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 would 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
The first instance of televised Doctor Who being broadcast through an avenue of which German viewers may have been able to watch reportedly occurred in the mid-1980s, in which a selection of Fourth Doctor serials were broadcast on the European, English-speaking.

In 1989, Doctor Who finally made its full German-dubbed, televised debut on the commercial station. It began on Wednesday, 22 November with the first episode of Time and the Rani (translated as Terror auf Lakertia, or "Terror on Lakertia"). The broadcast was preceded by a short introduction by John Nathan-Turner and Sylvester McCoy, in which they explained the history of the program to their new viewers. Each episode that followed aired every Sunday.

The channel aired the entirety of the Seventh Doctor's tenure during this initial run. Curiously, the serials were aired in their original production order, rather than in the order aired by the BBC. This resulted in Ghost Light (Das Hause der Tausend Schrecken, or "The house of a thousand horrors") being the last to air instead of Survival (Der Tod auf leisen Sohlen, or "Death on silent feet").

The show's German debut came a month shy of the end of the show's original run in its native United Kingdom. Nonetheless, the short run managed to attract around 2 million viewers, as reported in a 1990 issue of Doctor Who Magazine'. Due to its success, RTL entered negotiations with the BBC to begin airing Third Doctor serials in colour, but these plans seemingly fell through.

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

 * The TARDIS acronym is rendered in some media as Trips Aufgrund Relativer Dimensionen Im Sternenzelt ("Trips due to relative dimensions in the star tent").
 * The Tenth Doctor's first post-regeneration line in The Parting of the Ways contains a minor mistranslation: the Doctor's comment on his new teeth goes from "New teeth? That's weird" to "Blaue Zähne? Das ist merkwürdig", or "Blue teeth? That's weird", the implication being that the translator misheard the word "new" and translated accordingly.