Here’s a somewhat unusual find. As many people know, Doctor Who was made into two motion pictures featuring the Daleks in the mid-1960s by AARU Productions. These two films, Dr Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD featured Peter Cushing as Dr Who (in these films, Dr Who was an eccentric British scientist who invented a time machine in his garden) in distillations of the first two TV Dalek serials.

What is not so widely known is that these films were released in North America. Here’s the poster from the US release of the film:

And there’s the cover of the Dell comic book adaptation (Dell produced adaptations of films and TV series for Western Publishing; they were later succeeded by Gold Key)

Given that Doctor Who was completely unknown in the US (and only shown for six months in Canada in 1965), it wasn’t exactly top of the box office bill; it was considered more of a B movie in the same vein as the Hammer Horrors and the Godzilla films—a foreign genre film acquired at low cost. Once while researching the Toronto Star from 1966-67, I actually saw Dr. Who and the Daleks advertised at an independent cinema in Toronto as part of the parade of genre films being shown that week.

All this is preamble to what is, as I say, an unusual find on YouTube: the US theatrical trailer for Dr Who and the Daleks. In the great tradition that continues even today, it’s pretty much the narration from the UK Cinema Trailer only with an American voice actor doing it instead with DRAMATIC INTONATION. Which is wrong, in so many ways. (Not the least of which is that when the UK trailer has lines written in the first person it’s because Peter Cushing is doing the voiceover in character as Dr. Who; here we’re getting told by American voice actor that he can’t guarantee our safety but he promises us excitement.) Nonetheless it’s an interesting piece of Doctor Who’s cinematic history that’s largely ignored.