Movie Gadget Friday: The Doctor's TARDIS from Doctor Who

By Peter Rojas

Movie Gadget Friday is back! Yeah, we'd been jonesing for Josephine Fraser's weekly dose of movie gadget goodness, too, and for this new installment she checks out the Doctor's TARDIS from Doctor Who:

The TARDIS was featured in the Doctor Who series beginning with the first episode that was aired in the UK
in 1963, and in both of the Peter Cushing Doctor Who films. It's familiar design and function has remained a constant of the stories right through to the Doctors impending ninth regeneration.

There are a couple of key things that make the TARDIS so beloved of fans:

  1. The TARDIS comes with a chameleon circuit that allows the ship to appear in any outward form ? a pyramid or a
    filing cabinet for instance. Except it doesn?t – handily enough for the BBC?s famously under-funded props
    department, the circuit went haywire in the first series, and is stuck as a blue 1950s/60s Police Box ? the little
    blue shed that used to house a telephone for official use, and a light on the top that lit up if the phone was
    ringing.

  2. TARDIS stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, and has a huge advantage over other sci-fi craft, since
    it can move through space, time and matter, and can also opt out of the space-time dimension altogether. My
    eight-year-old son can?t have been the only one who found it a little convenient that the time machine in The Time
    Machine didn?t come to a standstill in a cement wall.

  3. The inside of the TARDIS is in a completely different dimension from the outside. This means while Bill and Ted
    got all squished up with their time travelling guests, the Doctor and his endless stream of young lady assistants
    get to live in an extensive interior that includes libraries, gardens, swimming pools, a cricket pavilion, the
    cloister room, the wardrobe room and the pink room. Inexplicably however, the interior shakes when you attack the
    outside.

  4.  It breaks down constantly because it?s old and the technology running it is obsolete, although it does
    seem to get upgraded from time to time. Hitting it usually makes
    it work again.

More than just a home and vehicle for the Doctor, his TARDIS also seems to have some kind of sentience and telepathic ability. It exists in a symbiotic relationship – except in emergencies, when the script calls for someone else to take over the controls. This does go some way to explaining the mystery of why the alien Doctor repeatedly dies and comes back as a white middle-aged guy.

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