User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20190917111635/@comment-6032121-20191003172044

At any rate, I've been taking a look at Category:Teasers and trailers for what other trailers that should be reevaluated if narrative trailers are indeed made valid. The vast majority are non-narrative, and what few aren't are usually fourth-wall-breaking as all hell, but I have found these four:


 * TV: Meet the Thirteenth Doctor: No more fourth-wall-breaking than the end of The Name of the Doctor — the Doctor just stands still weirdly long for the final frame as “Introducing X as the Doctor” text appears. It consists entirely of newly-shot footage and while its storyline as such may be simple, it's no more bare-bones than Prequel (The Wedding of River Song).


 * HOMEVID: Revisitations 2: Described on the page as "a new narrative created by using old footage from these stories", which is about right. Not fourth-wall-breaking as such, but it does state that the entire Doctor Who universe as depicted in the various episodes it advertises is contained in a miniscope. Is this too iconoclastic to be taken seriously? I mean, Happy Deathday does pretty unambiguously suggest The Five Doctors was actually a video game played by Izzy Sinclair, and The Land of Happy Endings that all the TV Comics stories took place in the Eighth Doctor's dreams…


 * TV: 25th Anniversary: Like Ace Returns, it's bookended by new in-universe McCoy/Aldred footage with "flashbacks" consisting of clips from various episodes sandwiched in the middle. There may be Rule 4 issues, though (the Doctor says it's been "25 years since he first visited Earth"; I think there's room for that to simply mean the TARDIS has landed in 1988, but some people may not agree).


 * TV: Season 17: Identical in format to the two Doctor Who YouTube Channel trailers that sparked this whole discussion: a self-contained, original-material-consisting little minisode with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor with a more conventional trailer tacked on at the end. This one I've seen and, again, I find it to be precisely in the same boat as Jo Grant Returns.

Again, these are all things that would warrant individual debates, not things I'm saying would definitely be valid if this thread's proposal is accepted. Nor is this thread the right place to already have the debates. But it's good to know all the stories that may be affected by the decision.