| The following article is written from an Out of Universe perspective. |
Doctor Who: Adventures was a Doctor Who television animated-spinoff series. It was produced by CBS Eye Animation Productions for the BBC and ViacomCBS. It featured Samantha Bond, reprising her role as the Fourteenth Doctor, alongside Montserrat Lombard, as Erin Stevenson, and William Moseley as Kyle Harrison.
Origins
The show was the third revival of a former Doctor to the screen in just a year and a half, with the Twelfth Doctor returning to the big screen in 2018 and the Eleventh Doctor getting his own adult oriented spinoff series. Jane Espenson, the Franchise Executive, in the wake of a lot of brand uncertainty, was looking to double-down on, what had initially just been a result of studio hostility, different doctors leading each show. She’d already had CBBC onto her office, several times over the past few years, about providing some sort of Doctor Who content for them.
On top of this, Espenson was well aware that over the past few years, lots of Doctor Who’s child audience had dropped off, with the programme going into some darker themes and places. With children being Doctor Who’s foundation audience, Espenson knew there was something she needed to do about this.
A cartoon featuring a former TARDIS team, who they’d easily be able to get the actors back to step into a recording studio, seemed the logical step. Espenson did consider inventing a new Doctor and companions just for the children to have, but believed they’d be more likely to get fans to also watch it, if they brought back an old TARDIS team. They considered a few different teams, but settled on 14, Erin and Kyle, especially as Samantha Bond was enthusiastic to come back and do more, especially as she only had to read from a script, unlike the high-intensity work on the actual show.
Espenson appointed Phil Ford as the showrunner of the show, and left it to him, from that point on, to create the show and decide just what it was going to be. Ford immediately instigated several rules for writers of the show, to set the boundaries of what Doctor Who especially for kids was:
- No people dying on screen
- No sex references
- No realistic guns firing - only fantasy laser beams can fire - and they mustn’t hit anyone
- Must have moral message
- Monsters in Every Story
- Short, snappy and most of all Fun!
The show would only be 25 minutes in length, so the stories happened at a much faster pace than the show was used to. In addition, due to the fact that the show was animated, Espenson managed to fulfil one of her biggest pet peeves about the Samantha Bond era – which was the fact that it was set mainly in the 1970s, but every time they needed to do a proper alien invasion story, they had to go to the present day, as using 1970s UNIT would have meant using those characters. Now, they could set all those stories in the 1970s and have a few vocal cameos from some of the 1970s Doctor Who cast (which while it wouldn’t matter to kids, as they’d be just another character), it’d be a bit of a treat for Doctor Who fans watching along.
The animation style was a hybrid of 2D and 3D animation. The backgrounds and exterior space shots were all done with 3D animation; however all the character animation was 2D inserted over the 3D sets.
For the title sequence, it’s about 20 seconds long and sees the TARDIS whizzing past loads of different alien planets, with the Doctor, Erin and Kyle sticking their heads out of the door, looking around. The theme tune is a new short and lighter arrangement of the 14th Doctor’s theme (by Bear McCreary), with the main Doctor Who ‘ooo-wee-ooo’ riff playing at the end over the title card.
Premise
To be added.
Cast
Main Cast
Recurring Cast
- Danielle Stevenson - Susannah Harker
- Roger Stevenson - Trevor Cooper
- Benton - John Levene
- Jo Jones - Katy Manning
- The Master - Murray Melvin
Series Overview
| Series | Episodes | Originally aired | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First aired | Last aired | ||||
| 1 | 10 | 6 April 2020 | 8 June 2020 | ||
| 2 | 10 | 11 January 2021 | 15 March 2021 | ||
| 3 | 10 | 17 January 2022 | 21 March 2022 | ||
| 4 | 10 | 4 July 2022 | 5 September 2022 | ||
| 5 | 20 | 12 June 2023 | 23 October 2023 | ||
List of Television Episodes
Series 1
| Story | No. | Title | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | The Dalek Invasion of Sussex | 6 April 2020 |
| 2 | 2 | The Black Death | 13 April 2020 |
| 3 | 3 | Starship Harmony | 20 April 2020 |
| 4 | 4 | Dreamland | 27 April 2020 |
| 5 | 5 | Something Borrowed | 4 May 2020 |
| 6 | 6 | The Coronation | 11 May 2020 |
| 7 | 7 | Orphan 55 | 18 May 2020 |
| 8 | 8 | Mona Lisa’s Revenge | 25 May 2020 |
| 9 | 9 | Halley: 2062 | 1 June 2020 |
| 10 | 10 | The Green Terror | 8 June 2020 |
Series 2
| Story | No. | Title | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | 1 | The Smuggler of Doom | 11 January 2021 |
| 12 | 2 | Earth Defense Force | 18 January 2021 |
| 13 | 3 | The Infinite Quest | 25 January 2021 |
| 14 | 4 | The Stone Age | 1 February 2021 |
| 15 | 5 | Eye of the Gorgon | 8 February 2021 |
| 16 | 6 | The Sale of the Century | 15 February 2021 |
| 17 | 7 | Public Enemy One | 22 February 2021 |
| 18 | 8 | Rest & Recreation | 1 March 2021 |
| 19 | 9 | Fear Her | 8 March 2021 |
| 20 | 10 | The Prisoner | 15 March 2021 |
Series 3
| Story | No. | Title | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21 | 1 | The Invaders | 17 January 2022 |
| 22 | 2 | Patriot | 24 January 2022 |
| 23 | 3 | Wonderland | 31 January 2022 |
| 24 | 4 | The Great Experiment | 7 February 2022 |
| 25 | 5 | Matchstalk Men | 14 February 2022 |
| 26 | 6 | The Layer Before | 21 February 2022 |
| 27 | 7 | Heart and Mind | 28 February 2022 |
| 28 | 8 | The Printer | 7 March 2022 |
| 29 | 9 | The Marauders | 14 March 2022 |
| 30 | 10 | Enemies of Earth | 21 March 2022 |
Series 4
| Story | No. | Title | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 | 1 | Prince of the Daleks | 4 July 2022 |
| 32 | 2 | The Marinus Factor | 11 July 2022 |
| 33 | 3 | The King's Wrath | 18 July 2022 |
| 34 | 4 | Murder on the Dancefloor | 25 July 2022 |
| 35 | 5 | Data Breach | 1 August 2022 |
| 36 | 6 | Kyle's Schooldays | 8 August 2022 |
| 37 | 7 | Victory of the Sontarans | 15 August 2022 |
| 38 | 8 | Opening Night | 22 August 2022 |
| 39 | 9 | The First Adventure | 29 August 2022 |
| 40 | 10 | The Abomination | 5 September 2022 |
Series 5
| Story | No. | Title | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 41 | 1 | Parallel Lives | 12 June 2023 |
| 42 | 2 | The Spectrum | 19 June 2023 |
| 43 | 3 | Casino Doctoral | 26 June 2023 |
| 44 | 4 | The Myths of Time | 3 July 2023 |
| 45 | 5 | The Four Doctors | 10 July 2023 |
| 46 | 6 | Starlight Echoes | 17 July 2023 |
| 47 | 7 | Viral | 24 July 2023 |
| 48 | 8 | Beneath the Surface | 31 July 2023 |
| 49 | 9 | Rebel Thoughts | 7 August 2023 |
| 50 | 10 | Enemy of the Cybermen | 14 August 2023 |
| 51 | 11 | Scattered | 21 August 2023 |
| 52 | 12 | Dream A Little Dream | 28 August 2023 |
| 53 | 13 | Library of the Lost | 4 September 2023 |
| 54 | 14 | The Rogue Carnival | 11 September 2023 |
| 55 | 15 | Temporal Mirage | 18 September 2023 |
| 56 | 16 | The Assassination of Queen Anne | 25 September 2023 |
| 57 | 17 | Legend of the Sea Devils | 2 October 2023 |
| 58 | 18 | Floral Uprising | 9 October 2023 |
| 59 | 19 | Exterminate! | 16 October 2023 |
| 20 | 23 October 2023 |
Home Media Releases
To be added.