Charles Daniels said:
I worked with various teams on trying to reconstruct various missing Dr Who stories, and while that is very hard stuff to do well, it would be peanuts compared to what Harmy has done.Really? I’d think that would be harder, since so much footage is actually lost, unlike Star Wars, where much of the footage was just low-quality.
It’s easier in the sense that the same quality of result is impossible. Doctor Who reconstructions are made from the best material available, but it mostly means it’s a slideshow.
Off-screen 8mm recordings exist from australia, but they’re generally only a few seconds long. Fortunately, the maker of them captured some absolutely critical moments.
A guy called John Cura was comissioned by the BBC to take official off-screen photos of episodes. So there are many hundreds of those, for most, but not all, missing episodes (generally about 60 made per episode).
For the few episodes not well represented by the above, promotional shots and on set shots, as well as tons of other material, have been used with the camera scripts to reconstruct what the episodes might have looked like.
Every episode’s audio, fortunately, was recorded by fans. Some of the earlier ones are of lower quality, but they’ve been restored very well anyway. Later in the 1960s, some fans managed to use fancier direct line-in recording setups.
As a Star Wars fan, the most frustrating thing is that people go through such incredible measures for Doctor Who, because of a mistake made in the 1970s (trashing the episodes). And everyone would kill for those episodes to be back. For Star Wars, it exists and we’re watching the mistakes happen in real time, and for no good reason.