Art Gallery 2
Target book covers tell their own story. Occasionally it is
not the story that was shown on television, but something bigger and better.
The Dinosaur Invasion
is one of those covers. It’s a novelisation of the Jon Pertwee story Invasion of the Dinosaurs, one of those
all-too-common Doctor Who stories
where the quality of the idea was just too big for the budget and too far ahead
of its time for the effects to stand up. It dances on the mediocre side of
brilliance.
Take away the rubbishy rubbery toy dinosaurs and the story
is a good ‘un. But we can’t avoid the fact that the dinosaurs were the hook
into the wider story, and they were a letdown. The cover of the novelisation
shows how the dinosaurs must have looked in Malcolm Hulke’s imagination, before
the BBC effects department dragged him back to reality.
The first cover, by Chris Achilleos, shows Jon Pertwee
menaced by a freaky-looking pterodactyl-thing, with that legendary KKLAK!
onomatopoeia demonstrating that Chris Achilleos actually travelled in time to find out how a pterodactyl would have
sounded. It is leagues away from the paper aeroplane/ kite effect in the
broadcast programme. And above Pertwee and his bird, there’s a ravening,
dribbling, threatening T-Rex, ready to eat the Doctor’s perm as it rises from
the evocative orange dusk of London (the T-Rex, not the perm). It’s a brilliant
cover, providing a pure distillation of what the story needed and didn’t get.
Proper dinosaurs.
The second cover, by Jeff Cummins, is from the reprint. Our
friend Mr T-Rex seems to be on a sightseeing tour. Presumably he’s just knocked
several Cybermen like skittles down the steps to St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s an
image that I can’t recall from the episodes, but sells the concept of dinosaurs
in London much more effectively than the story ever managed. It’s not as good a
cover as the Chris Achilleos version, but it’s still bigger and better than the
televised version, and that’s what it should be, really. It captured my attention
as a kid and made me read the book, so it succeeds on every level.
The only problem is; once you’ve read the novelisation, and
stared at the cover, memorising every detail, when you finally, actually see
the episodes, sometimes they don’t live up to the version you’ve created in
your head. You’ve created impossible expectations, and that’s one of the
unfortunate side-effects in viewing old Doctor
Who on DVD, years after the event. That
we still end up loving them all, each and every one of them, well, that’s the real
magic of Doctor Who, isn’t it?
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