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The character of the Doctor was initially shrouded in mystery. All that was known about him in the programme’s early days was that he was an eccentric alien traveller of great intelligence who battled injustice while exploring time and space in an unreliable old time machine called the TARDIS. The TARDIS is much larger on the inside than on the outside and, due to a chronic malfunction, is stuck in the shape of a 1950s-style British police box.
However, not only did the initially irascible and slightly sinister Doctor quickly mellow into a more compassionate figure, it was eventually revealed that he had been “on the run” from his own people, the Time Lords of the planet Gallifrey.
As a Time Lord, the Doctor has the ability to “regenerate” his body when near death, allowing for the convenient recasting of the lead actor. A Time Lord can regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen incarnations. The Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on nine occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities:
For more on the history of Dr Who visit The Old Hippie
Freaks
is a Pre-Code 1932 horror film about sideshow performers, directed by Tod Browning.
The movie was adapted by Al Boasberg, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, and Edgar Allan Woolf from the short story Spurs by Tod Robbins. Browning, famed at the time for his collaborations with Lon Chaney and for directing Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow “freaks,” rather than using costumes and makeup. Director Browning had been a member of a traveling circus in his early years, and much of the film was drawn from his personal experiences. He intended to portray the classic moral of how outer beauty does not necessarily equate to inner beauty. In the film, the physically deformed “freaks” are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the “normal” members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance.
Reaction to this film was so intense that Browning had trouble finding work afterwards, and this in effect brought his career to an early close. Because its deformed cast was shocking to moviegoers of the time, the film was banned in the United Kingdom for thirty years.
In 1994 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Video clip from “Freaks”
Remember, cigarettes kill and we have been protected from them for years now. So why is it that they have made such a comeback in the
movies? You see the main characters smoking to express themselves, or is it the cigarette expressing itself? The underlying statements being made are profuse, and laden with innuendo. Maybe we need to add a warning on the promotional material for films with rampant smoking in them.. Fight Club with its violence and constant smoking perhaps needs to be stated as potentially hazardous to more than your mental well-being.
After all, up in smoke was banned by the South African Publications Control Board (Censor Board) for fear that “it might encourage the impressionable youth of South Africa to take up marijuana smoking”.
As if they didn’t have much bigger problems at the time.. can anyone say ‘apartheid’.
The last fifty years has brought a total revolution in artistic expression, from the quiet beginnings of the late fifties and early sixties through the turmoil of the late twentieth century. We have gone from censorship on all levels to the complete abandon of all sensibility of gangster rap, and one word script movies like ‘Scarface’.
The recent Super Bowl mishap and Imus faux pas have begun a rethinking of the need to put some limits on creativity, to make things ‘respectable’ once more. There is a certain amount of desperation in the need to do something that is truly new, not to mention the need to get attention. Artists find themselves searching for something that hasn’t been done a thousand times before, and we find them reaching into the unknown, which often involves that which has been taboo in the past.
They find themselves being outlandish in order to garner an audience, doing something shocking to be noticed. Where it will go from here is hard to say, the piercings and tattoos have been carried to such heights that its hard to see how those artifices could be escalated. And when you get right down to it, the adoption of those practices by the general public have made it almost beyond a fad to the common. Lets hope the censorship crowd doesn’t limit creativity and artistic freedom, and that the artists don’t lose touch with the difference between creative freedom and complete abandon.
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