YMMV / Doctor Who S4 E7 "The Macra Terror"

• Broken Base:
  • The animated recreation was controversial in some quarters, as the animators decided to try to not merely recreate the original episodes frame-by-frame^note Mostly because they couldn't - the audio contained long stretches of what they described as "bump bump scrape scrape" with no context given in the telesnaps, and serial director John Davies was well-known for going off-script and reworking things - especially action - in camera, so the shooting script was known to be very inaccurate, but to re-imagine certain scenes as they might have been done had the technology and budget existed at the time. Most praise the result as adding to the danger and atmosphere of the story, as well as taking advantage of a new medium, but others believe that the changes ruin the feel of the original. (The Blu-Ray release contains the animated serial in a black-and-white version, and the telesnap reconstruction with both the 1992 Colin Baker and 2012 Anneke Wills narrations - including scenes cut from the animation - for the purists, however.)
  • Even moreso that some scenes that were not recreated for the animated version, most infamously the gag where the Doctor is forced through a "Rough and Tumble" machine that tidies up his hair and clothes, only to walk back through it in reverse when he doesn't like how it makes him look, foreshadowing his rebellion against the colony authorities. Some would say that the scenes aren't necessary, while others felt like the scenes make it feel not completed for anybody who are completionists. (Cutting the scene was unfortunately necessary. As with cutting the cast's costume changes, the expense of creating a second animation model was too great.)
• Critical Dissonance: Many professional critics praised the ambitious and technically-improved animation (especially for the scarier Macra and an even better interpretation of Patrick Troughton) while noting the story was relatively humdrum and not really a forgotten classic like "The Enemy Of The World". Meanwhile, a minority of fans complained about liberties taken with the source material in the animation. Everyone likes the idea of the Doctor fighting a 60's TV equivalent of Brave New World (minus the omnipresence of Everyone Has Lots of Sex) though.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Doctor brags about short-circuiting the mind-control system with an ordinary screwdriver. It would take a year, but he would eventually up his game.
• Narm Charm: One older viewer who actually saw the original story on its one and only airing pointed out that the Macra prop only looks terrible due to the photo being out in the open, with a lot of bright light. In the televised story, it’s in a dark studio, surrounded by gas, making it (to him) utterly terrifying. This is corroborated by a piece of surviving footage that shows Ben and Polly being attacked by a Macra, where it indeed is hidden mostly in shadow and looks surprisingly convincing for a prop that could only do so much as shimmy along the floor.
• Special Effects Failure: The Macra. The prop cost £500 (a record amount of money spent on a prop at that time - the equivalent of about £8000 today) and was heavily promoted as the biggest monster yet. While this story is lost (and how several scenes were actually executed remains a mystery as you can't tell from the soundtrack), production stills reveal that there's more to making a convincing monster than just spending lots of money on it◊. Fortunately the actual televised episodes reportedly made the prop work surprisingly well by obscuring it behind dark lighting and smoke,◊ and the animated release's creative liberties allow the Macra to look even more menacing.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: "Macra" is pronounced /ˈmækrə/ ("MAK-ra") in the show, but some fans say /ˈmɑːkrə/ ("MAHK-ra") instead.

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