TARDIS
The TARDIS is a fictional time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. The name is an acronym of Time And Relative Dimension (or Dimensions) In Space.[1] A product of Time Lord technology, a properly piloted TARDIS can transport its occupants to any point in space and time. Its interior exists in multidimensional space, leading to it being significantly larger on the inside than it appears from outside.
In the series, the Doctor pilots a Type 40 TARDIS. Although TARDIS is the name of a class of vessel, rather than a specific craft, the Doctor's TARDIS is usually referred to as "the" TARDIS or, in some of the earlier serials, just as "the Ship." (In the two 1960s Dalek films, the craft was referred to as Tardis, without the definite article.)
Externally, the Doctor's TARDIS resembles a 1950s-era British police box (a special phone booth for police communications), and the programme has become so much a part of British popular culture that the shape of the police box is now more immediately associated with the TARDIS than its original real-world function.
Generally, TARDIS is written in all upper case letters, but many examples of the form Tardis are found in media and, occasionally, licensed publications. In the 2005 series episode World War Three, the caller ID of the TARDIS is displayed on Rose Tyler's mobile phone as "Tardis calling."[2]
The word has entered popular usage as a term to describe anything that seems bigger on the inside than on the outside.[3] The name TARDIS is a registered trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Conceptual history
When Doctor Who was being developed in 1963, the production staff discussed what the Doctor's time machine would look like. Due to budgetary constraints, it was decided to make it resemble a police box. This was explained in the context of the series as a disguise created by the ship's "chameleon circuit", a mechanism which is responsible for changing the outside appearance of the ship in order to fit in with its environment. A further premise was that the circuit was broken, explaining why it was "stuck" in that form.
The idea for the police-box disguise came from BBC staff writer Anthony Coburn, who rewrote the programme's first episode from a draft by C. E. Webber. Coburn is believed to have conceived the time machine's external form after spotting a real police box while walking near his office on a break from writing the episode. At the time of the series' debut in 1963, the police box was still a common fixture in British cities, and with some 700 in London alone, it was a logical choice for camouflaging a time machine.
While the idea may have begun as a creative ploy by the BBC to save time and money on props, it soon became an in-joke genre convention in its own right as the old-style police box was phased out of use. The anachronism has become more pronounced since there have been very few police boxes of that style left in Britain for some considerable time. Despite slight changes in the prop, the TARDIS has become the show's most consistently recognisable visual element.
The type of police box the TARDIS resembled was normally constructed out of concrete. However, the props for the television series were originally made out of wood, and later on from fibreglass, for easy transportation and construction on location as well as within the confines of a studio set. The props have also varied slightly in their dimensions and designs over the years, and do not conform precisely to their real-life counterparts.
The production team conceived of the TARDIS travelling by dematerialising at one point and rematerialising elsewhere, although sometimes in the series it was shown to also be capable of conventional space travel. The ability to travel simply by fading into and out of different locations became one of the trademarks of the show, allowing for a great deal of versatility in setting and storytelling without a large expense in special effects. The distinctive accompanying sound effect — a cyclic wheezing, groaning noise — was originally created in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop by Brian Hodgson. He produced the effect by dragging a set of house keys along the strings of an old, gutted piano. The resulting sound was then recorded and electronically processed with echo and reverb. The comic strip feature of Doctor Who Magazine traditionally represents the ship's distinctive dematerialization sound with the onomatopoeic phrase "vworp vworp."
In 1996, the BBC applied to the UK Patent Office to register the TARDIS as a trademark. This was challenged by the Metropolitan Police who felt that they owned the rights to the police box image. However, the Patent Office found that there was no evidence that the Metropolitan Police — or any other police force — had ever registered the image as a trademark. In addition, the BBC had been selling merchandise based on the image for over three decades without complaint by the police. The Patent Office issued a ruling in favour of the BBC in 2002.
General characteristics
TARDISes draw their power from several sources, but primarily from the nucleus of an artificial black hole, known as the Eye of Harmony, created by the legendary Time Lord Omega.
Other elements needed for the proper functioning of the TARDIS and requiring occasional replenishment include mercury (used in its fluid links), the rare ore Zeiton 7 and "artron energy." The latter is a form of temporal energy, generated by Time Lord minds, which is also said to help power TARDISes.
Before a TARDIS becomes fully functional, it must be primed with the biological imprint of a Time Lord, normally done by simply having a Time Lord operate the TARDIS for the first time. This imprint comes from the Rassilon Imprimatur, part of the biological makeup of Time Lords, which gives them both a symbiotic link to their TARDISes and the ability to withstand the physical stresses of time travel.
Without the Imprimatur, molecular disintegration would result; this serves as a safeguard against misuse of time travel even if the TARDIS technology were copied. Once a time machine is properly primed, however, with the imprint stored on a device called a "briode nebuliser", it can be used safely by any species.[4] According to Time Lord law, unauthorised use of a TARDIS carries "only one penalty", implied to be death.
Apart from the ability to travel in space and time (and, on occasion, to other dimensions), the most remarkable characteristic of a TARDIS is that its interior is much larger than it appears from the outside. The explanation is that a TARDIS is "dimensionally transcendental", meaning that its exterior and interior exist in separate dimensions. In The Robots of Death (1977), the Fourth Doctor tried to explain this to his companion Leela, using the analogy of how a larger cube can appear to be able to fit inside a smaller one if the larger cube is farther away, yet immediately accessible at the same time (see Tesseract). According to the Doctor, transdimensional engineering was a key Time Lord discovery. To those unfamiliar with this aspect of a TARDIS, stepping inside the ship for the first time usually results in a reaction of shocked disbelief as they see the interior dimensions.
Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, claimed to have coined the name TARDIS.[5]. As seen in The Trial of a Time Lord (1986), the experiences of the TARDIS and its crew can be recorded and played back from the Matrix, the Time Lord computer network which is the repository of all their knowledge. The Doctor implies in this serial, with his protestations of being "bugged", that the TARDIS is not normally connected to the Matrix in this manner.
The Doctor's TARDIS
In the programme, the Doctor's TARDIS is an obsolete Type 40 TT capsule (presumably TT stands for "time travel") that he unofficially "borrowed" when he departed his home planet of Gallifrey. There were 305 registered Type 40s, but all the others had been decommissioned and replaced by new, improved models (The Deadly Assassin, 1976). However, the changing appearance of the primary console room over the years and the Second Doctor's statement in The Three Doctors ("Ah! I see you've been doing the TARDIS up a bit. I don't like it.") suggests that the Doctor does upgrade the TARDIS's systems on occasion, though it has been implied that the ship's ability to reconfigure its interior architecture applies to the console room too.
The TARDIS was already old when the Doctor first took it, but exactly how old is a matter of conjecture; the spin-off media have, on a number of occasions, had the TARDIS wait around for the Doctor for decades and even centuries in relative time. In The Empty Child (2005), the Ninth Doctor claimed that he has had "900 years of phone box travel", meaning the TARDIS is probably at least that old.
Exterior
As noted above, although the TARDIS is supposed to blend inconspicuously into whatever environment it turns up in, it invariably retains the shape of a police box (which it took when landing in 1963) because of a faulty chameleon circuit. The circuit was first mentioned, but not given a technical name, in the second episode of the series. It was first termed the "camouflage unit" in The Time Meddler (1965). The name was changed to "chameleon circuit" in the Target Books novelisations of the serials, and eventually made its way on screen as "chameleon circuit" in Logopolis (1981).
Despite his considerable ingenuity in other fields and his ownership of a sonic screwdriver, the Doctor has been unable to fix the chameleon circuit. Attempts to repair the circuit were made in Logopolis and Attack of the Cybermen, but the successful transformation of the TARDIS into the shapes of a pipe organ and an elaborate gateway in the latter serial was followed by a return to the status quo. In Boom Town (2005), the Ninth Doctor implied that he had stopped trying to fix the circuit quite some time ago because he'd become rather fond of the police box shape — a claim the Eighth Doctor likewise made in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie.
For most of the series' run, the exterior doors of the police box operated separately from the heavier interior doors, although sometimes the two sets could open simultaneously to allow the ship's passengers to look directly outside and vice versa. The entrance to the TARDIS is capable of being locked and unlocked from the outside with a key, which the Doctor keeps on his person and occasionally gives copies of to his companions. In the 1996 television movie, the Eighth Doctor (and the Seventh before him) kept a spare key "in a cubby hole behind the 'P'" (of the POLICE BOX sign). In the 2005 series, the keys are also remotely linked to the TARDIS, capable of signalling its presence or impending arrival by heating up and glowing.
The TARDIS lock's security level has varied from story to story. Originally, it was said to have 21 different "holes" and would melt if the key was placed in the wrong one (The Daleks, 1963). The First Doctor was also able to unlock it with his ring (The Web Planet, 1965) and repair it in the same way (The Daleks' Master Plan). The changing design of the TARDIS keys suggests, however, that the Doctor changes the system every now and then and it does not always work the same way. In Spearhead from Space (1970) the Third Doctor said that the lock had a metabolism detector, so that even if an unauthorised person had a key, the doors would remain locked. This security measure was also seen in the Ninth Doctor Adventures novel Only Human by Gareth Roberts, which called it an "advanced meson recognition system." The Ninth Doctor claimed that when the doors were shut, even "the combined hordes of Genghis Khan" could not enter (Rose, 2005). That being said, several people have managed to just wander into the TARDIS without any problem over the years, including some who became companions.
The doors are supposed to be closed in-flight; in Planet of Giants (1964), the opening of the doors during a dematerialisation sequence caused the ship and its occupants to shrink to doll size. In The Enemy of the World (1967), taking off while the doors were still open resulted in rapid decompression, with the villainous Salamander being sucked out of the TARDIS. The Second Doctor and his companions managed to cling to the console, and the crisis passed when Jamie managed to shut the doors.
The Time Lords (as well as similarly powerful beings) are able to divert the TARDIS's flight path (The Ribos Operation, 1978), as the renegade Time Lord known as the Rani also did once (The Mark of the Rani, 1985). The Rani used a Stattenheim remote control to summon her TARDIS to her. In The Two Doctors (1985), the Second Doctor also used a portable Stattenheim.
The exterior dimensions can be severed from the interior dimensions under extraordinary circumstances. In Father's Day (2005), a temporal paradox resulting in a wound in time threw the interior of the ship out of the wound, leaving the TARDIS an empty shell of a police box. However, the Doctor was able to use the TARDIS key in conjunction with a small electrical charge to recover the Ship.
Interior
Once through the doors of the police box, the TARDIS interior has a vast number of rooms and corridors. The exact dimensions of the interior have not been specified, but apart from living quarters, the interior includes an art gallery (which is actually an ancillary power station), a bathroom with a swimming pool, a medical bay and several brick-walled storage areas (all seen in The Invasion of Time, 1978). Portions of the TARDIS can also be isolated or reconfigured; the Doctor was able to jettison 25% of the TARDIS's structure in Castrovalva to provide added "thrust."
Despite a widespread assumption that the interior of the TARDIS is infinite, there are indications that it is not. In Full Circle (1980), Romana stated that the weight of the TARDIS in Alzarius's Earth-like gravity was 5 × 106 kilograms. Presumably that referred to its internal weight as the TARDIS has been seen on several occasions to be light enough to be lifted by several men (as if it were an actual police box) and any movement of the exterior has also been known to be transmitted to its interior.
A distinctive architectural feature of the TARDIS interior is the "roundel." In the context of the TARDIS, a roundel is a circular decoration that adorns the walls of the rooms and corridors of the TARDIS, including the console room. Some roundels conceal TARDIS circuitry and devices, as seen in the serials The Wheel in Space (1968), Logopolis, Castrovalva (1981), Arc of Infinity (1983) and Terminus (1983). The design of the roundels has varied throughout the show's history, from a basic circular cut-out with black background to a photographic image printed on wall board, to translucent illuminated discs in later serials. In the secondary console room, most of the roundels were executed in recessed wood panelling, with a few decorative ones in what appeared to be stained glass. In the new series, the roundels are built into hexagonal recesses in the walls of the new console room.
Other rooms seen include living quarters for many of the Doctor's companions, although the Doctor's own bedroom has never been mentioned or seen. The TARDIS also had a "Zero Room" — a chamber that was shielded from the rest of the universe and provided a restful environment for the Fifth Doctor to recover from his regeneration in Castrovalva — but it was among the 25% jettisoned.
Although the interior corridors were not seen in the 2005 series, the fact that they still existed was established in The Unquiet Dead, when the Doctor gave Rose some very complicated directions to the TARDIS wardrobe. The wardrobe is mentioned several times in the original series and spin-off fiction, and seen in The Androids of Tara (1978), The Twin Dilemma (1984) and Time and the Rani (1987). The redesigned version, from which the Tenth Doctor chooses his new clothes, was seen in The Christmas Invasion (2005) as a large multi-levelled room with a spiral staircase.
The console rooms
Within the TARDIS, the most often seen room of the TARDIS is its console room, where its flight controls are housed. The TARDIS has at least two console rooms — the primary, white-walled, futuristic one most used throughout the programme's history and the secondary console room used during Season 14, which has wood panelling and a more antique feel to it. Two other console rooms have also been seen, in the television movie and the 2005 series. The cavernous, steampunk-inspired console room of the television movie may have been a reconfiguration of either of the previously mentioned console rooms (as first suggested in Virgin New Adventures spin-off novels and later in the Big Finish Productions audio plays) or another one entirely.
In the 2005 series, the console room became a dome-shaped chamber with organic-looking support columns. The interior doors are now absent, with the police box doors being clearly visible from inside the TARDIS. How this configuration came about is not explained, but in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, the TARDIS interior was severely damaged by a cold fusion explosion. Although The Gallifrey Chronicles was written before the start of the 2005 series, Parkin has commented in the Outpost Gallifrey fan forums that the TARDIS repairing itself after this coincidental event could explain the change in look. As always the canonicity of the non-televised media is uncertain.
The Virgin novels introduced a tertiary console room, which was described as resembling a Gothic cathedral (Nightshade by Mark Gatiss). Another novel (Death and Diplomacy by Dave Stone) suggested that the "native" configuration is so complex and irrational that most non-Time Lords who witness it are driven mad from the experience.
The main feature of the console rooms, in any of the known configurations, is the TARDIS console that holds the instruments that control the ship's functions. The appearance of the primary TARDIS consoles has varied widely but share common details: hexagonal pedestals with controls around the periphery and a moveable column in the centre that bobs rhythmically up and down when the TARDIS is in flight. Although fan opinion is divided on this point, the arrangement of the controls implies that it was designed to be manned by more than one person. One piece of fan continuity, used in the spin-off media and also mentioned by the current production team, is that the consoles were supposed to be operated by between three to six Time Lords. This may explain why the Doctor tends to do a lot of manic running around the console while he is piloting the TARDIS.
The central column is often referred to as the "time rotor", although in The Chase (1965), the first time the term was used, this referred to a different instrument on the TARDIS console. However, the use of this term to describe the central column was common in fan literature and was finally used on screen when the Doctor referred to the central column as the time rotor in the 1996 television movie. The current production team uses the term in the same way.
The secondary console was smaller, with the controls hidden behind wooden panels, and had no central column. The 1996 television movie console also appeared to be made of wood and the central column connected to the ceiling of the console room. The new series' console is circular in shape and divided into six segments, with both the control panels and the central column glowing green, the latter once again connected to the ceiling.
In the Third Doctor serial The Time Monster (1972), the console room of the TARDIS was dramatically altered, including the wall roundels. This new set, designed by Tim Gleeson, was disliked by producer Barry Letts who felt that the new roundels resembled washing-up bowls stuck to the wall. As it turned out, the set was damaged in storage between production blocks and had to be rebuilt, so this particular design only saw service in the one serial.
Precisely how much control the Doctor has in directing the TARDIS has been inconsistently portrayed over the course of the series. The First Doctor did not initially seem to be able to accurately steer it, but over time subsequent Doctors seemed to be able to pilot it with more precision. However, writers continued to use the plot device of having the TARDIS randomly land somewhere, or imply that the TARDIS was "tempermental" in its courses through time and space.
Following the Key to Time season (1978-79), the Doctor installed a randomiser to the console which prevented the Doctor (and by extension the evil and powerful Black Guardian) from knowing where the TARDIS would land next. This device was eventually removed in The Leisure Hive (1980). In the new series, the Doctor is shown piloting the TARDIS at will, although he still makes the occasional error, such as returing Rose to Earth a year later than he meant to in Aliens of London (2005).
TARDIS systems
Because the TARDIS is so old, it is inclined to break down. The Doctor is often seen with his head stuck in a panel carrying out maintenance of some kind or another, and he occasionally has to give it "percussive maintenance" (a good thump on the console) to get it to start working properly. Efforts to repair, control, and maintain the TARDIS were frequent plot devices throughout the show's run, creating the amusing irony of a highly advanced space-time machine which, at the same time, is an obsolete and unreliable piece of junk.
The new series console room has a much more thrown-together appearance than previous consoles, with bits of junk from various eras substituting as makeshift controls, including a glass paperweight, a small bell and a bicycle pump, the latter identified in the Tenth Doctor interactive mini-episode Attack of the Graske as the vortex loop control. Two other controls, the dimensional stabiliser and the vector tracker were also identified, but although the stabiliser had been mentioned before in the series, the canonicity of the mini-episode is also unclear.
The TARDIS possesses telepathic circuits, although the Doctor prefers to pilot it manually. In Pyramids of Mars (1975), the Fourth Doctor told Sutekh that the TARDIS controls were isomorphic, meaning only the Doctor could operate them. However, this characteristic seems to appear and disappear when dramatically convenient, and various companions have been seen to be able to operate the TARDIS and even fly it. It has been theorised that either the Doctor was lying to Sutekh or the isomorphic feature is a security feature that the Doctor can activate and deactivate when convenient. The Eighth Doctor does just this in the Big Finish Productions audio play Other Lives (2005) to allow his companion C'rizz to operate the console.
Apart from the sound that accompanies dematerialisation, in The Web of Fear (1966), the TARDIS console was also seen to have a light that winked on and off during landing, although the more usual indicator of flight is the movement of the central column. The TARDIS also possesses a scanner so that its crew may examine the exterior environment before exiting the ship. In the 2005 series the scanner display is attached to the console and is able to display television signals as well as various computing functions and occasionally what the production team has stated are Gallifreyan numbers and text.
In some of the First Doctor serials, the console room also contains a machine that dispenses food or nutrition bars to the Doctor and his companions. This machine disappears after the first few serials, although mention is occasionally made of the TARDIS kitchen.
In the television movie, access to the Eye of Harmony is controlled by means of a device that requires a human eye to open. Why the Doctor would program such a requirement is retroactively explained in the Big Finish Productions audio play The Apocalypse Element, where a Dalek invasion of Gallifrey prompts the Time Lords to code their security locks to the retinal patterns of the Sixth Doctor's companion Evelyn Smythe.
Some of the TARDIS's other functions include a force field and the Hostile Action Displacement System (HADS), which can teleport the ship away if it is attacked (The Krotons, 1968). The force field may no longer be present on the current TARDIS, as an external device had to be hooked up to provide one in The Parting of the Ways (2005). The Cloister Room on the TARDIS sounds the Cloister Bell when "wild catastrophes and sudden calls to man the battle stations" are imminent (Logopolis).
The interior of the TARDIS is said to be in a state of "multidimensional temporal grace" (The Hand of Fear, 1976). The Fourth Doctor explained this meant that, "in a sense," things do not exist while inside the TARDIS. This has the practical effect of ensuring that no weapons can be used inside its environs. However, this last function is also inconsistent in its application — weapons were fired in the console room in both Earthshock (1982) and The Parting of the Ways. In Arc of Infinity, the Fifth Doctor was planning to repair the temporal grace circuits but was interrupted by the events of that story.
The TARDIS also grants its passengers the ability to understand and speak other languages. This was previously described in The Masque of Mandragora (1976) as a "Time Lord gift" which the Doctor shared with his companions, but was ultimately attributed to the TARDIS's telepathic field in The End of the World (2005). In The Christmas Invasion, it was revealed that the Doctor himself was an integral element of this capability. Rose was unable to understand the alien Sycorax whilst the Doctor was in a regenerative crisis.
At times the TARDIS appears to have a mind of its own. It is heavily implied in the television series that the TARDIS is "alive" and intelligent to a degree (Inside the Spaceship, 1964), and shares a bond with those who travel in it; in the television movie the Doctor calls the TARDIS "sentimental." In Boom Town, a portion of the TARDIS control panel opened and a luminescent vapour could be seen within, described by the Doctor as the "heart of the TARDIS." In The Parting of the Ways it was shown that this is connected to the powerful energies of the time vortex. It is unknown whether, when Rose said that "the TARDIS is alive" in The Parting of the Ways, she meant it literally. These characteristics have been made more explicit in the spin-off novels and audio plays. In the Big Finish audio play Omega, the Doctor meets a TARDIS which "dies" after its Time Lord master has passed away.
In the novels, a portion of the TARDIS could be separated and used for independent travel. This was featured in two Virgin novels, Iceberg by David Banks and Sanctuary by David A. McIntee. This subset of the TARDIS, resembling a small pagoda fashioned out of jade, had limited range and functionality, but was used occasionally when the main TARDIS was incapacitated. A Yahoo! Groups electronic mailing list dedicated to discussion of the Doctor Who spin-off novels adopted the name "Jade Pagoda."
Other TARDISes
Other TARDISes have appeared in the television series. The Master had his own TARDIS, a more advanced model. Its chameleon circuit is fully functional, so it has been seen in various forms including a filing cabinet, a grandfather clock, a fireplace, an Ionic column, and an Iron Maiden. While a TARDIS can materialise inside another, if both TARDISes occupy exactly the same space, a Time Ram will occur, resulting in total annihilation (The Time Monster). In Logopolis, the Master tricked the Doctor into materialising his TARDIS around the Master's, creating a dimensionally recursive loop, with each TARDIS appearing inside the other's console room.
Other Time Lords with TARDISes included the Meddling Monk and the Rani. The War Chief provided dimensionally transcendent time machines named SIDRATs to the alien race known as the War Lords (Space and Inter-Dimensional Robot All-purpose Transporter, according to the New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Exodus). In the script for The Chase, Dalek time machines are known as DARDISes.
In the spin-off media, Gallifreyan Battle TARDISes have appeared in the comic books, novels and audio plays, which fire "time torpedoes" that freeze the target in time. The renegade Time Lady Iris Wildthyme's own TARDIS was disguised as a No. 22 London Bus, but was slightly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. The Eighth Doctor Adventures novels have stated that future model Type 102 TARDISes will be fully sentient, and able to take on humanoid form (Alien Bodies). The Eighth Doctor's companion Compassion was the first Type 102 TARDIS (The Shadows of Avalon), and she was seen to have enough firepower to annihilate other TARDISes (The Ancestor Cell).
In the Big Finish audio play The One Doctor, confidence trickster Banto Zame impersonated the Doctor. However, due to incomplete information, his copy of the TARDIS (a short range transporter) was called a Stardis instead, resembled a portaloo rather than a police box, and was not dimensionally transcendental. In Unregenerate!, the Seventh Doctor and Mel stopped a secret Time Lord project to download TARDIS minds into bodies of various alien species. This would have created living TARDIS pilots loyal to the Time Lords and ensuring that they would have ultimate control over any use of time travel technology by other races. Those created before the project was shut down departed on their own to explore the universe.
Since the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords as stated in the 2005 series, whether any other TARDISes still exist is uncertain. The removal of Gallifrey — and by implication the Eye of Harmony — may also be why the TARDIS in Boom Town needed to refuel using radiation from a space-time rift.
Other appearances
Merchandising
As one of the most recognisable images connected with Doctor Who, the TARDIS has appeared on numerous items of merchandise associated with the programme. TARDIS scale models of various sizes have been manufactured to accompany other Doctor Who dolls and action figures, some with sound effects included. Fan-built full-size models of the police box are also common. There have been TARDIS-shaped video games, play tents for children, toy boxes, cookie jars, book ends, key chains and even a police-box-shaped bottle for a TARDIS bubble bath. The 1993 VHS release of The Trial of a Time Lord was contained in a special edition tin shaped like the TARDIS.
With the 2005 series revival, a TARDIS-shaped DVD/CD cabinet, standing 22 inches (55 cm) tall with adjustable shelves, was made by Cod Steaks Ltd, a Bristol-based model-making company. Other TARDIS-related merchandise announced in conjunction with the new series included a TARDIS coin box and a TARDIS that detects the ring signal from a mobile phone and flashes when an incoming call is detected, as well as a children's book, the TARDIS Manual which contained information on the ship and a pop-out-and-make cardboard model. The complete 2005 season DVD box set released in November 2005 resembles a TARDIS.
A model TARDIS, used in the television series' production in the 1970s, sold at auction in December 2005 for £10,800.[6]
Popular culture
The TARDIS has frequently appeared or been referred to in popular culture outside of Doctor Who. It has been immortalised in space: Asteroid 3325 was named "TARDIS" in its honour. In the 1989 movie Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, the two protagonists travel in a time machine disguised as a phone booth, although it is not bigger inside than out. The TARDIS made a background appearance in "Marooned", an episode of the science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf (in a corner of the Starbug launching bay). An episode of the situation comedy Chelmsford 123 includes a brief scene in which the TARDIS materialises in Roman Britain in the year 123 and the silhouetted figure of the Doctor rushes out to urinate in the woods — implying that the TARDIS does not have a toilet. The resemblance of a police box to a portable toilet often leads to parodies of the TARDIS (as in the abovementioned audio play The One Doctor); in the Bottom Live 2003 comedy tour, Adrian Edmonson's character Eddie refers to his time-travelling toilet invention as a "TURDIS".
The TARDIS also appeared, abandoned and ignored, in a corner in Doctor Strange's study during the Marvel Mangaverse event published by Marvel Comics in 2002. The main artist on this series and architect of the event, Ben Dunn, is a Doctor Who fan, also having included a Doctor-inspired character in the cast of his Ninja High School comic. In the PC game Fallout, the TARDIS is featured in an Easter Egg, where it appears in a desolated piece of desert and disappears when approached.[7] The MMORPG Asheron's Call uses the TARDIS in a similar manner.[8]
In 1988 the band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (later known as The KLF) released the single "Doctorin' The Tardis" under the name The Timelords. The song is a mix of Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part 1)", Sweet's "Blockbuster" and the Doctor Who theme, with sparse vocals inspired by the Daleks and Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney" character, in addition to sampling the original theme music composed by Ron Grainer. The TARDIS also gets a mention in the lyrics of the song "How Long's A Tear Take To Dry?" by the Beautiful South (from their album Quench), and in the lyrics of the song "All Things To All Men" by The Cinematic Orchestra (featuring Roots Manuva on vocals).
"Tardis" was also the name of a mid-1990s era Internet time server program, which when run in Windows used a blue police box as its onscreen icon.
Since 1986, all Sun UNIX workstations at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are called "Tardis" [9].
Footnotes
- ^ There is some disagreement over whether the "D" in the name stands for "dimension" or "dimensions"; both have been used in various episodes. The very first story, 100,000 BC (1963), used the singular "Dimension" and other episodes followed suit for the next couple of years. The 1964 novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks used the plural "Dimensions" for the first time and the 1965 serial The Time Meddler (1965) introduced it to the television series. Since then both versions have been used on different occasions. In Rose (2005), the Doctor uses the singular form (although this was a decision of the actor Christopher Eccleston — the line was scripted in the plural).
- ^ This usage is consistent with current British press style, in which acronyms are referred to with only the first letter capitalised (for example, Nato), while initialisms (which are not pronounced as words), such as BBC, are capitalised in their entirety. The capitalisation of the initial letter and having the rest in lower case is also the default setting for Nokia mobile phones.
- ^ http://www.jessesword.com/sf/view/424
- ^ The Sixth Doctor stated this in The Two Doctors (1985). However, the veracity of this information may be suspect, as the Doctor later revealed that he had made some facts up to confuse the Sontarans and their allies, who were trying to duplicate the Imprimatur to prime their own time vessel.
- ^ The term TARDIS, however, appears to be used by others to apply to all Time Lord time machines. This apparent inconsistency, like others over the course of the programme's history, has generated some lively debate among fans. In the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow by Marc Platt, Susan tells the First Doctor that she gave him the idea when he was, implicitly, the Other.
- ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4529332.stm
- ^ http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?index=619
- ^ http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Odds'nEnds/tardis.htm
- ^ http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/os/unix/tardis.en.html
References
- Harris, Mark (1983). The Doctor Who Technical Manual UK: Random House, ISBN 0394862147.
- Nathan-Turner, John (1985). The TARDIS Inside Out UK: Picadilly Press, Ltd, ISBN 0394874153.
- Howe, David J & Walker, Stephen James (1994). The First Doctor Handbook London, UK: Virgin Publishing, ISBN 0-426-2-430-1.
- Howe, David J & Blumberg, Arnold T (2003). Howe's Transcendental Toybox: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who Collectibles UK: Telos Publishing, ISBN 1-903889-56-1.
See also
External links
- The TARDIS on the official BBC Doctor Who website
- The TARDIS Library - A guide to the various props used over the years, and their relationship to real police boxes
- TARDIS Manual - an extensive, fan-written guide with much speculative information.
- TARDIS 360° Views - virtual views of the 2005 series TARDIS console room
- Doctor Who Collectibles: An Annotated Bibliography
- A TARDIS Storage Shed
- TARDIS builder's site, with free plans
- More TARDIS pictures