Sobre estas líneas teneis arte conceptual no utilizado en el episodio de la serie Doctor Who del que es encargó el conocido Neil Gaiman (y de título The Doctor’s wife); el primero para el personaje de Uncle y el segundo para Nephew, que luego fue sustituido por un Ood. Estos y más diseños para la serie (como por ejemplo los Silenciosos vistos en el doble capítulo The imposible astronaut) los podeis ver por este enlace y la noticia original por este otro enlace. Por su parte la curiosidad que cito en el título hace referencia a la paródica interpretación de Batman que ha hecho Matt Smith (el 11º Doctor en la citada serie) de la que teneis más información por este enlace.
En un Q&A, Neil Gaiman explica el porque de estos cambios (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/06/fairly-humongous-doctor-who-q-mostly.html):
Q: Why an Ood? Didn’t seem like it needed to be one. Did you just like them?
N.G.: I really do like the Ood.
Originally Uncle, Auntie and Nephew were all patchwork monsters, with Nephew the least human of all them.
Last July we were at the Make Sure This Comes In On Budget draft, and Steven, Beth and Piers were determined to save all the CGI I’d put in and all the TARDIS stuff, so my original plan for Auntie and Uncle and Nephew to be three new different patchwork aliens got modified.
I made Auntie and Uncle look more human, and less obviously patchwork, and I was offered my choice of any existing monster in the costume department for Nephew. I picked the Ood because it was perfect for what I needed – they have a history of being mentally taken over, and I loved the idea of the eyes and translator ball glowing with green House-light, as opposed to the red possessed Ood eyes we’d seen on their first appearance. Nephew never spoke, so a silent, possessed Ood seemed perfect. And it was a shout-out to Russell Davies. And it seemed like it might be fun to make the Ood scary again…
It also gave us the whole fiddling with the Ood translator/hearing the Time Lords scene, which we didn’t have before that, and made the episode much better.
Making television – and especially making Doctor Who, where you have to imagine a new world (in my case a new universe) with every episode – is always a negotiation between dream and reality. (That was the same email in which I learned that we weren’t going to have the scene in the Tardis Swimming Pool because Karen Gillan couldn’t swim.)
There’s always a Make Sure This Comes In On Budget Draft, as the realities of “Anything You Can Imagine” come face to face with “This Is What We Can Do”. In the case of Doctor Who, the producers found money in seat cushions and borrowed money from other episodes to make it as close to the thing I’d dreamed as they could.
And scenes were being rewritten and modified because we couldn’t afford to do the thing I’d originally asked for until we were actually shooting. That’s the way of television. It was true in Neverwhere. It’s true in everything you watch.
And that’s why an Ood.