cartoon feeling, making it apt for this animated re-imagining.

The animation is provided by the BBC Studios team responsible for The Power of the Daleks, The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks, and it’s interesting to see the art style evolve over each release. It’s a curious decision to animate the full serial when Episodes 2 and 3 of The Underwater Menace exist in full (the earliest surviving Troughton episodes), although this has allowed the animation team to take various artistic liberties and create an engaging standalone production, as opposed to an accompaniment to the existing instalments. Fans are already divided over this approach, so those who didn’t like previous releases will probably find that their criticisms carry over into The Underwater Menace.

That being said, I do think that the animated production is really polished, and the story itself is perfect for the new medium. The sets are larger, more impressive and quite colourful, the redesigned fish people aren’t hindered by a 60’s BBC budget and there’s a lot more fluidity to the character movements than in some previous animations. Comparisons with the live-action footage are inevitable, and it’s fair to say that the animation can never fully do justice to the various mannerisms in Patrick Troughton or the rest of the cast’s performances. There are also some interesting lighting effects that I wish had been experimented with a little more, as it does provide an added sense of depth to the compositions. That being said, if this is the standard for Doctor Who missing episode animations moving forwards, I think we’re in safe hands for future releases.

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Special Features

For this new DVD/Blu-ray release, all four animated episodes of The Underwater Menace are available to watch in widescreen and colour, as well as in 4:3 black and white. The surviving original Episodes 2 and 3 are also included alongside telesnap recreations of Episodes 1 and 4. Other extras include Frazer Hines‘ introduction for Episode 2 from the story’s VHS release, Australian Censor Clips, The Man from Miditz (a previously unreleased 1964 drama starring Patrick Troughton and Joseph Fürst), BBC News Report (South Today), BBC Radio Solent Piece (audio only), Photo and Animation Galleries, PDF material and from the 2015 DVD release, the making-of documentary A Fishy Tale.

With the new animation and a whole host of extras, this is sure to be a must-have release for Doctor Who fans for its 60th anniversary year.

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace is available to pre-order on DVD, Blu-ray and Blu-ray Steelbook now: https://amzn.to/3xezgCo