DVDFile

BBC / 246 Minutes / 1974/1975 / Unrated / Street Date: January 10, 2012

Invasion of the Dinosaurs - one of Doctor Who fans' most passionately beloved installments - comes from the series' eleventh season, in which our fair leader is played by Jon Pertwee, and aided by the faithful and handsome Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith). When this serial opens, the Doctor and Sarah Jane descend upon 1970s London to find that the whole town has been evacuated. The reason: Dino attack!

It turns out that a mad scientist is hellbent on reverting away from modern civilization, so he's invented a device (called The Timescoop) that allows giant dinosaurs from the past to demolish the present in hopes that all these technological and man-made dissolve into memory, leaving only a (theoretically) Edenic, utopian world. Of course, this isn't exactly well-planned: Thank heavens the Doctor is there to work things out before the whole place becomes a nice British lunch for a team of ravaging T. Rex.

The Android Invasion - lots of invading happening in this new wave of Doctor Who BBC DVD editions - is taken from the thirteenth season of the series, featuring the sturdy Tom Baker as the Doctor (Sladen returns as Sarah Jane). This particularly diverting and campy installment begins as our beloved duo land in what appears to be a quaint English village. It has flashes of Village of the Damned - some elements of the community seem a little off - and the Doctor immediately has a hunch that something is amiss.

Alas, he's completely right. Theirs is no mere English town: It's an alien-constructed facsimile of one, with the devious Kraals testing an all-cyborg cabal of pseudo-humanoids that they want to test out on the Doctor to assess just how useful these androids will be when they're used for the Kraal's eventual takeover of Earth. Retro-fun and smartly diverting, this pair of Doctor Who releases are wildly anticipated editions, indeed: They may not be the prototypically most imperative Doctor adventures out there, but the argument could be made that they're nevertheless fun as hell.