The folks at JEFusion.com shared footage from this year’s Power Morphicon of Saban Entertainment’s promo reel for next year’s Power Rangers series. Their seventeenth series, Power Rangers Megaforce, will be based on the thirty-fourth of Toei Company’s Super Sentai series, Tensou Sentai Goseiger.
Starting with the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers in 1993, based on Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, Saban has been producing series using costumes, props and action footage from the Japanese originals. The series have remained a perennial hit in the States, as the original series has done in Japan for the past thirty-six years.
It’s not the first time the name has appeared in entertainment either. One of the original sentai series had “mega” in the title; Denji Sentai Megaranger, which was used to create 1998’s Power Rangers in Space. Action film fans may remember the Hal Needham directed MegaForce, starring Barry Bostwick and Persis Khambatta. More important to the toy manufacturer side of the process, MegaForce was a line of military adventure vehicles from Kenner in 1998. It’s assumed the trademarks for those series have already lapsed, otherwise Saban might have to pull a “Metro” and change the name (as Microsoft has been forced to for its new Windows 8 interface).
In addition to using footage from Goseiger, the new series will also be using footage from the sentai feature film, Gokaiger Goseiger Super Sentai 199 Hero Great Battle. This was the film release for the NEXT Sentai series, Kaizoku Sentail Gokaiger, which featured a massive battle where all 35 of the sentai teams to date united to fight a massive alien threat. However, since Megaforce is the anniversary series in America, the reunion footage will be used there. Footage of the battles in the promo reel included shots of all past sentai teams, including series that were never used for American series, much to the delight of the audience. Saban said there’s no confirmation if those non-MMPR heroes will appear in the final series. They had asked Toei to film sequences featuring only Zyuranger forward – it’s unknown how much of the all-heroes footage will be used in the final product.
The promo reel was well received by fans at the convention, especially footage from the 199 hero great battle. Saban has been experiencing a resurgence of popularity of the series. After several series produced in association with other companies including Disney, the current series, Power Rangers Samurai, is the first they’ve produced on their own since 2001. Saban has brought the Internet into their marketing in a big way- their website and Facebook page appeal to both new and long-time fans of the series. They’ve also released DVD sets for the previous series, including a 40-DVD set from Time-Life of the first 7 series.
Power Rangers Samurai is currently running on Nickelodeon.
Last Saturday was a busy day if you were a Doctor Who fan in New York City. The first episode of the new series, Asylum of the Daleks, had its US premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater, the largest single-screen theater in the city they could lay their hands on. After a minor frenzy to obtain tickets, fans were treated to an hour-long thrill ride as The Doctor and his friends Amy and Rory fought against more Daleks than you could shake an eye-stalk at. But the activity began earlier in the day, as the folks at BBC America made stars Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, as well as co-producer Caroline Skinner available for interviews to the appreciative hordes of the working press.
Matt Smith (The Doctor) is currently shooting the Christmas special (“Which you have to shoot in August, because what could be more silly” explained Caro Skinner) and arranged a break in his schedule so he could fly to New York specifically to attend the premiere. “I want to film every single episode in New York, I want to get that out there right now. I absolutely love this place. Any way you point a camera, there’s something wonderful and beautiful to look at. The Light here sort of falls between the grids of the buildings so wonderfully. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’d like to come live here one day. And it’s great to do a sort of periody piece here – the locations afford you so much.”
In the aforementioned special, “[The Doctor] meets his new chum…or someone he thinks is his new chum”, played by newcomer to the series, Jenna-Louise Coleman. When asked about how The Doctor acts when he hasn’t got a companion, Matt admits he’s “really interested by the time he spends on his own. I think he gets more dangerous when he’s on his own. I think he needs that sort of human moral compass, that human sensibility. He needs that, he doesn’t have the same grasp of it. It’s interesting to think about the character becoming more reclusive, and on his own. Just this old man, wandering around the universe, trying to put things right…killing loads of innocent people along the way. when you look at it, there’s a lot of clerics that die in certain episodes.”
This season of thirteen regular episodes is broken into a short set of five, the final eight coming in 2013, after the Christmas special. The only “arc” in this five is what matt calls “The fall of the Ponds”. “We start off exactly where we left him,” Matt explains, “a man who is trying to step back a bit, into the shadows, and be less prominent, less famous, less apparent, less destructive. less of all those things that he started to struggle with. We see him trying to deal with that, as a character, or personality trait, it’s absolutely something he’s trying to deal with. Perhaps it does make his soul a bit darker, because he’s alone a lot more. As Amy says, it’s unhealthy for him, I think, ultimately, to be alone too long.”
When discussing the new episode, everyone has said the Daleks are “scary again”. “We’ve got the design of them better,” says Matt. “We’ve drawn from every Dalek, every one ever on its…well, you can’t say ‘legs’, can you? On their…space wheels. And The Asylum, you’ll see tonight, it’s…Dalek-Land. Like a perfect theme park – everything’s made for Daleks, it’s sort of ridiculous. The doors all go like that (makes a triangle shape with his hands) cause they’re all fat at the bottom. The world is really sort of gruesome and frightening. The design, and the tone, and the way it’s lit, I think we’ve achieved our intention with their nature.”
Karen Gillan (Amy Pond Williams) admitted something fairly major – “I’ve never found the Daleks…all that scary. I’ve loved them, cause they’re so iconic. But in this episode, they’re properly frightening.
I wondered if this “asylum” was more in the sense of a place where you keep mad people, of a place where dangerous people beg to be kept safe. Matt surmised, “I think it is [the first], but I rather like the idea of Daleks SO mad, they’re asking, ‘don’t let me out’. If they had more of a human consciousness, the latter could apply, but the Daleks don’t have that, it’s just not there. It’s just alien evil, encased in a tank. That’s why The Doctor has had this life-long war, that’s why they are his greatest foe, there’s nothing redemptive about them. They are only evil, and that’s the way he sees them; only evil.”
“This is an interesting episode for the nature of the Daleks”, Matt thinks. “We learn a lot, Steven cleverly reveals. As I think you have to with any villain that comes back. They have to have moved on somehow. And I think Steven’s done that here, he’s explored their nature in a very interesting way.”
The recurring theme of meeting historical figures will come round again, in an odd way. “In episode four, we encounter someone’s feet. He was a king, and he’s chasing us…and I’m not gonna give anything else away.” When asked what figure he might like to see appear, Matt was introspective. “Was Tarzan real? He wasn’t real was he? I kind of like the idea of The Doctor swinging from the branches, but being really bad at it.”
Gillan had a rather definite opinion about her character, specifically about the possibility of a return after this season’s assuredly dramatic departure. “I’ve always said that when I go, I want it to be for good. Because I want that final scene to have that same impact, maybe ten years on. I want people to be able to revisit it and still have the same emotion. That’s really important for me, so for that reason, I think I’m going to rule out any returns.” However, when I quietly complimented her on her ability to lie, she replied, “I learned it from the best!”
This season will start with a five-part webisode prequel, Pond Life, which will be made available on the BBC’s You Tube channel. “That was really interesting,” Karen recalls. “Cause you never get to see the snippets in between their adventures with The Doctor. And that’s what Pond Life is all about. And the in episode four (The Power of Three) that’s what the whole episode is about – these two people trying to deal with their domestic life, with this time-traveler popping in and out of their lives, whisking them off into these crazy adventures.”
“Steven (Moffat) and I wanted to do a fairly substantial piece about the Ponds and their relationship with The Doctor,” explained Executive producer Caroline Skinner, “kind of in general, and in between series six and seven. And one of the exciting thing about this series of episodes is you’ve got Amy and Rory as a married couple, and The Doctor popping in and out of their life, and taking them on adventures, and then dropping them off again. And we wanted something to set up that context, and really let people get an emotional sense of their relationship. And to see what The Doctor popping in and out meant from their point of view. You’ve got him coming in like that crazy little child, and throwing everything up in the air.”
“We were working at the time with brilliant writer Chris Chibnall (writer of 42 and The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood for Who, and numerous episodes of Torchwood), and he’s just got the most beautiful way for writing for Amy and Rory, and we asked him to put pen to paper, and that’s what we got.”
In this, her first full season producing the show, Caro brings to the table “A huge amount of passion for [the series], I’ve always loved it, and massive enthusiasm and ambition to make this the biggest series ever. And so does Steven. I sat down on day minus-one, just before I got the job, and he pitched me what he wanted to do with the series. And miraculously, in fifteen minutes, he’d pitched me all 13 stories for each episode, and I was just sat there saying ‘Wow, that’s quite a lot.’ And it was just so exciting to hear, to be honest, and I just wanted to bring my enthusiasm to bear to make all those ideas come to life, in the most ambitious way that we could.”
While chatting, Karen shared a problem she had with the many deaths of Rory Williams: “Each time, I have to invent a sort of new ‘death reaction.’ What am I going to do now?” She didn’t have any such problems filming her final scenes. “It not even acting, it’s just real. And it was honestly, just one of the most powerful feelings, and I just related it to how I genuinely felt. [that scene] was fairly far along in the shooting, but our very last scene was kind of an insignificant one, just us getting into the TARDIS, going ‘bye!’ But it became significant, cause it was the last time were going into the TARDIS together. So Matt closed the door, and we were in total darkness, and we all had a massive hug in the dark. And I cried, and milked it for all it was worth. It was amazing.”
Of all the episodes she’s filmed, Karen still considered The Eleventh Hour to be her favorite. “There was a particular magic to that episode. We were introducing the characters and establishing their relationship for the first time, and it was all so exciting. Actually, my favorite scene doesn’t even involve me at all, it’s the fish/custard scene, with my little cousin (Caitlin Blackwood) and Matt.”
Karen’s met some very wonderful fans, but had a couple stories about a couple that…stuck in her mind. One was a fellow who had actually had his name changed to “River Song”, and dressed as her for the convention, and a second fellow from Australia who had customized his house to a Doctor Who theme – “He had a TARDIS elevator, the gates had the logo – it had to cost some money.”
All three of the guests agreed that filming in New York City was a wonderful experience. “We filmed in Central Park and had hundreds of fans,” Matt recalls, “following us. It was remarkable, like nothing I’d ever witnessed before.” Karen agreed – ” Just to contain the excitement of being in Central Park was a challenge. We didn’t have any sort of security, we didn’t think anything like [hundreds of fans] was going to happen. But what was really nice is everybody respected the shooting, they were really quiet, and the they said ‘Cut,’ and it was all ‘Sign my TARDIS!'” Caroline explained, “When we shoot in the UK, we’ll get quite a few people following us around, and the fan base absolutely adore the show. But in my career, I’ve never known anything…I don’t think anyone had prepared themselves for what shooting in New York would be like. Least of all, our producers here in New York, who had done various movies here, and they’re all saying, ‘Caro, I don’t mean to be funny, but you’ve got twice as many people as Julia Roberts here!’ Just a wonderful experience. We had maybe twenty, thirty people in central park in the morning, and the crowd just grew, and by the end, we were shooting at a big fountain, and we could hardly hold the people back. And the sheer love and passion for the show was in the air, and it made the entire experience so special.
Indeed, Caroline called Angels in Manhattan the most challenging episode of this front half of the season. “Challenging for Steven because he’s written the most beautiful and heartbreaking exit story and there are some scenes in there that just so absolutely emotional. It’s an enormous thing to change companions, and you absolutely have to get that story right. And at the same time, we wanted to make the New York setting as resonant as we possibly could, and really make it feel to every detail, that we’d set it over here. And we did, we came here. We worked incredibly hard to get to get out and about to every New York landmark that we could, but more so to create that sort of noirish atmosphere that shooting in this city is so famous for. To make the story feel as beautiful as it possibly could do.
As for next year, which will of course be 2013, the fiftieth anniversary year for the series. “All I can say at this point”, said Caroline, guardedly, “Is that next year i going to be the biggest year of Doctor Who, bar none. I spent a lot of my time in strange underground rooms, with senior people at the BBC, and talking about what we might do. And not just on television; but other things, cause obviously Doctor Who has a lot of live events. So there are many plans afoot, which are all wonderful, and are all absolutely top secret.”
Writing for science fiction is always a challenge, as eventually someone has to ask how much things will cost, and that’s ultimately Caroline’s job. “We are treated very nicely by the BBC, but it’s always, whatever show you do, however big of small the budget is, you always want more. The thing we do on Doctor Who, as much as we possibly can do, is to let writers write exactly what they want, and then try not to cut anything, What you tend to get, in a Doctor Who script, is if it doesn’t, in terms of the production challenges, within it, in terms of location, in terms of special effects, just sheer story-based ambition…if it doesn’t scare you, as well as the monsters, we’re none of us are working hard enough.”
Later that evening, Matt and Karen arrived at the Ziegfeld theater in twin DeLoreans, to the sound of the cheering crowds, and of reality folding in upon itself. The episode itself was met with delight by the audience, and as the trio were so earnest in their requests to keep it all a secret (especially the BIG where where…ok, sorry), well, who are we to refuse them. suffice to say we learn about a great deal more about how Daleks think, how they treat their failures, and what they see as beautiful. The question and answer session was filled with laughs as, among other things, we learned that Matt had to help Karen zip up her dress (“Twice!”), the cast think that Peter Sellers and Bill Nighy would make great Doctors, and in answer to a young girl who asked “Why does Amy always get in trouble?”, Karen simply answered “Well, she’s a risk-taker”. Matt shared a story about his Mum, who was with him at the premiere (and was received with great cheers). She’s quite the fan of the series herself, and when they were looking for the new Doctor, she sent him a text saying “You should be the new Doctor”, and he had already gotten cast, and couldn’t even tell her. So if he’s that good at keeping secrets, surely the 1,200 member of the audience can keep schtum for a week.
Asylum of the Daleks premieres September 1st at 9PM EDT on BBC America. Check you local listing, especially in HD as several major cable and satellite carries have recently added the BBC America HD channel to their lineups.
Doctor Who fans don’t have to hold it anymore. The Great Question has been answered. No, not the one about Life, The Universe and Everything, or even the one that will be asked on the Fields of Trenzilor at the Fall Of The Eleventh. The BIG question – “When will Doctor Who premiere?”
And the answer is, September 1st. And it’s the SAME answer whether you live in America or the UK, with only a slight variance in detail. In the UK, the premiere episode Asylum of the Daleks will broadcast at 7:20 PM, and in the states at 9 PM, EDT.
The episode has already seen its premiere in the UK via a gala celebration, and will see its US premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on August 25th. Tickets for the NYC event sold out in under half an hour, the rush of hopeful fans crashing the Movietickets.com website.
Over and above the welcome news of the premiere, the big surprise was that the premiere will be preceded by a five-part webisode mini series. The story, entitled “Pond Life”, will feature Amy and Rory PondWilliams attempting to live a normal life, outside the TARDIS. The synopsis of Asylum suggests that said normal life may not be going too smoothly. Series stars Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill discuss the mini-adventure on the BBC Website.
The episodes, written by Chris Chibnall, will be released one day, starting Monday, August 27th on the BBC website. They’ll also be made available in the UK, via BBC’s interactive “Red Button” service. Plans are proceeding on how the episodes will be released by BBC America— look for an update soon.
These webisodes are a continuation of the episode prequels from the previous season, each of which featured a brief extra scene from several episodes of the series. These prequels were included on the later video releases, it’s presumed this mini-series will also appear in this season’s set.
In honor of this surprise, Your Humble Reporter has crafted a suggested logo for the mini-series, inspired by a popular Britcom which starred a number of actors who later appeared on Doctor Who:
(Update: yes, 9/1, not 8/1 as we originally had in the headline. We’re dumb.)
Inspector Spacetime is a self-paradoxical anomaly, which makes perfect sense. It’s only existed for a few months, but has also apparently been on television for nearly fifty years. Actor Travis Richey has played him for all of that time, for a grand total of less than two minutes of footage, and yet 11 actors have played the role, including Stephen Fry and Christopher Lee. As Travis explains it, “The best part is, NOTHING is canon, and EVERYTHING is canon”.
After the character made its debut as a brief Doctor Who parody on NBC’s Community, the Internet got right to work fleshing out his history and adventures. A Tumblr feed was quickly created to serve as the main repository of the work, and photos from past episodes were quickly “discovered” and shared.
Travis Richey had a very good time at Gallifrey One, the country’s biggest Doctor Who convention. At a panel dedicated to Inspector Spacetime, he announced plans to produce an independent web series dedicated to the Infinity Knight and his continuing adventures.
“Tony Lee (writer for IDW’s Doctor Who comic) reached out to me to do a video for Chicago Tardis (the Midwest DW convention) back in November” Travis explains. “I did that, and the greeting went over so well that Tony put me in touch with Shaun (Lyon) who does Gallifrey One.”
The panel was filled with fans and the panel “reminiscing” about their favorite moments of the show, including past Inspectors, and of course, the death of Jeffrey. “There were jokes people were making that I hadn’t heard, like ‘Horse-Bot 3000’, and I was ‘ Huh? What’s that?’ But I do improv all the time, so I just accepted it, gave it a ‘Yes, and…’ and went with.” He shouldn’t have been surprised; as is traditional the people starring in the sci-fi show don’t know NEARLY as much about the show as the fans.
What was amazing is that everything they discussed in the panel was all created from whole cloth on sites like the Tumblr blog, in a world wide improv session. Fans across the world agreed which jokes were funnier, went with the stronger material, and the mythos became cohesive amazingly quickly. “One example of that was the word DARSIT, for the the Inspector’s vehicle,” Travis recalls. “I have to admit, I never really liked it; I thought it was too simple of a joke, from TARDIS. But someone on the ProBoards came up with BOOTH, and everybody liked it, and not only did the change get made in the “canon”, but they have, I hear, retconned things so that “Darsit” is now an Infinity Knight curse word. And they’ve already started folding Boyish the Extraordinary, our bad guy, into the canon, so by the time we see him, it’ll be his return.”
The ability for fans to so easily collaborate on such a mad undertaking, couldn’t have existed only a few years back. “It’s really extraordinary. I admit that I saw the potential, but my vision was so far from what actually happened, and how much it means to the fans. And I think part of it is for fans to be able to actually have a hand in creating something new. A lot of people don’t have the opportunity to create something new, so to be able to write something on the Internet, or submit a photo to the tumblr blog…it’s an easy way for the fans to be engaged, and I think that’s something that has been lacking. So in that respect, this is something totally new.
Travis saw the potential in the character while he was still filming that first episode. “I wrote the script [for the web series] with my writing partner after I shot the first episode, but before it even aired. We knew it was gonna be pretty big” Travis recalls. “I’m a pretty forward thinker; I’m never happy just waiting for things to happen. So my thought was, Hey, I’ll write this, and if there’s a second episode, I’ll tell them you should do this for the DVD or for web content. Especially after the first weekend, when it just EXPLODED, so I knew that it was going to be something the audience wanted.”
“So I wrote this, and I brought it with me when I did my second episode, and the word on set was ‘We can’t just look at it’. So I went back to my agent and said to submit this, because this is really huge, and we understand the character and the meme, and the world that the fans created’. And he sent it in, but never got any response, one way or the other. I certainly didn’t get a ‘no, don’t do this cause we’re doing it’, nor did I get a ‘yes’, or even a ‘Hey, this is good, but no thanks’.”
“But like I said, I’m not a person to wait for things to happen. I did wait, actually – I wasn’t going to anything while they were still working with the character. As long as they had things to do with Inspector Spacetime, I was just, ‘Let that happen’. But after the Christmas episode, I knew they were shooting the rest of the season, and they weren’t using me. And then the status of the show coming back at all was in question, and I thought, ‘At the very least, this’ll get some buzz, for Community, at least. Plus, it was a case of me being prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to me.”
Considering the reaction that 15 seconds of footage got, it’d seem somewhat surprising they didn’t want to do something more with the character, but Travis has a theory. “I think it’s more just how Hollywood works. It’s very difficult to get a piece of writing into someone’s hand. And I’m not sure why that it is, because Star Trek did it. Some of the best names we know in Sci-Fi today, from Jane Espenson, to Ron Moore to Rene Echevarria , they all got their start because they sent in spec scripts to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don’t understand it.”
Like air rushing in to fill a vacuum, fans stepped up and created a full 50 years of history for this character, and hasn’t stopped. “It was less than two or three weeks to form the basis of it, but over the last few months, it’s just continually been adding and adding and adding. It’s astounding the amount of creativity that exploded over the Internet, base on all of this three-line joke. And it was wonderful to see. And that’s exactly the kind of person I am – I was a fan, at one point. I wrote Star Trek scripts in my bedroom, I wrote Doctor Who stuff.”
With all that creativity already in place, one has to wonder how much material did Travis plan to cull from the communal pool, and how much would be brand new? “When we started to write the first episode, it was before the fans even knew it existed. Eric [Loya, Travis’ writing partner on his other video work, including Robot, Ninja and Gay Guy] and I spent hours going through the mythos and creating a rudimentary character bible. We had to understand how it spoofed Doctor Who. Cause the Community people didn’t really do anything. They showed that Blorgons were Daleks, and they showed the red phonebooth. So we had to invent everything else. And then the fans came along and started doing their thing, I was actually involved in some of the fandom – I was on the ProBoards, talking to people about what was what. “Infinity Knight” was mine and Eric’s invention [compared to the “Space master” term the fans have been using], the name of the home planet is fan-created, like that. What we have in the web-series is, I believe, 100% original. We invented a new Associate; we’re not going to use Constable Reggie, and we have a new arch-nemesis we invented, Boyish The Extraordinary. We’re making a quick reference to the Circuit-Chaps [the fan-created Cybermen-spoof]. We took out the Blorgon reference in respect to the Community team.”
Science-Fiction shows are well aware of the fannish community, and know when to turn a blind eye to fan-made fiction, and even merchandise. Travis thinks Community is aware of that as well. “There are people posting mash-ups that use clips from the show; people are posting actual clips of the show,” Travis notes. “The merchandise that people produce – not only for Community, but for Inspector Spacetime. And nobody has told the t-shirt companies that they can’t produce the shirts. And I want to be clear, we’re not selling [the series]. We’re going to make it, and it’s going to exist for free. We’re not going to make DVDs, we’re not going to do ads on it on YouTube, nothing like that.”
Sony and NBC did decide that an outside entity producing an Inspector Spacetime series was a bit offsides, and sent Travis a request to shut down. Luckily Travis had a backup plan just in case someone in the legal field got uppity. “Except for the name ‘Inspector Spacetime’, everything we have in the script is invented by us. So there’s no reason this can’t get made. And you can’t copyright a title…and they haven’t trademarked the name; I did a trademark search. Cause I want to be careful. So hopefully they’ll let this happen. And more hopefully it’ll create some buzz for Community. Cause even though it’s coming back for the rest of the third season, there’s no guarantee it’ll be renewed for a fourth.” The series will be titled “The Untitled Webseries About A Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel In Time”. So we’ve got an unofficial adaptation of a parody show that only exists in the mind of its fandom…that sound you hear is reality folding in on itself.
The Kickstarter campaign, which made its $20,000 goal and them some, will cover the cost of the production. “Frankly, I don’t have the capability to make it look and sound as good as it deserves to,” says Travis. “If you look at the stuff I’ve produced so far, it looks…okay, but you can tell that it was made with no budget. But here the writing and the acting is so strong, it really deserves to be be complemented by good equipment; a decent camera, lights and stuff.” Travis schedule is pretty accelerated. He’d already posted a better-quality animatic of the first episode through the folks at io9, the same episode he did a live read-through of at Gallifrey One. Principal photography is complete, and Travis is looking for a sound designer now.
NBC has also seen the potential in the character. It was announced at San Diego that an episode of the new season Community would center around an Inspector Spacetime convention. And the show (both Community and IS) has one other big fan – Karen Gillan, AKA Amy Pond on Doctor Who. She’s already gone on record as saying that she’d LOVE to appear on an episode. The irony is that in the continuity of the show, it’s her on-screen husband that would be a more logical fit. According to the history, the character Rory Williams (played by Arthur Darvill) is the only one to appear on BOTH shows, moving from Inspector Spacetime to Doctor Who.
It seems that The Inspector’s possibilities are, rightfully, infinite. It’s not WHERE he’ll pop up next…but WHEN.
Naturally, some well-meaning busybodies worried the child was in some danger during these exploits. “I never throw him, and I never move him into a place in the frame that he wasn’t in to begin with,” Hulin shares with My Modern Met.
They’re very well done, both the composition of the initial shot and the…post-production work.
When BBC America teased Wednesday that tickets would be made available for New York City Premiere of this season’s premiere episode of Doctor Who, there was little doubt they would be highly coveted. But when the link was released shortly after 2PM on Thursday, it was not expected that the rush of fans would crash the channel’s link forwarding service. A direct link to the sales page at Movetickets.com was hastily released, and the crush of eager purchasers quickly brought that website to its knees as well.
In a mini-repeat of recent bottlenecks for the San Diego Comic-Con, the ticket purchase system slowed to a crawl, and access was severely limited almost immediately after the links were announced. The site’s customer service number was jammed to bursting for several hours after tickets sold out as people attempted to see if aborted transactions resulted in a sale or not.
Those who could snag a connection and hold onto it for a full purchase session were able to secure ticket to the premiere of Asylum of the Daleks for the princely sum of eleven cents. The site would not allow them to give the tickets away for free, so the micro-fee (plus the website’s one-dollar service charge) was their way of tipping the hat to Matt Smith, the eleventh Doctor, while still granting almost free admission to the fans.
The site sold over 800 tickets in approximately twenty minutes, selling out New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, the largest theater they were able to secure.
BBC America has made it clear they’re very thankful that the event was so zealously accepted by the fans, and apologized that the process didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done. While there’s been no reports of a second showing, the site will be offering contests throughout the week to win tickets. Announcements will be made via their popular Twitter and Tumblr feeds.
During the information feeding frenzy of the (still unannounced) broadcast premiere of the show, BBC America has also been undertaking a massive publicity blitz for its first original series, the period police series Copper. Produced by Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, it tells the tale of one of New York City’s honest policemen in the wild and chaotic year 1864. Copper premieres this Sunday, August 19th, at 10PM on BBC America.
The Doctor Who premiere will be on August 25th at 6PM at the Ziegfeld Theater. It is presumed the line has already started.
