Science fiction lovers rejoice! You may be in between new episodes of Dr. Who, however that doesn’t mean that you can’t head to iTunes and checkout long lost episodes of the famed British television icon and according to Slate, they are actually something to get excited about.
The new piece, written by Mac Rogers, details exactly why long-time sufferers — we mean fans — should be excited to see Patrick Troughton play both the hero and villain in one of the long lost episodes that the BBC announced it’d found late last week.
“From 1963 to 1969 the BBC broadcast fifty Doctor Who serials, comprising altogether 253 individual episodes. These were stored after broadcast in two ways: on two-inch videotape in the BBC’s Engineering department, and as 16mm film in the BBC’s international wing, BBC Enterprises, for the purposes of foreign sale. Between 1967 and 1978, a huge number of the original master-tapes were wiped. Why? Partly because they needed the videotapes to use for new programming—videotapes used to be really expensive!—and partly because it was incorrectly thought that BBC Enterprises was keeping backup copies. For their part, BBC Enterprises were junking a number of their film versions of the black-and-white 1960s serials, thinking their commercial viability had come to an end with the advent of color television”
Users can download the missing episodes from the iTunes Store.
