Trivia / Doctor Who S11 E2 "Invasion of the Dinosaurs"

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• Accidentally-Correct Writing: The Doctor refers to a sauropod dinosaur as Brontosaurus. Although the correct designation at the time was Apatosaurus, the issue of the type specimen's proper genus has recently been re-opened, and this trope will very likely apply if the splitters have their way. Being a time traveller, the Doctor could have already known the name would change when he called the animal that.
• Creator Backlash: The showrunners were deeply disappointed with how the dinosaurs turned out. Barry Letts went so far as to name this as the one story he'd like to see remade with modern technology.
• Creator's Favourite Episode:
  • Malcolm Hulke named this as his favourite script:
    I decided what I wanted to do, and came up with a lovely idea of The Golden Age with all these people behind it who just didn't fit in. There were lots of rather sad people always living in the past, and who wanted to turn back the clock. I think they were totally wrong in their thinking, but I liked the story – it's easily my favourite – because I felt that it was the way a lot of people feel, left out or left behind by things changing.
  • Paddy Russell named this as the best of the stories she directed.
• Missing Episode: This is the most recent Doctor Who story to be in some way incomplete, due to the fact that the master tape of the first episode was junked for some reason almost immediately after its original transmission; until 1983, it was the only missing Pertwee episode.^note  Because its title was simply "Invasion", which shared the name of a Patrick Troughton Cyberman serial, "The Invasion", some believe it got junked along with that serial, even though "The Invasion" was actually junked before "Invasion" first aired. It is not known why the serial was marked to be junked so soon after its original broadcast (all 6 episodes were scheduled to be wiped, but for whatever reason only the first one was), but a fan theory is that the production team's embarrassment over the dinosaurs played a part in it Fortunately, this was one of the last Doctor Who stories that BBC also made a black and white film copy of, and the first episode survives in that form. For the DVD release, the episode was recoloured using the chroma dot automated colour recovery process, but the results were not 100% effective. The default version on the DVD is the monochrome one, and the best attempts at restoring it to colour are included as a bonus feature. At the moment, no attempts have been made at manually recolouring the episode à la episode one of "The Mind of Evil" (likely because the BBC are well aware of this serial's poor reputation and don't consider a manual recolouring job commercially viable as a result).
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Elisabeth Sladen cut her hair short before filming, causing several continuity problems both with "The Time Warrior" and during the story.
• Spared by the Cut: Terrance Dicks thought that Yates might be killed off during the story's events, but Barry Letts felt they might revisit the character in a forthcoming serial.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original script had the Doctor using a motorcycle instead of the Whomobile.
  • Hulke’s original outline had the Doctor returning to present day London, only to discover that in the meantime, aliens had invaded and taken over the Earth. A puppet state had taken control of Britain. All the while, the aliens demanded more and more land in a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Nazi takeovers of World War II. Humanity was eventually forced to Australia, which the aliens then intended to destroy. Terrance Dicks however suggested using dinosaurs instead, thinking there was a growing demand for the prehistoric animals.
• Working Title: Bridgehead from Space and Timescoop.
• You Look Familiar: Peter Miles (Professor Whittaker) was Dr. Lawrence, while Martin Jarvis (Butler) had previously played Hilio.

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