Tuesday, 8 October 2013

Did David Tennant inspire the use of Zygons for the 50th?

Because it's pretty well established that Tennant loves Zygons (they're spooky, they've not been done to death yet, they're Scottish...), but here's a bit of an old interview in which he's pondering the technicalities of bringing them back. It sounds like he was already sounding out the possibility of a good, not too expensive monster even back when he was on the show, so maybe Moffat picked up on this when he was brainstorming for the special. [Neil Gorton, mentioned below, said in an interview that the two monsters he most wanted to make were Davros and the Zygons, and he's already done Davros.] Full text transcript available here, video below.

Q: What was your favourite ‘Doctor Who’ baddie when you were a boy?
A: I didn’t have a favourite particularly, I liked the fact that each week, each story there was something new, and I think that was my favourite bit, and I wanted it to be more horrific and more grizzly than the one before. So I don’t think I had a particular favourite, I liked the grizzly ones, the really weird-looking ones… the Zygons, the Sontarans. I mean, there were some really brilliant designs, the Zygons are case in point, they managed to make it not look like a human being, they had these huge coned heads and they made the faces small and scrunched up, and they did things. I mean, I was talking to Neil Gorton who does the prosthetics on our show, who designed a lot of our monsters, and he was saying that were we to do the Zygons again there’s not much to do, it’s a perfect bit of design. The technology of these things was a lot more primitive then, just because it was thirty years ago, and you couldn’t really better what they came up with, and I think that’s a testament to the talent of the people who are making the show now, and were making the show then.

1 comment:

Guywhothinksstuff said...

If you read the booklet with the Specials DVD, there's a 'conversation' between 40 year old David and 10 year old David, where the older him tells the younger him that he's playing the Doctor, and the younger him specifically asks if he's faced the Zygons. The older David sadly tells him no.


...I wonder if it was a condition for his return? ;)