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docbeard
Jul 19, 2011

I think my first exposure to Doctor Who was in the form of some old Target novelizations that were repackaged into a collection that I grabbed from the library on a whim. If memory serves, it was the run between Genesis of the Daleks and, er, Doctor Who and the Zygons Who Weren't Uncomfortable Refugee Stand Ins, possibly. Mostly memorable for Harlan Ellison using his introduction to wage his never ending vendetta against Gene Roddenberry somehow.

Later on, PBS was airing full episodes on Saturday afternoons and, being a nerdy teenager in a tiny rural town, of course my Saturday afternoons were free. The first one I saw was Silver Nemesis. For some reason I kept watching, though the next time I got around to it the Doctor was played by someone different because they'd circled back around to Tom Baker and I was hooked from there.

I first saw Roseabout a year after it aired. It wasn't bad.

Tl;dr :corsair:

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Doctor Zero
Sep 21, 2002

Would you like a jelly baby?
It's been in my pocket through 4 regenerations,
but it's still good.

Well, if we’re going to do that, my first Doctor was Peter Cushing in Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth. I think. The one where they tried to roll a bomb into the center of the Earth. It was on TV one Saturday afternoon at the neighbors and they had a color TV and we didn’t. It I was enthralled by the Daleks and I stopped whatever we were doing parked in front of the TV and wouldn’t let anyone change it.

Yeah I was kind of a dick when I was little.

It wasn’t until years later I saw a Tom Baker episode on TV that I realized it wasn’t just a one off movie.

egon_beeblebrox
Mar 1, 2008

WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING IN LIFE.



I'd heard of "Doctor Who" for years before I finally decided to check it out. I bought the THE BEGINNING DVD set and really enjoyed the vibe of Hartnell. Then I skipped to the TV movie, didn't know what the Hell. Then I watched from "Rose" on. All this happened around the time of Tennant's last few episodes. By now I own about half the DVD sets of the classic series and most of the modern show. And my Big Finish folder is getting increasingly ridiculous in size.

Tim Burns Effect
Apr 1, 2011

My first exposure to Doctor Who was buying "City of Death" on DVD in like 2006 because i was a big Douglas Adams fan. I remember watching it once and thinking it was all right but it didn't do a whole lot for me overall.

Not long afterward i watched Coupling on BBC America and found out the guy who wrote it (some guy named Steve) had a new show out called Jekyll. Once that was over i saw he had written a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, so i watched "Girl in the Fireplace" and the newly-released "Blink" back to back. Been hooked ever since

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
My 8th Grade Latin course was going over the Caimbridge Latin Course and Magistra Mazzola mentioned that characters from it would be cameoing in some show I'd heard of occasionally called "Doctor Who". A couple weeks later I was consumed.

Bicyclops
Aug 27, 2004

Actually, I refrained from watching Doctor Who until, I think, the end of Matt Smith's first season was on the air, despite it being recommended to me continuously. The most enthusiastic recommendation came from my ex-girlfriend, and, being an extremely weak and soft baby made of infant tears, I was afraid that watching it would make me think of her and be sad (which, to be fair, all of her other recommendations did). The Dickens episode was her sales pitch for me and, actually, watching it does make me wish that we'd managed to get past the awkwardness of long, unrelationship break-up and stay friends so that we could talk about it together. Oh well.

Class3KillStorm
Feb 17, 2011



I got into "Doctor Who" thanks to internet piracy and weed. One of the guys upstairs in my college apartment had a real problem with both, and was downloading everything in the world he could get his hands on, due to some weird compulsion to digitally hoard everything. One of the things he ended up finding was this weird British sci-fi show that was just coming back on the air. He and his buddies were into because of the camp value; I got into it because this really good actor from 28 Days Later was on it.

After Eccleston's season wrapped, I was actually put off of the show for a while due to HOW BAD the start of Tennant's first season was. Like, I downloaded the Christmas special plus the first 4 or 5 episodes of Season 2, got through the Special and episode 1 and gave up about 10 minutes into episode 2.* I got back into the show a year or so after college, though, when the tech nerds at my first job started bringing in their own pirated copies of season 3. Pulled some episodes out of an unlocked folder, burned them to DVD and took them home, wondering if the show got any better. I jumped back in at "42," and it's a good thing too; had I jumped back in at "The Shakespeare Code" or "The Lazarus Experiment" or God forbid the Dalek 2-parter, I don't think I would have stuck with it. Been hooked ever since.

*It's weird how the start of Tennant's run does almost nothing to establish the character of the Tenth Doctor with audiences, right? Between keeping him in a coma for almost the entire runtime of "The Christmas Invasion," having Tennant spend a good third of the runtime of "New Earth" pretending to be Cassandra, and then spend half of "Tooth and Claw" putting on (or taking off, I suppose) an accent, it feels like the show had no idea what his character was or how to establish him. Like, he has a moment or two in "New Earth" where you can see something forming, but he doesn't hit the ground running the way Matt Smith did later.

Elrond Hubbard
Mar 30, 2007

To ERH
*everyone applauds*
My earliest memory of Dr Who is at the age of 5 watching the original broadcast of the Power of Kroll and being terrified that a giant ('poorly realised') octopus thing would rise from the lake that was out the back of our house.

Great days.

marktheando
Nov 4, 2006

Smh at all the posters whose first time watching the revival was their first time watching Doctor Who.

My first Who exposure was catching a 90s repeat of The Sea Devils. I would have liked Rose better if it was more like The Sea Devils.

Tim Burns Effect
Apr 1, 2011

Agreed that the revival's scores should sound more like the Sea Devils and hopefully whoever is taking over for Murray Gold realizes this

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
I caught some of the McCoy run, had a few videos (including the Seeds of Death and Day of the Daleks), and then got into the programme properly in 1992 when they had a run of stories on BBC2.

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."
Oh we’ve moved from Rose reactions to first Who. For me, that was being about 6 years old and catching a man being chased by a robot on prime time BBC1. That never happened, so I was rapt. It turned out to be Paradise Towers (I’ve still not actually worked out what episode). I guess I was Whooked!

Rhyno
Mar 22, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
Mom sat me in front of the teevee when i was 3 because she watched it in college.

That was 36 years ago.

CobiWann
Oct 21, 2009

Have fun!
Ghost Light was mine, in which I developed my first teenage crush via Sophie Aldred only to find out that Battlefield the next week was the last episode of the show my PBS local channel was airing.

Then fifteen years later a friend of mine was visiting from out of town and we were already halfway through a bottle of port when she noticed Arc of Infinity was going to be on in a few minutes. Two bottles of port later I think I was more confused than I was during Ghost Light!

Sydney Bottocks
Oct 15, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 61 days!
The first time I saw any Doctor Who was sometime in the early 1980s. The PBS station out of Chicago ran DW in "movie" format and I saw what I later discovered was the last 30 minutes or so of the second half of "The Mutants" during summer vacation one year. It wasn't "G.I. Joe" so I promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward a couple years later. My parents had gotten our first VCR, I was in junior high, and on another Sunday summer vacation night, my brother and I watched a Tom Baker episode. I don't remember what one it was, but this time around I was hooked. I'd entered my nerdy phase where I was into comic books, pro wrestling, my brother's collection of rock and metal tapes, and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. So a British show about a time traveling alien was right up my street.

Davros1
Jul 19, 2007

You've got to admit, you are kind of implausible



My first exposure to Doctor Who was an ad for Who merchandise in a copy of Starlog in 1984. Fast forward to 1991 and my sister and I had just watched Plan 9 From Outer Space, wanting to see how bad this movie was. Afterwards, our father suggested switching over to PBS to see some bad special effects. Caught a couple of minutes of what I'd later learn was "The Pirate Planet". Couple of weeks later, caught the end of "The Androids of Tara", then a couple of weeks after that, watched some of "The Armageddon Factor". Then properly sat down and watched the whole of "Destiny of the Daleks" which hooked me as a fan.

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!
I started by watching Baker's run as a wee tot back in the 80's. Because it was on PBS, we assumed it was a kid's show, and were therefore quite astonished to see people actually be killed.

Burkion
May 10, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Gynovore posted:

I started by watching Baker's run as a wee tot back in the 80's. Because it was on PBS, we assumed it was a kid's show, and were therefore quite astonished to see people actually be killed.

I hope to God you meant Tom and started with like, Genesis of the Daleks or something


Because God drat is that a body count

Cerv
Sep 14, 2004

This is a silly post with little news value.

i watched the mccoy years the first time round 👴🏻

Barry the Sprout
Jan 12, 2001

MrL_JaKiri posted:

I caught some of the McCoy run, had a few videos (including the Seeds of Death and Day of the Daleks), and then got into the programme properly in 1992 when they had a run of stories on BBC2.

My introduction was the same. I have vague memories of the spaceship landing in Remembrance, then it was the Time Meddler rerun in 1992 that got me hooked.

Narsham
Jun 5, 2008
1980s channel surfing, passed by a PBS compilation of Ark in Space in the first "episode", lingered briefly, returned at the moment that Tom and Ian are looking up from the table they'd been hiding behind. Four grins and say, "I think we've done it, Harry!"

Cue watching the rest of the story. Hooked. During the glory days, we had three separate PBS feeds and two of the channels had weekly Who, always the full compilation stories and not the 25-minute episodes.

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

My first memories of Who were watching Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, though I can't precisely remember which story it was - by the time I started distinguishing the individual stories in my memory, I was already very familiar with all the characters and the concepts of the show.

That said, a few years back I finally got my hands on one of the Troughton's I thought I had never actually seen before. I was intrigued that I actually remembered seeing all of it before, so now I wonder if I actually watched some Troughton as well but just didn't retain conscious memory of it.

Also yes I am old, but not THAT old - Who used to play on repeat basically every day when I was growing up (I guess I was living in paradise?)

Edward Mass
Sep 14, 2011

𝅘𝅥𝅮 I wanna go home with the armadillo
Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene
Friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever seen
𝅘𝅥𝅮
First time I realized Doctor Who was a thing was when I was at a local video rental store and there was a huge rack of VHS Who. I was so enamored, I remember taping the 1996 movie and watching it over and over, mystified by this alien with a British accent. I was seven at the time, so I didn’t think the movie was anything but amazing.

egon_beeblebrox
Mar 1, 2008

WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING IN LIFE.



I'm honestly surprised I didn't discover Who much much earlier. I have clear memories of our local PBS airing hours of British programming every Saturday. But somehow I missed Doctor Who. I did see Mr. Bean playing with a Dalek toy back then, not knowing what the Hell it was supposed to be.

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."
It’s snowing over here (not my photo).

jivjov
Sep 13, 2007

But how does it taste? Yummy!
Dinosaur Gum
I was vaguely aware of Doctor Who from a book I had in elementary school about sci-fi robots that had pages on Daleks and Cybermen; but I didn't get into actually watching the show until 2008. I can't even remember why I started watching it, but I picked it up starting with Rose, and binged through the revival up through the end of season 4, and then I had to wait for the Year of Specials/Season 4.5

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Burkion posted:

I hope to God you meant Tom

That goes without saying. I only saw three or four of Colin Baker's episodes, but they all made me want to shove a sock in his mouth every time he opened it. Granted, the Doctor has always been something of a know-it-all, but Colin is the only one I wanted to cockpunch.

McGann
May 19, 2003

Get up you son of a bitch! 'Cause Mickey loves you!

I don't even remember why I decided to give Who a go on Netflix back in 2012-13, I was drinking incredibly heavily due to ending a loooong relationship where we still worked together every day. And thankfully I was drinking heavily because I would never have made it past the first couple fart jokes otherwise.

cargohills
Apr 18, 2014

I started watching Doctor Who in 2006, because my dad told me I'd like it. I wouldn't recommend anyone start watching at "New Earth" now, but at the time I found it pretty frightening.

AndyElusive
Jan 7, 2007

Doctor Who was Tom Baker to me, even when I was too young to understand exactly what the gently caress was going on. All I knew was that Doctor Who was the guy with the long scarf and the toothy smile who handed out candies to people and called them babies for some reason. I also was too young to understand exactly what the TARDIS actually was. Was it a spaceship? Was it a doorway to other places? Was it something else?

From then on I was aware of Who in a peripheral way, but I didn't ever sit down and watch anything from Davison, Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy. I didn't understand they were Tom Bakers character, just with new faces.

Then one day I heard that they brought back Doctor Who and it had the actor who I remembered from the movies Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later. I caught up on all of Nines adventures and all the way through til Tens regeneration and here I am. Welp, that's my story. Thanks for reading!

Dr. Gargunza
May 19, 2011

He damned me for a eunuch,
and my mother for a whore.



Fun Shoe
My first Who was the Tom Baker serial The Brain of Morbius. This would be sometime around 1982 (yep, I'm old), during a summer I was staying at my aunt & uncle's and right when I was leaning hard on Star Trek as methadone between Star Wars movies. After a brief chuckle at Morbius' henchman being named Condo, and getting a quick primer on the Time Lords from my uncle, I was hooked (and apparently on a pro-tier serial, with a lot of heavy series mythology and graphic violence). From then on, Four was My Doctor, Sarah Jane was My Companion, and after I got home I was disappointed to discover that my local PBS affiliate only showed DW on Friday nights.

I was really thrilled to see the Sisterhood of Karn from these episodes show up in the Paul McGann short for the 50th. I think that's the least irritated I've been with Moffat since "Blink."

Astroman
Apr 8, 2001


Like I said earlier, my first exposure to Who was watching The Three Doctors on a rainy day when I was pretty young. Probably 7 or so.

Then a few years later I'd gotten into Star Trek pretty hard...this was around '86 or so. Was watching TOS reruns, buying novels and the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph and poring over it. And I'd heard of this Doctor Who thing, but never really seen it. I remember exactly the circumstance...it was around 9pm or so on a Friday or Saturday, and there was nothing on tv except The Golden Girls, which wasn't exactly exciting tv for a 10 year old. I was watching on a little 13 inch black and white set in my room, turning from channel to channel (all 5 or 6 of them) and I alighted on The New Jersey Network, channel 24, our local PBS affiliate. Timelash was on, and it was sci-fi and it was different! I realized vaguely this was that Doctor Who show and I thought "well, I can dedicate myself to obsess over something else besides Star Trek."

Pretty soon I was watching both the NJN 9pm show and a midnight showing on another PBS affiliate, and I think somewhere in there they were doing an afternoon viewing. It was great because each one was a different point in the show's run, and they'd go through every episode in order until they hit the end or new ones came from England, whichever came first. Then they started over with Hartnell. And these were the 90 minute PBS edits so you'd see a new serial every week (unless it was a crazy one like The War Games). I faithfully recorded each week which episodes I watched on my Star Trek calendar (sacrilege!) and checked against the Jean-Marc Lofficier episode guide (Volumes 1 and 2). And bonus, if I went to say my grandmother's on vacation, I could watch her PBS which was bound to be showing a totally different Doctor! If I went out of town for anything the first thing I did was try to find local tv listings to see if Doctor Who would coincide with my visit--I recall at least once forcing my family to watch a random Davison on a family trip in a hotel because I wasn't going to miss that opportunity!

Because of this, my Doctor Who viewing was oddly spotty. I saw every episode of Hartnell at least twice, all of 2 and 3, most of 5, and much of 6--except his first season, but I saw Trial as a first run in the US, and all the 7th Doctor seasons on their first airing here. To this day there's still many of the most iconic 4th Doctor episodes I haven't seen and so ironically he was my least favorite Doctor while to most Americans he was the most well known one up till the revival. It took me a long time to jump into the 4th Doctor BF stuff, though of course I love it now.

I also started buying Target novels at my local bookstores to catch up on stuff they hadn't got to yet and the indispensable Doctor Who A-Z encyclopedia, and the Peter Haining books which told a lot of the offscreen history. I lapped up every color photo in those books, and the stories about production. I read about monsters and planets I'd never seen. You have to understand something about the feel for Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s in the US--only someone who was here will "get it." In those days, Doctor Who was pretty underground. "Mainstream" US nerds were into Trek and Tolkein (which was also horribly unknown to normies). Doctor Who was something Other, on PBS at odd hours, on the bottom shelf of a B Dalton or Waldenbooks with a bunch of tiny spined colorful Target novels. Every time I went into a bookstore, especially on vacation, it was an amazing delight to see NEW (to me) Doctor Who in any form--be it Target books, stuff about the history of the show, etc. It was like discovering a new and unknown piece of history if I could afford to buy them. And oh joy of joys if I found a comic book store and some back issues of Doctor Who Magazine!

Then it was cancelled. I saw the last season of McCoy, and we were into The Wilderness Years. I was very excited to see the Virgin books come out, and in my mind I thought "whelp, it was a good run, it's nice that someone is continuing Doctor Who with some new stories but THIS IS PROBABLY THE BEST IT WILL EVER GET." Doctor Who, consigned to the heap of sci-fi history with stuff like Blake's 7, Space 1999, etc.

If you're from the UK, you really won't get it because if you grew up in the 70s and 80s Doctor Who was a National Institution that everyone knew about, but in the US it was just loving underground, man, even to scifi nerds. And more so when it was cancelled.

The TV Movie was a pleasant surprise, especially the way they brought back McCoy and seemed to (mostly) stay in continuity. Then it vanished again. So when the revival came, and it burst onto the scene, it was pretty amazing. I remember watching Rose with my brother, who used to watch McCoy serials on PBS with me and being ecstatic.

Now we live in a world where mainstream US news stations and papers like USA Today will write front page news about "The New Doctor" being cast. And thousands of teenagers squeeing over the hot new Doctor, and it's like I'm in some kind of strange parallel universe totally alien to what I experienced in the 80s and 90s.

It's pretty loving cool. :cool:

TinTower
Apr 21, 2010

You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.
My first exposure to the Who bug was a showing of Claws of Axos on UK Gold.

sinepost
Nov 16, 2004

four o'clock and all's well
My first memory of Doctor Who is watching some of Trial of a Timelord on original broadcast. It began with the continuity announcer having to spend a couple of minutes explaining the plot of the previous eight or so episodes to the audience, which I obviously found more memorable than the actual episode itself as I can't remember exactly which one it was.

The main memories I have from watching classic Who at the time are the cleaner robots from Paradise Towers, and particularly the episode 1 cliffhanger in Remembrance of the Daleks. Then of course it all ended the following year and I never got into the books, so largely took no interest again until 2005. Although I did watch Planet of the Daleks which I think was repeated in the early '90s.

(Oh, and I also watched the TV movie when it was broadcast in the UK, or at least I watched it up until the regeneration and then turned it off.)

Emerson Cod
Apr 14, 2004

by Pragmatica
I thought my first experience with Doctor Who was watching Rose on SciFi when it first started airing. Then when I started watching the older stuff I realized that I had caught the start of the premiere of the TV movie back when it first aired. Then, even earlier that I had seen part of The Happiness Patrol when I was like 3 or 4. I remembered that one because it made me want to really learn how to play spoons as a musical instrument.

Dabir
Nov 10, 2012

The first Who I remember seeing is the regeneration at the end of Caves of Androzani. Some repeat on a cable channel. I'm British, so obviously I was going to watch the revival and aside from the Eleven/Clara half season I've not stopped. Don't know why I didn't watch that one, just kind of couldn't be bothered after the last half season had been a bit crap.

Davros1
Jul 19, 2007

You've got to admit, you are kind of implausible



I remember in 91 going to the mall, and going into Suncoast to look at movie posters, and being blown away by all the Doctor Who videos they sold (at full retail price!) I won a writing award in high school, and the prize was fifty dollars, and you can bet the first thing I did with it was to buy 2 Who videos (Three Doctors and The Deadly Assassin)

The first video I ever owned was a previously viewed copy of The Brain of Morbius I bought at a local video store for 5 bucks

Rhyno
Mar 22, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
I remember the hyper nerds in high school printing off fliers and papering the halls to celebrate the tv movie.

It was a good day because i realized i wasnt actually at the bottom of the food chain.

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."
I went to the midnight release of the Movie on VHS here in London, and got it signed by Geoffrey Sax. It was a week before broadcast, and couldn’t wait.

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egon_beeblebrox
Mar 1, 2008

WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING IN LIFE.





Picked up some Literature today

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