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I'm a long-time fan of Doctor Who, and have had a number of the roleplaying games over the years. The problem has been finding figures for it. Not necessarily exact figures, since that's tricky. But close enough. I gather that Black Tree Design has the rights to market Doctor Who figures from before the reboot, so all of them up to Dr. #8, Paul McGann. They also sell companions, friends, enemies, monsters, and the TARDIS. It sounds good ... except ... First off, the sculpts are kind of so-so, much of the time. Their TARDIS looks a tad wobbly. It's a little hard to tell because the site only has small, low-resolution pictures of their figures. I've also heard poor reports of their customer service and reliability. If anyone with actual experience with them could weigh in I'd be most appreciative. As far as I know no one is making official 28mm miniatures for the newer Doctor Who series. I wish they would. I hear that issues of the tie-in fan magazines in the UK sometimes come with premiums like little armies of plastic Daleks, but I'm not sure how easy such things would be to find on this side of the Atlantic. There are some people making close-enough figures and props. For the TARDIS, model railroad supplier Hornby makes a police box. Hasslefree sells a historic model in resin, as does Fenris Games. You have to paint the fiddly bits on them yourself. Or get these decals from Company B miniatures (scroll down the page to see them), which fit the Fenris model, and possibly the Hasslefree one as well. Heresy Miniatures has a group of figures which are very close to the newer Doctors and a few companions here. Between these and Black Tree Design one can have reasonable figures for all of the Doctors and most of their major companions (but not Rose, Mickey, Martha Jones, Captain Jack, Donna Noble, or Clara, or any of the New Who monsters). Of course no one has minis for the really unmistakeable trademarked characters, which is fine by me. I wouldn't want pirated minis, and not-quite Daleks sound really silly. But I am interested to know who is marketing minis that are pretty close to the spirit of Doctor Who characters and monsters. And if there is any word on getting better sculpts for the classic ones.

Although the first figures I started painting out of my Bones box were the frogmen*, the one piece that actually got closest to being called "finished" first ended up being this "Telephone Box" (#80037). The labels are printed, and, alas, I miscalculated by a couple of millimeters or more in just about every dimension (either that, or I goofed up in my printer settings), so I will likely have to go back and try again with SMALLER labels before I can respectably put this on a table top for a game scenario. (I'm thinking of using it for a cameo in a wacky "Government Agents in Black" scenario, featuring the Little Grey Men from the sci-fi expansion set as the adversaries.) Basic paint job is just sky blue with a deep blue wash applied, then painting the top light white, then again yellow, with fine black lines painted on it for the supporting braces. In retrospect, I think the box probably looked better when I originally painted the windows BLACK rather than attempting to paint the panels grey/white. The piece has a "footprint" of about 1" x 1", and the model appears to be made of the same plastic as the new Bones figures in general. There is some slight warping to the plastic evident near the roof (this can be seen in the sagging curvature of the roof details on the left side of the model), but by and large it's very slight and easily overlooked. I'm not sure what all is different, but I really like the new Bones plastic, as it seems to be much better with sharp and shallow details, and it feels more solid. (There are still some occasional bendy issues with thin things such as spears and blades, and with the sci-fi "starship door" piece, but soaking in hot water appears to still be the best remedy. Overall, it's quite the improvement, I think.) Although this particular paint scheme would seem to be the "obvious" use for this model, I think (depending upon the price) I might get a few more for use in steampunk games. Thanks to Wikipedia, I find that this particular design dates back to 1929 or so, so it would be anachronistic to use for a Victorian-era game ... but in steampunk, a certain amount of anachronism is par for the course, so I could probably get away with it. ;) I think I might paint one RED as a street decoration, so it's not immediately the subject of Tardis jokes from players ("I want to see if it's bigger on the inside than out!"), but I could also see painting it up in stained-wood brown and using it as a deck feature on a pirate-ship-to-airship conversion. Another possibility I see is that the inset panels could be painted as if they were window panes (making this look a little more like a conventional telephone booth), or "glowing" panels (for general steampunkery). But I simply couldn't help but go with the OBVIOUS use first. ;)

This is the best offically BBC sanctioned fan-made video of clips from Doctor Who I've ever seen. It's by someone called Babelcolour. There is literally something from every episode through 2011 (yes, even the lost ones). The music is a witty mix of the Doctor Who theme and "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This" (they call it "Whorythmics"). And the sound clips are marvelous. EDIT: My link was wonky. Please scroll down to post #3, where Argentee kindly put in a working link. The link may be a little funny. My ipad refuses to let me watch Youtube on Safari, instantly bouncing me to a special Youtube app which will not let me copy the web address of where to get it. But I got to this video by first linking to its comments page, which seems to have bypassed that particular annoying feature, at least temporarily. Until I tried to reload the window, whereupon I had to play "Load Safari and try to close that window in the split second before it loads the Youtube app instead. Close Youtube and repeat until you are fast enough." I hate the ipad Safari Youtube policy.