Why The Underwater Menace Should Be Animated
Released across four Saturdays in November and December 1967, The Underwater Menace was the Doctor Who serial most in need of rescue from the archive. Its first two episodes, “The Menace” and “The Pool of Death,” are missing, leaving only fragments associated with episode one and no moving images of episode two. The surviving instalments preserve the wit and menace of the original production, but the central movement from a strange seaside encounter to an underwater struggle remains permanently out of reach.
Animation offers an unusually direct solution. The story’s submerged complex, fishlike Zarbi and egg-born homunculus were designed for live action, yet many of their most memorable possibilities were limited by studio techniques and physical effects. A drawn or computer-assisted version could show what the original cameras could only hint at, while preserving the sharp dialogue, reckless heroics and eerie sonic identity associated with this era of Doctor Who.
That prospect has particular appeal in Australia, where beaches, ocean pools and summer swimming are familiar parts of public life. Sydney and Melbourne audiences already understand the uneasy boundary between a calm coastal town and a threatening world below. A new animated chapter could also join the country’s lively cult screenings, collector market and tradition of gathering around classic television during the Christmas barbecue season.
The serial’s fragmented legacy
The original four-part serial was written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln and staged with bold aquatic imagery, practical creatures and an elaborate underground complex. Its surviving episodes, “The Elixir of Life” and “The Final Reckoning,” still provide a strong sense of place. They cannot, however, supply the crucial journey from the motorboat and the dockside mystery to the alien labour and scientific conflict beneath the waves.
| Presentation | What it preserves | What it leaves unresolved |
|---|---|---|
| Surviving episodes | Original performances, colour, sets and Radiophonic sound | The complete opening movement and two missing episodes |
| Novelisation | Plot, dialogue and a readable account of the serial | Visual action, spatial relationships and production changes |
| Audio retelling | Character voices, atmosphere and sound effects | Creature design, staging and the underwater environment |
| Animated adaptation | Motion, geography, character clarity and a unified aquatic world | A degree of interpretation rather than recovered footage |
The comparison reveals why another prose or audio solution would remain incomplete. Animation can act as a visual bridge between the surviving instalments and the documented story, giving viewers a continuous experience without pretending that the lost scenes have genuinely been found.
Faithful animation would require equal care with text and tone. Scripts, production notes, costume records and surviving fragments should guide the adaptation, while every new design choice should be openly identified as interpretation. The aim would not be a counterfeit episode, but a lucid recasting of material the audience has long known through fragments, repetition and fandom memory.
Animation as a faithful recasting
The Zarbi are ideal candidates for stylised movement. Their bulging eyes, heavy jaws, sucker-like limbs and nervous clustering can be animated with a fluidity that would have been difficult and expensive in 1967. Close-ups could register their vacant obedience or sudden panic, while underwater sequences could show eggs opening, bubbles gathering around bodies and shadows passing through green water without interrupting the action.
The submerged city would gain equally much. Live television suggested vast chambers through careful lighting, painted backgrounds and a studio tank. Animation could connect those visual fragments into corridors that slope, flood, split and transform, making the Doctor’s route feel like a journey through a functioning future settlement. Reused shapes and textures would also allow the city to feel vast without making every scene appear to occur in the same pool.
Sound would remain central rather than decorative. The original serial’s hissing electronics, bubbles, voices calling through water and abrupt silences could guide the movement of every shot. Independent fan reporting, including sites devoted to Walking Dead news, illustrates the wider appetite for detail, speculation and shared interpretation that animation can reward.
Animation’s narrative and visual gains
Two kinds of gain would matter most: recovering narrative threads that are difficult to follow and giving the aquatic world movement it never fully received.
Narrative and character gains
- Clarify how the Doctor, Ben and Polly move between the harbour, the divers’ base and the hidden city.
- Give Catherine’s conflict with her father, Professor Sharpe, room to develop through expression and action.
- Make the bargain between the humans and the Zarbi visible through labour, resistance and changing allegiances.
Visual and creature gains
- Show the Zarbi hatching, adapting and moving as a group rather than appearing only through sound and reaction shots.
- Present the underwater complex as a single environment, including flooded rooms and narrow industrial passages.
- Use restrained colour shifts to distinguish the surface town, the submerged settlement and the Doctor’s temporary escape.
The production need not imitate every television limitation. Its first responsibility is to make the plot intelligible, especially because the available novelisation and other adaptations differ in emphasis. A disciplined visual grammar can reveal relationships that dialogue alone cannot, including who controls each space and how the colony’s future depends on exploited creatures.
Animation is also well suited to suspense that expands rather than explains. A tiny movement in a flooded pipe, a shadow crossing a chamber wall or a Zarbi testing a door can create dread without requiring a lengthy spoken scene. These passages would give the lost episodes their own identity instead of making them feel like an illustrated appendix to the existing serial.
Time, survival and moral tension
Beneath the mystery, the serial imagines a future displaced by nuclear catastrophe. Its descendants have adapted to an oceanic refuge, but survival has created hierarchy, mutation and a willingness to treat the Zarbi as tools. Animation can make that society legible by repeating shapes, gestures and colour codes, then subtly altering them as the Doctor challenges the system.
Temporal perspective adds another layer. The Doctor knows that the underwater settlement is not humanity’s final destination, yet his companions must experience its desperation from within. This concern with how long a people can endure before changing resonates with the ideas explored in Time Lord lifespan analysis, although this story locates the question in a damaged Earth rather than Gallifrey.
The strongest emotional image may be a choice rather than a battle: whether the colony’s inhabitants will preserve their safe enclosure or trust the Doctor’s claim that movement and change are possible. Animation can hold both sides in the same frame, pairing the sterile brightness of the refuge with the warmer, unsettled surface. That contrast would give the resolution more force than a simple fight with a monster.
A release plan for Australian audiences
A premiere at Melbourne’s Astor Theatre or Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema could turn the project into a shared event rather than a niche release glimpsed on a streaming menu. Both cities have audiences accustomed to classic science fiction, and an illustrated serial would suit a Saturday matinee with a panel on missing episodes, creature effects and fan reconstruction. Australian conventions would provide another natural setting for first screenings, costume displays and creator sessions.
The physical edition has obvious value in a country with an active market for television box sets, steelbook editions and character models. A collector’s release could include the animation, the original scripts, production artwork and a comparison with surviving footage. Special material need not overload the main programme; it could sit in separate galleries, allowing viewers to move between the reconstructed experience and its evidence.
Streaming should widen the audience, not replace the event. Short clips focusing on one Zarbi design or one underwater transition could reveal the project’s craft to newcomers, while subtitles, audio description and clear chapter guides would make a stylised reconstruction accessible to more viewers. Christmas viewing at home, alongside the familiar barbecue and family gathering, could also establish it as a new seasonal tradition rather than an artefact filed away after one release.
A community project with scholarly care
A fan-led effort should respect the complicated history of a story that now exists across incomplete television, prose, audio and fan memory. Researchers, artists, sound designers and longtime viewers could each contribute, but the finished work should credit the writers and performers whose work made the original serial memorable. It should also recognise that no fan production can alter canon without the rights holder’s involvement.
Good documentation matters because this story has been interpreted many times. A companion site could map every scene to the available script, show where animation fills a gap and explain changes made for clarity. That transparency would invite informed debate while reducing the sort of misinformation that can harden around lost television.
Production evidence and correction requests can be sent through contact the archive, where they could join the wider effort to preserve Doctor Who commentary and review history. The enduring achievement would be bigger than filling two gaps: it would create a vivid, coherent work that lets the aquatic adventure stand on its own while remaining honest about the absence of the original episodes.