Animated episode

An animated episode is a missing episode of Doctor Who that has been "completed" by use of animation. In several cases, producers of the Doctor Who DVD range have commissioned original black-and-white animation, synced to the programme's original audio tracks.

Early commissions served to "complete" serials with only one or two missing episodes, allowing the full serials to be sold as a commercial product.

Later, BBC Worldwide and BBC America commissioned a full animation of The Power of the Daleks for broadcast and commercial release, beginning the trend of animating whole missing stories going forward.

The first such effort, Cosgrove Hall's animation of The Invasion episodes 1 and 4, was released to DVD alongside the surviving episodes in November 2006. The animation had been paid for by an earlier surplus in the Doctor Who website budget, allowing it to be used in the DVD release as a test for the concept, at no extra cost. Despite the DVD's success, the sales were not high enough to offset the animation cost for any future collaboration.

Eventually other animation studios were commissioned to continue the reconstruction. In June 2011, 2 Entertain announced that the missing episodes 4 and 5 of The Reign of Terror would be animated by Planet 55 Studios, using the "Thetamation" process.

The serial was released on DVD in January 2013. Planet 55 would later go on to animate Episode 4 of The Tenth Planet (November 2013), and episodes 1 and 3 of The Moonbase (January 2014).

In August 2013, BBC Worldwide announced that episodes 2 and 3 of The Ice Warriors would be animated by Qurios Entertainment for a DVD release later that month.

In December 2013, 2 Entertain commissioning editor Dan Hall mentioned that Planet 55 had again been commissioned to complete The Underwater Menace, for what he hoped would be an early 2014 release. However, in September 2015 Doctor Who Magazine confirmed that the much-delayed DVD, now scheduled for 26 October, was instead to contain tele-snap reconstructions of the missing episodes 1 and 4.

In September 2016 it was announced that the completely missing serial The Power of the Daleks would be animated and released via the BBC Store on 5 November 2016, the 50th anniversary of the serial's first broadcast, before it was released on DVD (21 November) and Blu-ray (6 February 2017). This is the first wholly missing serial to be completely reconstructed using animation.