Omnibus

Omnibus is a term, more popular in British than American English, used to describe a collection of individual parts of a story into a single entity. The term is used in Doctor Who fiction to describe the conversion of a serial into a movie. It is also used to describe the collection of comic stories, but there is a significant variance in the way comic omnibuses are conceptualized in the US and UK.

Television
An "omnibus edition" of a 1963 serial is one in which constituent episodes have been edited together to form a single movie. Thus, it begins with the opening titles of episode 1, and concludes with the closing titles of the final episode, with all intervening credits removed. The various end-of-episode cliffhangers and their reprises in the following episode are also slimmed so that, effectively, there is no "cliffhanger", as such, present. Though generally not actually destructive to the content of a serial, the practice could have some minor consequences on the viewer's experience of a serial. For instance, if people were only credited in one of the middle episodes, there was a chance — depending on who was doing the editing — that their credit might not appear at the end of the so-called omnibus edition. Also, on those rare occasions when a reprise of a cliffhanger was a different take of the same scene from the previous episode, the editor would have to choose which of the two performances to edit out. By and large, though, an omnibus edition was not so heavily edited as to create a significantly different version of the narrative.

United States
This practice was done frequently, if inconsistently, in the United States, in order to make a standard 4-part adventure fit into a 90-minute time-slot. Often stations ran a version that had been pre-edited by BBC Enterprises, but sometimes they created a unique cut of their own, and sometimes slightly re-edited the BBC Enterprises version. Thus omnibus editions did not necessarily conform to a "standard"; viewers of a California PBS station may have experienced a slightly different version of a story than a New York PBS station. Indeed, sometimes the same station occasionally broadcast slightly different versions of the omnibus on different occasions, depending upon their immediate scheduling needs. It was not uncommon for PBS stations to broadcast omnibus editions during one part of the week and the full episodic versions during another.

Because individual stations sometimes created their own omnibuses, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty which serials were ever broadcast in North America as omnibuses. We know quite definitively which were released to home video — and that these were exclusively Tom Baker episodes from his first three seasons — but it is impossible to compile a definitive list of all the omnibuses ever created in the US. Anecdotal evidence on various fan message boards suggests, however, that the Philip Hinchcliffe era was not the only one to be broadcast in the movie format in some parts of the United States. All we can say for sure about omnibus broadcasts in North America is that after that first three seasons of the Fourth Doctor, BBC Enterprises stopped offering the movie versions.

Although the term "omnibus" is understood in the US, it is never a word that was used to actually market Doctor Who in North America. Indeed, little attention was ever drawn to the fact that the edit was in any way "different". Thus, fans were free to describe the editions how they wished, and the terms "movie version" or "movie format" have dominance over "omnibus".

United Kingdom
The practice was less usual in the United Kingdom, and never applied to the initial broadcast of Doctor Who. It did, however, begin to happen with more frequency once Doctor Who shifted to second-run channels like BBC Gold, and occasionally during themed "Doctor Who nights" on channels like BBC Two.

Home video
BBC Video began their VHS releases of Doctor Who stories by using the omnibus format. However, the practice was quickly abandoned in the UK. The format lingered for a bit with their releases to the United States, however, where buyers would have been more accustomed to seeing Fourth Doctor stories presented as movies. Nevertheless, the episodic versions were fairly quickly seen as preferable, and the practice was dropped for even the NTSC versions relatively quickly. Ultimately, all stories originally released as movies were re-released episodically in both PAL and NTSC.