Fantastic news for completist Doctor Who fans... which, let's face it, is all of us.

Patrick Troughton's classic adventure 'The Faceless Ones' will be the next 'lost' story to be recreated as an animation.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, the BBC 'junked' many classic Doctor Who episodes in an age before repeat showings and DVD/Blu-ray releases.

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Related: Doctor Who: 'The Macra Terror' team on their biggest challenges and the future of animated 'lost' stories



But, following earlier releases 'The Power of the Daleks' and 'The Macra Terror', 'The Faceless Ones' – originally broadcast on BBC One in six parts in April and May 1967 – is being restored, with new animated visuals set to the surviving soundtrack.

The story, the eighth serial in Doctor Who's original fourth season, pits the second Doctor against a race of identity-stealing aliens known as the Chameleons, with only two of the original live-action episodes surviving.

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All six episodes are being recreated with photographic reconstruction and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 16, with the set also due to include surviving archive material.

The set also includes audio commentary on multiple episodes, surviving film fragments from the original episodes, a Making Of featurette for the animated sequences, camera script PDFs and five Easter eggs.

Last year, Charles Norton – animation producer/director on the Doctor Who reconstructions – suggested that it might not be feasible to restore all 97 missing episodes.

"It's one of my favourite stories, but I don't think [1965 historical] 'The Crusade' is terribly likely to have its missing episodes animated," he said.

"Episodes one and three survive on film, episodes two and four don't, and in episodes two and four, there's something like 26 speaking characters, and most of them have three different changes of clothes, and [those characters] aren't in episodes one and three!

BBC

"In the '60s, particularly the Hartnell era, they used to do historical epics and they were great because the BBC had the resources to do that... you'd have hordes of extras and ornate costumes from the massive BBC costume store.

"When you've actually got to draw it, particularly on a budget, and you've maybe only got a year to do it, it does get a little bit tricky!"

Norton suggested that a number of other fan-favourite stories like 1964's 'Marco Polo' and 1966's 'The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve' might not ever be animated for the same reason.

"I do wonder whether or not they would be doable," he said. "That still leaves a huge number of stories that are doable, but I don't think we could say that every Doctor Who story is going to be animated, at least not any time soon."

Doctor Who 'The Faceless Ones' is available to pre-order now on Amazon.

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