User:WaltK/Doctor Who media in Germany

After two decades of failed attempts, the Doctor Who series first arrived in Germany in full earnest in the 1980s.

Early distribution attempts
The earliest attempts to introduce Doctor Who to Germany date back to 1965. The BBC offered a selection of First Doctor stories to an unidentified German television channel, an offer that they passed on. A second attempt was made in 1968, when the series was offered to the German public-service broadcaster,, with the Second Doctor serial, The Ice Warriors being submitted for review. The proposal was rejected, the protocol citing the "naive" scenery and costumes and "obscure" scripts as the reason the "unanimous" rejection by the jury.

The fact that German television stations were already archiving their programs for repeat purposes at the time have led some to speculate that, had ZDF picked up the series, many missing episodes would perhaps still exist today.

Early scraps of exposure
Although it take at least another decade for the television series to get any airtime in the country, the 1970s would see the German masses' first, loose exposure to Doctor Who in the most unlikeliest of places. Plaisir, a German erotic magazine, printed the famous nude photo of Katy Manning with a Dalek on one of its front covers. It is not known whether the issue in question contained an explanation of the series for the German readership who, at the time, would have been very unlikely to have heard of the series by this point. It was not until 1980 that the first pieces of Doctor Who media finally found their way to Germany via official distribution; the young adult books publisher, Schneider, published two translated Target novelisations, Planet of the Daleks (Der Planet der Daleks), and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (Kampf um die Erde, or "Fight for Earth"). The two publications were infamous for being heavily edited.

Television debut
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Television
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Prose material
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Audio
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Comics
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Miscellaneous
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Notable translation quirks
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