Oh boy, here we go again…

Am I gonna blog about anything but baby antics and Doctor Who this week? Not a chance – especially not when there are new Doctor Who figures on display at SDCC right now.

Apparently, exasperatingly enough, the surprise items are display only, not for sale – or so I’m hearing. In addition to the already-announced (and already-lusted-after) Troughton, Hartnell and Big Finish Baker packs, we now have:

Third Doctor pack #1 – Pertwee in green smoking jacket, removable cloak, and sonic screwdriver, with a Sea Devil

Third Doctor pack #2 – Pertwee in blue smoking jacket with red trim, with sonic screwdriver, with a Dalek from Death To The Daleks

Fourth Doctor pack – Tom Baker (identical to existing single figure), Voc robot (repaint of existing Robots Of Death robots), “Suicide Dalek” (rehash of Genesis Dalek with “bombs” attached to its collar, as seen in Destiny Of The Daleks), and a Mummy from Pyramids Of Mars

Dalek pack #2 – another three-figure set: Gold Dalek (Day Of The Daleks), Saucer Pilot Dalek (Dalek Invasion Of Earth), Emperor’s Guard Dalek (Evil Of The Daleks)

If they’re not opened up for sale at SDCC itself, they’ll be available online next month.

Initial thoughts: I’m not normally crazy about varients, but I’m up for both of the Pertwee packs, definitely. The Sea Devil figure, though already released on its own, isn’t a bad “army builder” to have around, and I’ve always been a fan of the one-off Death To The Daleks “corrugated metal” Dalek design. I can’t wait to see the first photos of the Third Doctor figures leak out – if the first two Doctors (and, of course, the others released to date) are anything to go by, a decent likeness of Pertwee’s very distinctive face should be a real treat. I wouldn’t even mind two different head sculpts for the two different figures (vs. the fourth Doctor’s “swappable head”). Feel free to call me a sucker (ha! get it?) for Daleks, but I’m interested in the new all-Dalek set too – they had me at “Gold Dalek from Day Of The Daleks“.

The Tom Baker pack? Honestly…not fascinated. The Doctor himself is left unaltered from the single-packed figure (which I already have), the Voc robot is a repaint (I already have D84 and SV7, and I’m just not interested in setting up a whole Robots Of Death diorama, you know?), which leaves us with my only points of interest being the Pyramids Mummy (if they’d done Sutekh himself rather than the generic Mummy, I probably would change my mind) and the “Suicide Dalek”. With the Hartnell SDCC exclusive that I’m already getting (which comes packed with a different Dalek variation), one of the upcoming Pertwee packs and the 3-Dalek set, I’d already be adding five of the deadly dustbins to my already quite crowded Dalek shelf (I do indeed have a Dalek/Cybermen shelf, and the Daleks are taking up more real estate by far)…so a Dalek with bombs on it isn’t a compelling selling point. If the fourth Doctor set comes down in price considerably, I may pick it up at clearance at some point.

Barring really important ancillary characters such as the Delgado or Ainley Masters, the Brigadier and/or other UNIT characters, or major companions like Jamie, Ace or Leela (or a Peri 2-pack – buy them by the pair!), what I need to seriously entice me into buying a new box set is a Doctor that I don’t already have. I understand the deal with the fourth Doctor set: basically, the Voc and the Mummy were scheduled for the now-almost-certainly-cancelled second wave of classic figures (the classic range didn’t do well at retail, so the remaining original series Doctors will only see the light of day as exclusives – you can almost bank on McCoy and McGann for next year’s SDCC). The figures were already sculpted and prototyped and approved, and they just needed to go to production. A box set revolving around the third, seventh or eighth Doctors would have involved sculpting, prototyping and approval of a bunch of new characters, many of them with the likenesses of real people (rather than BBC costume department masks) who would have to be haggled with. So here’s my prediction for the ’10 exclusives:

• Seventh Doctor with updated Remembrance Dalek (meaning the existing modular Dalek mold with only minimal revisions and a new paint job) or Special Weapons Dalek; I’d prefer the normal Dalek to the S.W. Dalek, but so many fans go bugf@#k crazy over the S.W. Dalek that there may be riots if they don’t do it.
• Eighth Doctor, alone or with either “skeletal” Master from Deadly Assassin (I know that’s a wild pairing, but that version of the Master is known to exist in prototyped and approved form, and again is a masked character that dodges the need to clear an actor’s likeness) or TV movie Seventh Doctor (only a moderate revision of the above Seventh Doctor figure).
• Peter Cushing! Come on, I know it’s wishful thinking, but hey, I want the Peter Cushing Doctor on my shelf.

More news (and/or photos) as they hit me. I’m a happy duck knowing that I have a shot at having Doctors 1-6 sitting on my shelf by Christmas.