Inauguration - Monochrome Malarkey

Doo we-oooo...

And here we are.

For the last two months and change, I've been embroiled in a fun little project over on Gallifrey Base's "Long Game" forum, the home of all marathoning efforts on that fansite. As a Doctor Who fan of a mere(ish) six years, I'm woefully uninitiated in most of the classic series. I hear it's something of a rite of passage to make it through the entire program in order, from the start to the finish. Having now speedily started my way into the show's first years, I have decided to host my little reviews on an off-Base platform to make them a little more available to outside readers, as well as to group them somewhere with a more logical content cataloging setup. From here on out, everything that I publish there will also be published here. Joy!

What's Valentime and Space?

Aside from a really nauseating pun, it's a dedicated space for whatever Doctor Who content I might feel inclined to spit out, including this and all future marathon attempts, and probably (inevitably) for other TV and movie reviews and analysis somewhere on down the line. I have been pondering about where to try a similar marathoning effort for The X-Files for months, and eventually came to accept that a personal blog would probably be best. Multitasking is a beautiful thing - and like most beautiful things, dangerous, too.

What's Monochrome Malarkey?

The first of my in-order Doctor Who marathon's six parts, naturally. For convenience's sake on this marathon's message board home, I'm planning to split the whole project into six discrete threads, each one covering a certain era in the program's history, and with uniformity in mind I'm keeping the basic skeleton of these segments delineated here too. Just call it a nod to my compulsive interest in organization and leave it at that. Monochrome Malarkey, the first of these, could be subtitled variously with 60s Who, or the black-and-white years, for these are what it covers. From 1963's An Unearthly Child to 1969's The War Games, Doctor Who's early years run the gamut from great classics to justifiably derided garbage and everything in between. It's a weird, eclectic period where the program only just begins to discover what it wants to do with itself, and in which it reacts in fits and starts to the social climate of its time. Just based on what little I've seen and heard so far, I'm totally stoked to discover what else is waiting for me in this period.

What's next?

Some review posts, obviously. Shortly, I'll be copying over the ones I have already put together to bring this space up to speed. Future updates will arrive as they're posted on the forum thread. Cheers!