The Doctor and the Devil: These are among the tracks I've added to AFOS rotation this month

(Photo source: Art of the Title)

Delia Derbyshire, "Doctor Who (Original Theme)" (now playing during "Hall H")

In England, hiding behind the couch became a tradition for kids who grew up watching monsters chase after the Doctor and his companions on telly on Saturday night. But in America, those of us who grew up watching The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact back-to-back at 5pm on the local PBS station weren't exposed to Doctor Who on only one night of the week. Thanks to PBS, we were exposed to it every weeknight, right after the Bloodhound Gang would try to bust a cocaine ring or something. The Doctor Who opening titles meant that 3-2-1 Contact was over and it was time to change the channel as soon as possible because for a four-year-old like me, the Doctor Who title sequence--with its intense-looking, psychedelic slit-scan vortex FX, its photo of a somber-looking Tom Baker and that otherworldly piece of early electronica written by Ron Grainer and performed by BBC Radiophonic Workshop musician Delia Derbyshire--was scary as shit.



But unlike you Brits who yelped and cowered from the sight of giant pepper shakers with toilet plunger arms hollering "Exterminate!" at'cha boy, I didn't hide behind the couch whenever the Doctor Who titles came on. My brain merely shivered a little and then I switched to a different channel. That's how I rolled, and to me, the Doctor Who titles were scarier than any of the rubber monsters I would see a few years later, which was when I finally had the guts to get past those spooky and unsettling titles and watch the rest of the show.

"I remember as a child I was terrified by [the theme]. It just strikes fear into your very soul," noted British comedian Bill Bailey at the start of his "Docteur Qui" number during Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra, in which he amusingly broke it down on the piano and pointed out how Grainer's melody is basically Belgian jazz.

Delia Derbyshire (top); Sarah Winter as Derbyshire in An Adventure in Space and Time (bottom)

In An Adventure in Space and Time, the BBC's recent made-for-TV biopic about William Hartnell's resurgence as a TV star during Doctor Who's first few years, we get to briefly see Derbyshire (played by Sarah Winter) fiddle around with analog tape reels and perform the theme on keyboard (she's also seen explaining the origin of the TARDIS dematerialization sound FX: house keys scraped against a piano wire). Today, her arrangement of the theme--which, except for a few tweaks in the sound FX and the musical transition from episode credits to opening scene, remained unchanged in the opening titles from 1963 to 1979--isn't scary-sounding at all because since childhood, we've been subjected to much scarier things, like Dana Perino trying to rap or Alison Gold singing about Chinese food. But it hasn't lost its power as a trippy and effective musical encapsulation of exploring the unknown, which is why when I received Silva Screen's Doctor Who: The 50th Anniversary Collection and the Derbyshire version turned up as Track 1, I immediately added it to the "Hall H" playlist.

(Photo source: SMOSH)

Murray Gold, "All the Strange, Strange Creatures" (from series 3 of Doctor Who; now playing during "AFOS Prime," "New Cue Revue" and "Hall H")

One thing I've noticed about modern Doctor Who is that Murray Gold, who's been the show's composer since 2005, hasn't really referenced the Grainer theme, outside of the opening and closing titles and the "Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords" drumbeat motif that represents a certain old nemesis of the Doctor's. It's understandable because the Grainer theme doesn't really represent the Doctor as a heroic character--the theme's alien nature signifies that it's more of a theme about traveling through space and time and, like I said before, encountering the unknown--so Gold has written all-new themes to represent the heroism of the Doctor and his homies and emphasize the adventure side of this modernized and much less lethargically paced Doctor Who. These themes are more heroic-sounding than the Grainer piece, and because the BBC has given modern Doctor Who a bigger budget to work with, they're more cinematic and epic in tone and orchestration. (They also make for slightly more appealing listening than the mostly synthy and atonal score cues that were written for the show from the early '70s to the late '80s. Hardcore Doctor Who fans might enjoy that '70s-to-'80s section of the 50th Anniversary Collection album more than most listeners for nostalgic reasons, while others who are only familiar with Doctor Who in its present form might find that part of the compilation to be kind of grueling as music.)

The rousing "I Am the Doctor" motif Gold introduced in Matt Smith's first year as the Doctor is a good example of modern Doctor Who's cinematic sound, as is Gold's "All the Strange, Strange Creatures" motif from a couple of years before. "All the Strange, Strange Creatures," which reappears on the 50th Anniversary Collection album, is referred to as "The Trailer Music" because it was used in series 3 trailers, while I remember it best in an alternate form as the cue during the pivotal moment when an amnesiac professor played by special guest star Derek Jacobi regains his memory, and it turns out he's the long-unseen Master, the Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock.

Outside the context of the show, "All the Strange, Strange Creatures" brings back all those memories of the 10th Doctor and Martha Jones running around and continuing the show's tradition of chase scenes inside corridors. White sneakers--or as the 11th Doctor and the War Doctor prefer to call them in "The Day of the Doctor," sand shoes--just look wrong when paired with a suit and tie, but now that I think about it, the 10th Doctor's preference for sneaks makes some sense because of all that running he did.

Elmer Bernstein, "Theme from Devil in a Blue Dress" (now playing during "The Whitest Block Ever")

Before his breakout role in One False Move director Carl Franklin's 1995 Walter Mosley adaptation Devil in a Blue Dress as Mouse the trigger-happy thug ("If you ain't want him killed, why'd you leave him with me?"), Don Cheadle was known only as the uptight, by-the-book D.A. on Picket Fences--or for that one time he showed up as Will's best friend from the Philly streets really early on in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's run. Devil in a Blue Dress was meant to be a Denzel Washington vehicle, but the unassuming-looking, average-sized Cheadle straight-up stole the flick, like how the equally unassuming-looking, modest-of-height Kendrick Lamar steals damn near every posse cut or collabo he guests on these days: with attitude, energy, calm and wit.

(Photo source: The Blue Vial)

A playlist through space and time: The best of the AFOS block "Hall H" on Spotify

I named the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" after the huge-ass hall in the San Diego Convention Center, the home of San Diego Comic-Con, partly because at a total of 10 hours from 7am to 5pm Pacific on Saturday (and again on Sunday), the block is equally huge. "Hall H" is full of selections from scores to shows and films that are popular with the comic or anime con crowd, so it's all the fun and excitement of a comic or anime con, but without the horrifying smells.

So some British show celebrated the 50th anniversary of its premiere over the weekend. Inspector Spacetime didn't just prove that it hasn't shown any signs of aging even though it's a show that's so old Larry King discovered his first liver spot on the day it premiered. It also proved that even when the budget is at its lowest, the zippers on the Ocean Demon monster suits are at their most visible and the corridors that the Inspector and Constable Reggie are often seen running through are at their creakiest, it can still entertain, as long as there's plenty of charisma from whoever's portraying the Inspector and his associate and the storytelling is as impeccable as the Inspector's taste in bowler hats.

These days, Inspector Spacetime, or as it's known to people outside the Community universe, Doctor Who, looks much more spiffy and baller than it used to, and the interior of the time machine our favorite anti-authoritarian time traveler rides around in no longer looks like it's going to tip over if someone sneezed at the roundel-covered wall. The premise remains the same: an eccentric alien hops around space and time to protect the universe and a little planet he's come to love called Earth, and thanks to his bizarre alien physiology (he has two hearts instead of one), he regenerates into a completely different person whenever he dies. But now there's more of a focus on the humans he's befriended and how he's affected their lives, as well as a focus on the angst that makes him tick: guilt over the toughest decision he's ever made. That would be causing the destruction of his own native planet Gallifrey--he's responsible for killing off his own people, the Time Lords--to put an end to the off-screen Time War between them and the Daleks, one of the Doctor's biggest adversaries.

The PTSD from the Time War was added to the character by former showrunner Russell T. Davies, who revived Doctor Who 16 years after its cancellation by the BBC and modernized the show in ways that enhanced and improved it (the less said about Davies' love for farty alien jokes, the better), and not just in visual terms. Towards the end of Sylvester McCoy's late '80s run as the seventh Doctor, the show started to hint that the Doctor was less than saintly and could be as devious and shady as his enemies. Sure, in the past, he's been a cantankerous old man (the first Doctor) and an arrogant asshole (the sixth Doctor). But unless I'm mistaken because I haven't watched all the pre-Davies episodes, the show rarely raised questions about some of the Doctor's actions (I haven't seen all of them because--and longtime Doctor Who heads might disagree with me--I've found some of them to be too slow-paced for my tastes, even when I first caught some of the immensely popular Tom Baker episodes on PBS, and since all of them were shot on videotape, except one of my favorite old-school Doctor Who episodes, the shot-entirely-on-film "Spearhead from Space," they look like moldy '70s and '80s episodes of General Hospital).

Doctor Who was cancelled before it could further explore the dark side of McCoy's Doctor, but when Davies brought the show back and introduced the backstory of the Time War (which took place off-camera during the interval between the 1996 Doctor Who TV-movie starring Paul McGann and the show's 2005 return), he picked up on that dark side. He and several other writers, including current showrunner Steven Moffat, made the character of the Doctor more relatable, imperfect and human, even when the Davies seasons reimagined him as a cross between a thinking person's superhero, a god with a mischievous streak and a rock star who's charming to both women and gay guys (Billie Piper's lovestruck Rose Tyler was clearly a surrogate--some haters will say she was a Mary Sue--for the openly gay Davies; some probably consider John Barrowman's Captain Jack Harkness to be more of a surrogate, but Captain Jack is the dashing gay action hero Davies wishes he could be but isn't).

"The Day of the Doctor," last Saturday night's satisfying 50th anniversary episode, revisits the previously unseen tough decision that's haunted the Doctor since the first season of the Davies/Moffat era and finally gives us glimpses of that much-discussed Time War. To the show's fans, Moffat has been as polarizing a showrunner as Davies was in the last few episodes of his reign--Moffat haters think Moffat's writing on Doctor Who is overly convoluted, repetitive, misogynist and possibly racist and they're not so fond of his rather dickish response to their opinion that the Doctor doesn't have to always regenerate into a white guy--but Moffat has excelled at making us feel the giddiness the Doctor experiences whenever he achieves the impossible, whether it's during the climax of "The Doctor Dances" or during Matt Smith's current run as the 11th Doctor (which will come to a close in next month's Christmas episode, in which the 11th Doctor dies and regenerates into a profanity-free Peter Capaldi).

The quintessential moment of Moffat's take on the Doctor as "the mad man with a box" is that funny and clever scene in "A Christmas Carol" where the Doctor demonstrates to Michael Gambon's skeptical, Scrooge-like miser character that he's going to change his past and make himself appear on screen in the childhood home movie Gambon's watching, right after he leaves the room--and a few seconds later, thanks to the magic of the TARDIS, there he is, up on screen with Gambon's younger self. The Doctor is always rewriting history, and in "The Day of the Doctor," with the help of his current sidekick Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), his most recent self (David Tennant), the War Doctor (John Hurt), the "forgotten" past incarnation who obliterated both his own race and the Daleks, and a mysterious figure only the War Doctor can see and who looks an awful lot like Rose (the three Doctors wind up meeting each other for reasons too convoluted to explain here), the Doctor figures out how to rewrite history to fix his biggest mistake, and it's a moment as exhilarating as that home movie scene in "A Christmas Carol." It exemplifies why Doctor Who remains appealing to viewers all over the world (and why the BBC, which is now remorseful about the 1989 cancellation, has gone all-out for the franchise's 50th anniversary by bringing "The Day of the Doctor" to theaters in 3-D and producing An Adventure in Space and Time, a TV-movie that flashes back to Doctor Who's unusual and humble beginnings as TV that originally wasn't designed to scare or thrill kids but to educate them): the three Doctors' solution is--to borrow the words of longtime fan Craig Ferguson when he sang about why he loves the show--the ultimate triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

Selections from Murray Gold's epic score music for the third, fifth and sixth seasons of modern Doctor Who are featured during "Hall H," and they kick off the following sampler of tracks from "Hall H" that are found on Spotify. The complete sampler tracklist is at the very bottom of this post.

(Photo source: Greendale A.V. Club)

The fictional Inspector Spacetime, the Doctor Who counterpart we've seen bits and pieces of on Community (some of Ludwig Göransson's Community score cues are in rotation during "Hall H" but aren't part of the above sampler), is so popular with Community fans that's it's been made into a web series. It's even been cosplayed at cons.

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: !Blog)

Murray Gold's Doctor Who: Series 5 score album lands in the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks

I enjoyed Steven Moffat's fifth-season revamp of Doctor Who and composer Murray Gold's new themes for the show, so I'm adding several standout Gold cues from the fifth-season score album to "Assorted Fistful" rotation. The two-disc album from Silva Screen came out in November in the U.K. and finally hit our shores just recently.

Gold's rousing "I Am The Doctor" theme for The 11th Doctor (Matt Smith, who's been a terrific Doctor, despite the Tucker Carlson bow tie) is my favorite theme he's written for any of The Doctor's post-Paul McGann incarnations so far. When I first heard it during the "Eleventh Hour" season premiere, I thought to myself, "Okay, I gotta cop that CD." I like how Gold takes the percussion during the "I Am The Doctor" motif and makes it simulate a ticking clock, like in the "Amy in the TARDIS" cue that concludes "The Eleventh Hour" as The Doctor activates the new TARDIS for the first time.

"I Am The Doctor" and "Amy in the TARDIS" are part of the "Assorted" playlist, along with the season finale cue "The Sad Man with a Box," which includes some nifty electronic effects that represent the "timey-wimey stuff" that goes down during the finale. When I first heard the CD sound as if it were being played back in reverse and then paused, I got worried and thought my CD was skipping, but then I remembered it was an electronic effect from the scene where River Song (Alex Kingston) gets trapped in a time loop.

I'm looking forward to season 6 (finally, an episode shot on location in America, with actual American actors for a change, instead of British actors mangling American accents!), and I'm wondering what Gold has up his sleeve for the theme that will represent "the silence that will fall" in the new season. I'm thinking Gold will take the Pootie Tang approach (no music).