Wednesday, September 11, 2024

The Power of Kroll [1]

The Power of Kroll is not very good. 

The Power of Kroll, is, in fact, pretty bad.

The Power of Kroll is a pretty bad bit of TV, and it's a very bad Doctor Who story.

But what do we mean by "a bad Doctor Who story?" Do we mean that it is a Doctor Who story done badly -- a poor implementation of the kind of story which Doctor Who exists to tell? Do we mean that it is bad at being a Doctor Who story -- that it fails to understand the rules and doesn't do the kinds of things that Doctor Who is supposed to do?

Or do we mean that it is just outright bad -- that stories about superstitious natives sacrificing pretty ladies to monsters are inherently silly and not worth telling? Which comes perilously close to saying "Power of Kroll is bad because it is a Doctor Who story." Power of Kroll is bad because Doctor Who is bad.

What's wrong with Power of Kroll?

The monster, the giant squid, Kroll himself, is plainly ridiculous. But Power of Kroll is hardly the only Doctor Who story to be spoiled by a ridiculous monster. And Kroll isn't catastrophically misconceived, like the Nucleus of the Swarm or the Murker. And he isn't as jarringly terrible as the Weng-Chiang rat or the Kinda snake. He's just not particularly well done.

Classic monster movies like King Kong and Godzilla sometimes struggled to convince us that their model monsters and their human actors were part of the same world. Back projection used to inadvertently create an impression that there was an invisible glass wall separating Carl Denhem from the Stegosaurus. The Power of Kroll is not even that sophisticated: it uses a horizontal split screen; with a squid puppet waving its tentacles in the top half of the picture, and terrified extras running around the bottom half. No-one tries to convince us that the two elements are part of a single picture. Someone unfamiliar with 1970s TV could easily think that the producer was juxtaposing two different pieces of action for dramatic effect, like Ang Lee's art-house Hulk movie.

ITV used to use a split-screen to show us the two teams on University Challenge: some of us used to imagine that Trinity College Cambridge had climbed up a bunk-bed ladder to get into their kiosks. 

Then there are the Swampies. Alien humanoids, coded as "primitive" and "savage" (and not even particularly noble), they have green skins, and green braided hair attached to green shower caps. They look as if they might run a lucrative side-hassle selling tinned sweetcorn.

Green-face is not black-face. Having subjected us to Talons of Weng-Chiang two seasons ago, Robert Holmes resists any temptation to populate an entire planet with obvious racial stereotypes. But green make-up doesn't give the impression of someone with green skin. It gives the impression of someone who is wearing green make up. Tongues and mouths and eyes remain obstinately pink. It is perfectly clear what the green skin is a euphemism for; and even if you can get past that, it still looks ridiculous. 

It is said that the special soap which was supposed to clean the make-up off didn't work, and the actors had to deal with green bed linen and a sickly complexion for weeks afterwards. That sounds altogether too much like something out of a Jeeves and Wooster story. One that is generally omitted from modern collections, I understand. 

But both these issues could be trivially fixed. Imagine a version of the Power of Kroll from a world where the BBC had a higher budget and a bit more time on their hands. A little foliage and some model huts could have smoothed the join between the top of the screen and the bottom of the screen. It wouldn't have made Kroll look "real" but it would have helped us to suspend our disbelief. A more expensive make-up team could have done a better job on the swampies' faces. I imagine that in 1978 there were ways and means of making white skinned people look like green-skinned people, as opposed to people who have had an accident with a paint pot. 

They don't even necessarily have to be green. I don't think their colour is a plot point. There could have been some other signifier of not-humanness. They could have had pointy ears or ridges on their noses like every single alien in Star Trek. You could even have cast racially similar non-white actors in the roles. That would either have made the whole thing less racist; or else make the racism more obvious.

As long as we are playing mind-games, let's go further. Let's get rid of Tony Harding's marionette squid altogether, and replace it with a modern computer generated special effect. Doubtless CGI and green screen is just as artificial as stop-motion and back projection. The End of the World is already starting to look a little clunky and dated. So is Toy Story, sadly. But it's kind of what we expect Doctor Who monsters to look like nowadays; it wouldn't scream "look at me I'm a terrible special effect" in quite the same way. While you're at it, fire the entire swampie cast and replace them with green-face computer smurfs, like the Na'Vi in Avatar.

There are a couple of other issues, but they can all be fixed. The electrical storm looks like the opening credits of Thunderbirds; the alien methane refinery looks like an Airfix oil rig and we keep seeing tentacles which are pretty obviously not to scale with the rest of the monster. All of that can be fixed, in our heads, if not in an actual Special Edition. Ian Levine is probably working on an AI version as we speak. 

So: in our heads, we have ironed out all the flaws. We can now sit back and enjoy the Power of Kroll as the classic classic Doctor Who tale it so clearly is.  

James Burke voice: "Or can we?"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments from SK are automatically deleted, unread, so please don't waste your time.