Quote:
Originally Posted by DrNefario
Novelisations are fine by me.
They don't usually tend to add much to the original, though.
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Very true - although it does vary enormously depending on the range of books.
The
Doctor Who novelisations from Target Books back in the 1970s and 1980s tended to go through periods of adding in that something extra and then having a fallow period of just transcribing exactly what was seen on the screen.
In general, the first few years from 1973 and the last five or so from the mid-1980s were the highlights. The earlier ones were helped by having a slower pace of release and one of the finest novelisers of the range (Malcolm Hulke) working on them. In the later years it started to become more common for the writers of the original scripts to be contracted to novelise the stories, so again there was an upswing in quality as they had more of a vested interest in putting out their original vision.
Compare those to the James Blish
Star Trek novelisations of the 1960s and 1970s and you quite quickly realise how lucky
Doctor Who fans were to be getting the more basic novelisations from the late 1970s and first half of the 1980s. Whereas the
Doctor Who novelisations would take around 126 pages to re-tell a single 100 minute television story, James Blish had the unenviable task of cramming in between five and seven 50 minutes episodes into a similar space.
Having re-read
Star Trek 1 a few weeks back out of curiosity, let me tell you, it's not a pleasant experience. Fortunately, the number of episodes novelised did decrease for later books - I suspect it was mainly to stretch them them out as far as possible (the same happened with the Alan Dean Foster range based on the animated episodes) - and they also had a larger page count, which helped enormously.