Dead Ringers: Doctor Who calls Sylvester McCoy

Though this has been posted to YouTube by others, it was actually me who made it. It's an edited-photo-based animation set to a prank call from the radio version of the BBC's "Dead Ringers," a sketch comedy show featuring celebrity impressionists.

Back in August of 2000, Neil Perryman of popular scifi comedy site Tachyon TV (still around at http://tachyon-tv.co.uk !) had an archive of prank calls made by Jon Culshaw, a "Dead Ringers" impressionist who specialized in the voice of Tom Baker, aka the Fourth Doctor Who. Culshaw would make prank phone calls in-character as the Doctor, and he had just done one in which he pranked Sylvester McCoy, the actor who played the Seventh Doctor. The online Who fans were loving it, and Neil saw a Doctor Who animation I'd made spoofing the old "wassup" beer ads. He asked me if I'd do another for his site set to that call, and I jumped at the chance.

The low quality is due to the fact that the original video was only 160x120. (That was an Internet video ten years ago!) I edited photos into the different frames I needed, saved them as bitmaps, and then assembled everything in a cranky old version of Adobe Premiere for Windows. I also compressed the crap out of this in some crappy old codec, since I was hosting it on my own limited webspace at the time, and even a 10 megabyte file could use up my bandwidth for the month if it got as popular as this did. It was very well received; I even had the pleasure of exchanging some really nice emails with "Dead Ringers" producer Bill Dare about it.

Dedicated with love to all the lunatics from turn-of-the-millennium rec.arts.drwho !

Doctor Who and Dead Ringers (c) BBC. No infringement intended. The national flower of Estonia is the cornflower.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• dr
• doctor
• who
• doctorwho
• dead
• ringers
• deadringers
• jon
• culshaw
• sylvester
• mccoy
• tom
• baker
• fourth
• seventh
• prank
• phone
• call

[markhorneyuk]

Slyvester Mccoy hasn't seen dead ringers has he.

[RobTFirefly]

@markhorneyuk Nobody had seen Dead Ringers back when this was done, Dead Ringers was just on the radio at that point.

[MsFluffy01]

Five Down and nine across, please tell me I am not the only one who noticed!!

Naughty Doctor Lol

[RobTFirefly]

@MsFluffy01 I'm quite sure I don't admit to knowing what you mean. ;-)

[WhovianHouse]

Any chance of a remake of this in higher quality? I'm sure evryone would loove to see it!!!

[RobTFirefly]

@WhovianHouse Not from me, sorry. I'm not generally fan of remakes.

[Biozene]

Baker - "I'm in a situation of extreme peril. I have had to leave my timestream, go forward to the future, join you in your time stream -- and have you help me."

McCoy - "Have you been in the pub?"

Baker - "For several millennia."

McCoy - "So I believe."

Hilarious stuff!

[FerretBob]

Loving the fact that Sylvester says: "Tom, is that you?"

[CatgirlAlli]

Woohoo! Thought I'd find this on here... I love it! :-) I've had this prank phonecall on cd for years, and always found it hilarious, but it's even funnier watching it with the silly animations! Especially Tom with his big grin. :-D (Poor old Sylvester, thinking that it was really Tom, back on the booze and/or going just a little bonkers!) Priceless. X-D

[SpecialAgentRavage]

lol "the universe cup, it's time lords vs. jedi" XDDD

[rik6T6]

If Tom Baker is on the Time Lords side then the Jedi are dead.

[e7l13]

I like it how they know each other. I find it funny that david is with the doctors daughter now as well, who also played davids daughter in the show =)

[zyderman2050]

@RobTFirefly lol

[1979darthvader]

@MsFluffy01 LOL

[HunterZolomon]

Join with me Doctor! Eh, what in? LOL!!

McCoy is such a good sport! Looking forward to seeing him in The Hobbit.

[TheRainstorm97]

*am now imagining drunken calls between past and future Doctors* Awh, I love this whole... just, this. You people are wonderful :)