Like gin and tonic, chocolate and peanut butter, ham and pineapple, some things just go perfectly together. More fun, though, is when two things come together that you didn’t even know you wanted and afterwards are upset it never happened before. This August, two such great tastes will taste great together on the big screen when Fathom Events presents a RiffTrax live event, riffing the 1983 Doctor Who special, “The Five Doctors,” the show’s 20th anniversary episode which—as the name says—teamed up all five Doctors to that point. Or, rather, three Doctors, clips of a fourth, and a replacement guy in a wig.
Written by longtime Who writer Terrance Dicks, “The Five Doctors” had to work as both a story on its own and a celebration of 20 years of time and space. It saw then-current Fifth Doctor Peter Davison and his companions have to foil a plot by someone pulling previous versions of the Doctor out of time in an attempt to kill him. This meant Third Doctor Jon Pertwee and Second Doctor Patrick Troughton returned to face Cybermen and Yeti and things, but Tom Baker wanted nothing to do with it and so was relegated to a cameo made of scenes from the abandoned story “Shada,” and William Hartnell had already passed away and so had to be replaced by a guest actor named Richard Hurndall. There’s PLENTY to make fun of, and I even love it.
And who better to riff on “The Five Doctors” than the three RiffTrax kings themselves, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett? They’ve been riffing as a team since they were the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Syfy years, and they’re still the go-to voices in film and television skewering. The trio has already thrown shade at both of the 1960s Peter Cushing Dalek movies, but now they’re going for the real canonical deal.
RiffTrax Live: Doctor Who — “The Five Doctors” will be performed live Thursday, August 17, 2017, at 8:00 p.m. ET/7:00 p.m. CT (and tape-delayed to 7:00 p.m. MT/8:00 p.m. PT.) and shown in cinemas all over the U.S. as part of Fathom Events, and will be rebroadcast Thursday, August 24, 2017, 7:30 p.m. local time. I for one am way psyched.
Tickets will go on sale April 13 (funnily enough, the day before the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 season drops) at this link. Will you join in on the Time Lord hilarity? Let us know below!
