Doctor Who's long-lost story 'The Macra Terror' has been restored using new animated visuals – and Digital Spy has an exclusive clip from the gorgeous reconstruction.



All four episodes of the 1967 story starring Patrick Troughton were junked by the BBC in an age before repeat showings and DVDs, but using the surviving soundtrack, a restored version of the story has been produced using animation.

In our exclusive excerpt from the story, out next Monday (March 25) on DVD and Blu-ray, the Doctor (Troughton) confronts the runaway Medok (Terence Lodge), who's convinced that "horrible" insect-like creatures have invaded his utopian colony.

But there's no such thing as Macra... right?

BBC Studios

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Explaining why 'The Macra Terror' – which pits the second Doctor against a race of crab-like monsters – was picked as the next missing Doctor Who story to animate, animation producer/director Charles Norton explained: "We'd already done 'Power of the Daleks' and we were keen to find a story that was four episodes, because we knew we'd be able to do that in a more realistic timeframe.

"Also, a story on a purely practical level, we needed a story that didn't feature a massive number of characters. There's two stories that meet the criteria: one is [1966/67's] 'The Highlanders' and the other is 'The Macra Terror', and 'The Highlanders' features lots of tartan and location work, which is quite difficult to draw!

"We wanted to only bite off what we could chew, and we wanted to spend more time on trying to make it look as good as possible, so we decided to go for 'The Macra Terror' –it's a relatively contained story with a relatively small cast, so we could spend time getting it right. That would be a bit more difficult if we were doing [1965/66's] 'The Daleks' Master Plan', which is 13 episodes."

Doctor Who: The Macra Terror will be out on DVD and Blu-ray from March 25.

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