Everything about Dalek totally explained
A
Dalek () is a member of a
fictional
extraterrestrial race of
mutants from the
British science fiction television series
Doctor Who. Daleks are grotesque mutated organisms from the planet Skaro, integrated within a
tank-like mechanical casing. The resulting creatures are a powerful race bent on universal conquest and domination, utterly without pity, compassion or remorse (as all of their emotions were removed except hate). They became an immediate hit with viewers, featuring in many subsequent serials and two 1960s motion pictures. They have become synonymous with
Doctor Who, and their behaviour and catchphrases are part of British
popular culture. "Hiding
behind the sofa whenever the Daleks appear" has even been cited as an essential element of British cultural identity.
The word "Dalek" has entered the
Oxford English Dictionary and other major dictionaries; the
Collins Dictionary defines it rather broadly as "any of a set of fictional robot-like creations that are aggressive, mobile, and produce rasping staccato speech". It is also a
trademark, having first been registered by the BBC in 1964 to protect its lucrative range of Dalek merchandise.
The term is sometimes used
metaphorically to describe people, usually figures of authority, who act like robots unable to break from their programming.
John Birt, the
Director-General of the BBC from 1992 to 2000, was publicly called a "croak-voiced Dalek" by playwright
Dennis Potter in the MacTaggart Lecture at the 1993
Edinburgh Television Festival. The Daleks appeared on a postage stamp celebrating British popular culture in 1999, photographed by
Lord Snowdon.
Physical characteristics
Externally, Daleks resemble human-sized
salt or pepper shakers around five to six feet (152 to 183 cm) tall, with a single mechanical eyestalk mounted on a rotating dome, a gunstalk containing an energy weapon (or "
death ray"), which can also be fitted with a projectile weapon, and a telescoping
robot manipulator arm. In most cases, the manipulator resembles a sink
plunger, but Daleks have been shown with arms that end in a tray, a mechanical claw, or other specialised equipment like
flamethrowers and cutting torches. Daleks have used their plunger-like manipulator arms to interface with technology, crush a man's skull, and extract the brainwaves from a man's head (fatal, although it's implied that it doesn't need to be). Dalek casings are made of a bonded
polycarbide material dubbed "dalekanium" by a human in
The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Daleks also use this term for the material. However, in the
2005 series episode "Dalek", they're also part of a self-destruct system. The armour has a forcefield that evaporates most bullets and absorbs most types of energy weapons, though normally ineffective firepower can be concentrated on the eyestalk to blind the Daleks. It appears that the Dalekanium panels which constitute the 'skirt' can also be detached without damaging the shell or affecting the Dalek's performance. Leading on from this, three Dalekanium panels removed from a Dalek formed the basis for an energy conductor atop the Empire State Building to channel the energy of 'The Greatest Solar Flare for a Thousand Years'. Despite looking somewhat blackened and melted at the edges, the panels appeared unharmed. The actual appearance of mutants has varied, but in most cases they're
octopoid, multi-tentacled creatures. The Doctor described the Daleks as "little green blobs in bonded polycarbide
armour" in
Remembrance of the Daleks, in which a Dalek mutant was seen to have a
bionically augmented claw. In
Resurrection of the Daleks a Dalek creature, separated from its casing, attacks and severely injures a human soldier. The revived series has generally depicted mutants as having one eye and an exposed brain, however the mutants depicted in "
The Parting of the Ways" also had a second, smaller eye. The same episode states that these mutants were built from human materials. In "
Daleks in Manhattan", a mutant (
Dalek Sec) demonstrates the ability to engulf a human with a large, sack-like membrane. (Albeit one squad of Daleks locked in a war with the Movellans did appear to have become fully robotic.) The interdependence of biological and mechanical components makes the Daleks a type of
cyborg. The
Ninth Doctor, in "Dalek", described the Dalek as a genius: it could run through an electronic lock's billion combinations in seconds and download all of the information on the internet into its memory, showing the union of the biological and mechanical components. and
Planet of the Daleks. In
The Daleks,
Ian Chesterton disguises himself by hiding in a Dalek shell but initially speaks with his own voice until his friends remind him to talk like a Dalek. but in the revived series have been shown flying in the cold vacuum of space without trouble.
For many years, it was thought that due to their gliding motion Daleks were unable to tackle
stairs. A cartoon from
Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, "Well, this certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe". In a scene from the serial
Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and
companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The
Fourth Doctor calls down, "If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us? Bye bye!" The Daleks generally make up for their lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower. A joke among
Doctor Who fans goes, "Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building." Dalek mobility has improved over time. In their first appearance,
The Daleks, they were capable of movement only on the conductive metal floor of their city. In
The Dalek Invasion of Earth a Dalek emerges from the waters of the
River Thames, indicating that they not only had become freely mobile, but are
amphibious to a degree.
Planet of the Daleks showed that they could ascend a vertical shaft by means of an external
antigravity mat placed on the floor.
Remembrance of the Daleks showed that they can hover using a built-in limited antigravity capability — first implied in earlier serials such as
The Chase (1965) and
Revelation of the Daleks — but their awkward forms still limit their mobility in tight quarters. Despite this, journalists covering the series frequently refer to the Daleks' supposed inability to climb stairs; characters escaping up a flight of stairs in the episode "Dalek" made the same joke, and were shocked when the Dalek began to hover up the stairs. The unsettling form of the Daleks, coupled with their alien voices, made many believe that the props were wholly mechanical and operated by remote control.
The Daleks were actually controlled from inside by short operators who had to manipulate their eyestalks, domes and arms, as well as flashing the lights on their heads in sync with the actors supplying their voices. The Dalek cases were built in two pieces; an operator would step into the lower section, and then the top would be secured. The operators looked out between the circular louvres just beneath the dome that were lined with mesh to conceal their faces.
The Dalek cases created for
Doctor Who's 21st-century revival don't differ significantly from the original series' Daleks, except for an expanded base, a glowing eyepiece (though in early serials including
The Daleks and
The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Daleks were shown with the black and white television equivalent), an all-over metallic brass finish, a housing for the eyestalk gear, and significantly larger ear-bulbs. The new prop made its on-screen debut in the 2005 episode "Dalek".
Movement
Early versions of the Daleks were rolled around on nylon castors or propelled by wheels connected to hand cranks by
bicycle chains. Although castors were adequate for the Daleks' debut serial, which was shot entirely at the BBC's
Lime Grove Studios, for
The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Terry Nation wanted the Daleks to take to the streets of
London for location filming. To enable the Daleks to travel smoothly on location, designer Spencer Chapman built the new Dalek shells around miniature
tricycles with sturdier wheels; to hide the wheels, the base of the costume was deepened with enlarged fenders. The bumpy flagstones of Central London caused the Daleks to rattle as they moved and it wasn't possible to remove this noise from the final soundtrack. A small radar dish was added to the rear of the prop's casing to explain why these Daleks, unlike the ones in their first serial, were not dependent on
static electricity drawn from the floors of the Dalek city for their motive power.
Voices
The
staccato delivery, harsh tone and rising inflection of the Dalek voice were initially developed by voice actors
Peter Hawkins and
David Graham, who would vary the pitch and speed of the lines according to the emotion needed. Their voices were further processed electronically by Brian Hodgson at the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Although the exact sound-processing devices used have varied, the original 1963 effect used
EQ to boost the mid-range of the actor's voice, then subjected it to
ring modulation with a 30 Hz
sine wave. The distinctive harsh grating vocal timbre this produced has remained the pattern for all Dalek voices since (with the exception of those in the 1985 serial
Revelation of the Daleks, for which director
Graeme Harper deliberately used less distortion).
Besides Hawkins and Graham, notable voice actors for the Daleks have included
Roy Skelton, who first voiced the Daleks in the 1967 story
Evil of the Daleks and went on to provide voices for five additional Dalek serials).
John Leeson, who performed the voice of
K-9 in several
Doctor Who stories, and
Davros actors
Terry Molloy and
David Gooderson also contributed supporting voices for various Dalek serials Briggs previously had done Dalek and other alien voices for
Big Finish Productions audio plays. In a 2006 BBC Radio interview, Briggs said that when the BBC asked him to do the voice for the new television series, they instructed him to bring his own analogue ring modulator that he'd used in the audio plays; the BBC's sound department had gone digital and couldn't adequately create the distinctive Dalek sound with their modern equipment. He has used his modulator also for voicing the
Cybermen in the 2006 series.
Construction
Manufacturing the props was expensive. In scenes where many Daleks had to appear, some of them would be represented by wooden replicas (
Destiny of the Daleks) or, in the early
black and white episodes, life-size photographic enlargements (
The Dalek Invasion of Earth). In stories involving armies of Daleks, the BBC effects team even turned to using commercially available toy Daleks, manufactured by
Louis Marx & Co. A typical example of such use can be observed in
Planet of the Daleks. these became known in fan circles as "Mk I Daleks". Shawcraft were also commissioned to construct approximately twenty Daleks for the two Dalek movies in 1965 and 1966 (see
below). Some of these props from the movies filtered back to the BBC and were seen in the televised serials, notably in
The Chase, which was aired before the first movie's debut. The remaining props not bought by the BBC were either donated to charity or given away as prizes in competitions.
The BBC's own Dalek props were reused many times, with components of the original Shawcraft "Mk I Daleks" surviving right through to the Daleks' final appearance in the classic series. However, years of storage and repainting took their toll. By the time of the
Sixth Doctor's
Revelation of the Daleks, new props were being manufactured out of
fibreglass, and were lighter and more affordable to construct than their predecessors. These Daleks were slightly bulkier in appearance around the mid-shoulder section, and also had a slightly redesigned base which was more vertical at the back. Minor changes were made to the design due to these new methods of construction, including alterations to the lower skirting as well as the mid-shoulder section incorporating the arm boxes, which were now one single unit, with the vertical bands encircling the casing also included in the fibreglass mould.
History
Conceptual history
Wishing to create an alien creature that didn't look like a "man in a suit", Terry Nation stated in his script for the first Dalek serial that the Dalek should have no legs. He was also inspired by a performance by the
Georgian State Ballet, in which dancers in long skirts appeared to glide across the stage. An account in Jeremy Bentham's
Doctor Who — The Early Years (1986) says that after Nation wrote the script, Cusick was given only an hour to come up with the design for the Daleks, and was inspired in his initial sketches by a pepper shaker on a table. However, Cusick himself states that he based it on a man seated in a chair, and only used the pepper shaker to demonstrate how it might move.
In 1964, Nation told a
Daily Mirror reporter that the name came from a volume of a dictionary or encyclopedia, the spine of which read "Dal - Lek". He later admitted that he'd made this up as a reply to a question by a journalist and that anyone who checked out his story would have found him out. Later, Nation was pleasantly surprised to discover that in
Serbo-Croatian the word "dalek" means "far", or "distant". Other
Slavonic languages have similar words for "far", such as the Russian далеко (
daleko), or the Czech "Dalekohledy" which means "distant viewing" (for example telescopes and binoculars). Incidentally, the similar words "dålig" in Swedish and "dårlig" in Norwegian and Danish mean "bad".
Nation grew up during
World War II, and remembered the fear caused by German bombings. He consciously based the Daleks on the
Nazis, conceiving the species as faceless, authoritarian figures dedicated to conquest and complete conformity. The allusion is most obvious in the Dalek stories penned by Nation, in particular
The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and
Genesis of the Daleks (1975).
Prior to writing the first Dalek serial, Nation was chief scriptwriter for comedian
Tony Hancock. The two fell out and Nation either resigned or was fired. When Hancock left the BBC, he worked on several series proposals, one of which was called
From Plip to Plop, a comedic history of the world which would have ended with a nuclear apocalypse, the survivors being reduced to living in dustbin-like robot casings and eating radiation to stay alive. According to biographer Cliff Goodwin, when Hancock saw the Daleks he allegedly shouted at the screen, "That bloody Nation — he's stolen my robots!"
The first Dalek serial is called, variously,
The Survivors (the pre-production title),
The Mutants (its official title at the time of production and broadcast, later taken by a
second, unrelated Doctor Who story),
Beyond the Sun,
The Dead Planet, or simply
The Daleks. (The
naming of early Doctor Who stories is complex and sometimes controversial.)
The instant appeal of the Daleks caught the BBC off guard, Despite fans' adoration, the Daleks were clearly associated with
Doctor Who and several attempts to market the Daleks outside of the series were unsuccessful. Since Nation's death in 1997, his share of the rights now belong to his estate and are administered by his former agent, Tim Hancock.
Early plans for what eventually became the
1996 Doctor Who television movie included radically redesigned Daleks whose cases unfolded like spiders' legs. The concept for these "
Spider Daleks" was abandoned, but picked up again in several
Doctor Who spin-offs.
When the new series was announced, many fans hoped the Daleks would return once more to the programme. After much negotiation between the BBC and the Nation estate (which at one point appeared to break down completely), an agreement was reached. According to media reports, the initial disagreement was due to the Nation estate demanding levels of creative control over the Daleks' appearances and scripts that were unacceptable to the BBC. Talks between Tim Hancock and the BBC progressed more productively than had been expected, and in August 2004 an agreement was reached for the Daleks' appearance in the 2005 series. When the Daleks first appeared in
The Daleks, they were presented as the descendants of the Dals, mutated after a brief nuclear war between the Dal and
Thal races. However, in 1975, Terry Nation revised the Daleks' origins in
Genesis of the Daleks, where the Dals were now called
Kaleds (of which Daleks is an
anagram), and the Dalek design was attributed to one man, the crippled Kaled chief scientist and
evil genius,
Davros.
Instead of a short nuclear exchange, the Kaled-Thal war was portrayed as a thousand-year-long war of
attrition, fought with nuclear,
biological and
chemical weapons causing widespread mutations among the Kaled race. Davros experimented on living Kaled cells to find the ultimate mutated form of the Kaled species and placed the subjects in
tank-like "travel machines" whose design was based on his own life-support chair.
Genesis of the Daleks marked a new era for the depiction of the species, with most of their previous history either forgotten or barely referred to again. Future stories in the original
Doctor Who series, which followed a rough
story arc, would also focus more on Davros, much to the dissatisfaction of some fans who felt that the Daleks should take centre stage, rather than merely becoming minions of their creator. Davros made his last televised appearance in
Remembrance of the Daleks. This serial also marked the last on-screen appearance of the Daleks until 2005, save for charity specials like
Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death and the use of Dalek voices in the 1996 television movie.
A single Dalek appeared in "
Dalek", written by
Robert Shearman, which was broadcast on
BBC One on
30 April 2005. This Dalek appeared to be the sole Dalek survivor of a
Time War that had destroyed both the Daleks and the Time Lords.
The Daleks had been controlling humanity for at least 190 years, using a corporation called the Bad Wolf, and a space broadcasting tower. Oddly enough, this television studio runs fatal versions of known reality TV shows airing today, perhaps a wry comment that such shows are less toward higher human nature and more what Daleks would watch, formerly being human. When the Doctor asks the Dalek Emperor, however, he reveals that Bad Wolf isn't actually the design of the Daleks.
The
Dalek Emperor returned at the end of the 2005 series, having rebuilt the Dalek race with human subjects; it saw itself as a god, and the new Daleks were shown worshipping it. These Daleks and their fleet were reduced to subatomic particles in "
The Parting of the Ways".
On
23 March,
2008, the BBC released a series 4 teaser trailer depicting a Dalek.
Dalek culture
Daleks have little to no individual personality, Dalek speech is characterised by repeated phrases, and by orders given to themselves and to others. Dalek vocal inflection suggests perpetual anger, sometimes verging on hysteria.
In terms of their behavior, Daleks are extremely aggressive, and seem driven by an instinct to attack. This instinct is so strong that Daleks have been depicted fighting the urge to kill When the "Human" Dalek Sec began to doubt the Dalek race's supremacy, the other Daleks in the Cult of Skaro no longer thought of him as a Dalek and turned against him. This intolerance of any "contamination" within themselves is also shown in "Dalek", This superiority complex is the basis of Dalek ruthlessness and lack of compassion.
In "The Parting of the Ways", the Daleks that were resurrected through the manipulation and mutation of human genetic material by the Dalek Emperor were religious fanatics that worshipped their Emperor as their god. The Doctor theorised that these Daleks were also insane due to self-loathing, as they'd been created from human genetic material. He also noted that, prior to this encounter, no Dalek had a conception of blasphemy, as they'd no religion or tolerance for it. and the second was the renegade
Time Lord known as
the Master in the 1996 television movie. Neither trial occurred on-screen, so it isn't clear what was involved. The reasons for the Master's trial, and why the Doctor would be asked to retrieve the Master's remains, have never been explained on screen; the
Doctor Who Annual 2006 implies that the trial may have been due to a treaty signed between the Time Lords and the Daleks. The framing device for the audio plays, is a Dalek trial to determine if Davros should be the Daleks' leader once more.
The spin-off novels contain several
tongue-in-cheek mentions of Dalek poetry (and an anecdote about an opera based upon it, which was lost to posterity when the entire cast was exterminated on opening night). Two stanzas are given in the novel
The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch. In an
alternative timeline portrayed in
Big Finish Productions audio adventure
The Time of the Daleks, the Daleks show a fondness for the works of
Shakespeare.
Because the Doctor has defeated the Daleks so often, he's become their
arch-enemy and they have standing orders to capture or exterminate him on sight. They are occasionally able to identify him despite his
regenerations. In the comic strips and novels the Daleks know the Doctor as the "Ka Faraq Gatri", the "Bringer of Darkness" or "Destroyer of Worlds" (this was first established in the novelisation of
Remembrance of the Daleks by
Ben Aaronovitch). In "
The Parting of the Ways", the Doctor says that the Daleks call him "The Oncoming Storm" Both the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler suggest that the Doctor is one of the few beings the Daleks fear: in "
Doomsday", for example, the Cult of Skaro sees the problem of five million Cybermen as a matter of pest control, yet visibly recoil at the mere mention of the Doctor's name.
The modern Doctor has come to view the Daleks as completely evil and unworthy of trust or compassion. The Seventh Doctor even manipulated them into destroying their home world of
Skaro (or at least allowed them to destroy it without hesitating or displaying remorse). The one-page strip (written by
David Whitaker but credited to Nation) featured the Daleks as protagonists and "heroes", and continued for two years, from their creation of the mechanised Daleks by the humanoid Dalek scientist, Yarvelling, to their eventual discovery in the ruins of a crashed space-liner of the co-ordinates for
Earth, which they proposed to invade. Although much of the material in these strips directly contradicted what was shown on television later, some concepts like the Daleks using humanoid duplicates and the design of the
Dalek Emperor did show up later on in the programme. In 1994, the
UK arm of
Marvel Comics reprinted all the
TV 21 strips in a collected edition titled
The Dalek Chronicles.
At the same time, a
Doctor Who strip was also being published in
TV Comic. Initially, the strip didn't have the rights to use the Daleks, so the
First Doctor battled the "Trods" instead, cone-shaped robotic creatures that ran on static electricity that were obviously based on the Daleks. By the time the
Second Doctor appeared in the strip in 1967 the rights issues had been resolved, and the Daleks began making appearances starting in
The Trodos Ambush (TVC #788-#791), where they massacred the Trods. The Daleks also made appearances in the
Third Doctor-era
Dr. Who comic strip that featured in the combined
Countdown/TV Action comic during the early 1970s.
Beginning in 1979,
Marvel UK published
Doctor Who Magazine, which included comic strip stories in its pages. The Doctor occasionally fought the Daleks in the main
DWM strip, and a new nemesis was introduced in a recurring back-up strip:
Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer. Daak was a convicted criminal in the 25th century who was given the choice between execution and being sent on a suicide mission against the Daleks. He chose the latter and, when the woman he loved was killed by the Daleks, made it his life's purpose to kill every one of the creatures he came across.
The Daleks have also appeared in the
Dalek Empire series of audio plays by
Big Finish Productions. Four mini-series, totalling 18 CDs, have so far been produced; these saw the return of the original Dalek Emperor. The Daleks have also returned to bedevil the Doctor in Big Finish's
Doctor Who line of audio plays and
Bernice Summerfield in
Death and the Daleks.
Other appearances
Non-Doctor Who television and film
Dalek toys are seen in a
department store in "Death at Bargain Prices", a 1965 episode of the fantasy/thriller series
The Avengers, which like
Doctor Who was created by Sydney Newman, although broadcast on the rival
ITV network.
In the episode of
Mr. Bean, "
Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean",, Mr. Bean visits
Harrods to do Christmas shopping. There, he creates a rather odd Nativity Scene using the figurines in the shop window, including a Dalek to "exterminate" a baby sheep figure, then later to "battle" a plastic
T-Rex toy.
In the comic
television documentary The Red Dwarf A-Z, two Daleks are shown (under "E" for "Exterminate") arguing that all Earth television is human propaganda, and the works more commonly attributed to
William Shakespeare and
Ludwig van Beethoven were actually written by Daleks. After this, one of them remarks that the "change the bulb" joke from "
Legion" was funny, and is promptly exterminated by the other for the crime of "not behaving like a true Dalek".
A 2001 British
Kit Kat advertisement featured a squad of Daleks who have joined a group of
Hare Krishna devotees, rolling through a shopping centre and repeatedly chanting "Peace and love!" and "Give us a cuddle" in their distinctive voices.
In the 2004 series of
Coupling, written by
Steven Moffat (who later wrote for
Doctor Who), a Dalek appears in the second episode of season four. This was voiced by
Nicholas Briggs, who later went on to provide Dalek voices for the series proper from 2005 onwards. Terry Nation's original Dalek rights deal with the BBC had been negotiated by his then agent
Beryl Vertue, later
Coupling writer Moffat's mother-in-law.
In the 2003 film
, two Cushing movie-style Daleks made a cameo appearance in the "
Area 52" segment amidst many famous "old-time" movie monsters. A Dalek also appears (along with the
Lost in Space robot) in a 2005 television advertisement for the
ANZ bank in Australia - The Dalek was replaced by a giant toy robot in later ANZ Ads.
In a 2004 episode of
Top Gear, two black Daleks were featured on a segment where the
Sixth Doctor (played by
Colin Baker), a
Cyberman,
Darth Vader,
Ming the Merciless and a
Klingon each participated on a one-lap run on the
Top Gear track in a
Honda Civic hatchback. When it was time for one of the Daleks to drive the Civic, it analyzed the car's interior and went berserk upon seeing that only humanoid forms could drive it. As a result, both Daleks went on a rampage and exterminated the other villains on the track.
Parodies
» See also: Doctor Who spoofs.
Daleks have been the subject of many
parodies, including
Spike Milligan's "
Pakistani Dalek" sketch in his comedy series
Q, and
Victor Lewis-Smith's
gay Daleks. One sketch on
Dave Allen At Large portrayed a
baptismal font behaving like a Dalek.
Doctor Who itself has used the Daleks for parody: in 2002,
BBC Worldwide published the
Dalek Survival Guide, a parody of
The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks.
On
BBC Radio 4, the Daleks made occasional appearances on the satirical impressionist show
Dead Ringers, noting that the proliferation of wheelchair ramps would make it easier for Daleks to invade Earth. Other sketches included them trying to buy skin-care products for Davros's wrinkled skin. Dalek voices have frequently appeared on another BBC Radio 4 satirical programme,
The Now Show.
In one of the audio
bloopers released for the
computer game Black & White, the voice actor speaking a high-pitched, shrieking character jokingly claims he can't stop talking in that voice. He then tries to warn the producer about what would happen if his voice went any higher, but interrupts himself by saying "EXTERMINATE THE DOCTOR" in a Dalek-like voice.
Another parody occurred in "The Goodies" episode
U-Friend or UFO?. In it aliens are stealing trombonists from all over England. Graeme Garden's character has invented a copy of
R2D2 (from the film
Star Wars) which he's renamed EB-GB. In an attempt to communicate with the UFOs he asks:
"EB-GB, how do you speak to aliens?" to which it replies:"Exterminate!".
Politics
In a
British Government Parliamentary Debate in the
House of Commons on
12 February 1968, the then
Minister of Technology Tony Benn mentioned the Daleks during a reply to a question from the
Labour MP Hugh Jenkins concerning the
Concorde aircraft project. In the context of the dangers of
solar flares, he said, "Because we're exploring the frontiers of technology, some people think Concorde will be avoiding solar flares like Dr. Who avoiding Daleks. It isn't like this at all." An earlier political reference occurred at the 1966
Conservative Party conference in
Blackpool, where delegate
Hugh Dykes publicly compared the Labour government's
Defence Secretary Denis Healey to the creatures. "Mr. Healey is the Dalek of defence, pointing a metal finger at the armed forces and saying 'I will eliminate you'."
Australian Labor Party luminary
Robert Ray described his right wing
Labor Unity faction successor, Victorian Senator
Stephen Conroy, and his Socialist Left faction counterpart,
Kim Carr, as factional Daleks during a 2006
Australian Fabian Society lunch in
Sydney.
Music
The first known musical reference to Daleks is the 1964 novelty single "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek" by
The Go-Go's, released during the 1960s' "
Dalekmania" fad. As part of their light show in the 1960s,
Pink Floyd used a light which they dubbed the "Dalek", due to its erratic behaviour and tendency to break down. (the version of Pink Floyd's
One of These Days on the
Meddle and
Delicate Sound of Thunder albums also briefly quote the Doctor Who theme tune). In
The Clash's song "
Remote Control" (from their
self-titled 1977 album), the last verse includes the lines, "
Repression — gonna be a Dalek / Repression — I'm a robot / Repression — I obey."
The band
Shriekback had a musical reference in their 1985 album
Oil & Gold in the song "Hammerheads." Singer Barry Andrew declares, "
This is our mission; to be the Daleks of God!".
The Shapes' "Let's Go To Planet Skaro" is set entirely on the Daleks' homeworld, where the Doctor is holding his wedding reception. The single "
Doctorin' the Tardis" by
Doctor Who-themed group
The Timelords included various Dalek vocalisations, and its
music video featured a late-model sedan (dubbed "a
Ford Timelord") crashing into a crudely constructed Dalek.
Rotersand, a European
synthpop/
industrial band, lifted out a Single entitled
Exterminate Annihilate Destroy from their Album "Welcome to Goodbye", prominently featuring a sound sample of a Dalek repeating the title phrase. The short-lived punk act,
The Art Attacks, released a single with the song, "I am a Dalek" in 1978 for Albatross Records. Additionally, at least three musical acts have named themselves after the Daleks: the late 1970s
synth pop group
Dalek I Love You, and The Daleks, a
punk rock band who recorded one single in 1980.
MC Frontalot, a
nerdcore hip hop artist,
sampled the Dalek's infamous "Exterminate" catchphrase in the title track of his 2005 album "Nerdcore Rising" during a verse performed by
MC Hawking.
DJ Neophyte, a European
gabber artist, created a song entitled "I Will Have That Power", which samples several phrases by the
Daleks and
Davros, creator of the Daleks.
Screwface &
CTRL Z, two tearout
breakbeat DJs/ producers, created a track in 2005 entitled "Dar Licks", which uses various samples from or referring to
Daleks. This was released as a B-side to "Ting Dem" by
ED209 &
Dappa Dan on the
Hardcore Beats label.
Pornography
Daleks have made their way into pornographic material. For example, a Dalek appeared with a naked
Katy Manning (who played the
Third Doctor's companion
Jo Grant) in a photoshoot for
Playboy after Manning left the series. Although
Playboy didn't use the images, they were eventually published in a short-lived Australian men's magazine named
Girl Illustrated. Another pornographic parody, entitled
Dr. Loo and the Filthy Phaleks was released earlier in 2005.
Stand Up Comedy
The Daleks have also been featured in a comedy routine by
English comedian
Eddie Izzard, from his album,
Live at the Ambassadors.
Theatre
The Daleks made two brief appearances in the 2007/2008
Aladdin Pantomime at the
Birmingham Hippodrome, starring
Torchwood star
John Barrowman.
Merchandising
The BBC approached Walter Tuckwell, a
New Zealand-born entrepreneur who was handling product merchandising for other BBC shows, and asked him to do the same for the Daleks and
Doctor Who. Tuckwell created a glossy sales brochure that sparked off a Dalek craze, dubbed "Dalekmania" by the press, which peaked around the time
The Chase aired in June 1965.
Toys
The first Dalek toy from Louis Marx & Co., a battery-operated Dalek, appeared in 1964. More toys and merchandise appeared the following year, along with toys of the Mechanoids (robotic foes of the Daleks also introduced in
The Chase). The Mechanoids were created with the expectation that they'd become as popular as Daleks, but they were not as successful. Other unsuccessful BBC attempts to create a "replacement" for the Daleks, or at least duplicate their popularity included the Voord (
The Keys of Marinus, 1964), the Krotons (
The Krotons, 1968) and the Quarks (
The Dominators, 1968).
At the height of the Daleks' popularity, apart from toy replicas, there were also Dalek construction kits, Dalek board games and activity sets, Dalek slide projectors for children and even Dalek playsuits made from PVC. There were collectible cards, stickers, toy guns, music singles, punching bags and many other items.
In the 1970s, Palitoy released a Talking Dalek which could utter standard Dalek phrases such as "You will obey!" and "Exterminate!" Later, model kits of other Dalek-related characters like Davros, the Supreme Dalek and Gold Daleks were also released. In 2001 a new range of talking Daleks were produced, along with a talking
Cyberman and a talking Davros.
In 2005, new Dalek toys, including a remote-controlled, talking Dalek and a pair of battling Daleks, were also created based on the designs for the new series. These were unexpectedly popular and were sold out in many stores in the UK. A remote-controlled Dalek based on the white-and-gold Imperial Dalek design was also released.
In 2007, an enlarged remote-controlled, talking Dalek standing at eighteen inches tall was released. This new Dalek, aside from the usual remote control functionality in previous models, is, among other activities, able to act as a room guard, follow vocal commands and play games. This is possible due to the
speech recognition, ultrasonic
motion detection, passive
infrared and vibration sensitivity possessed by the toy.
Computer games
The Daleks have featured in computer games since the 1980s, beginning with an unlicensed modification of the
Robots game called
Daleks. However, the game uses Daleks only as generic monsters, with no Dalek-specific features. Similarly, the 1985 game
Paradroid includes a robot ("
Droid 883") which resembles a Dalek: the game's background info mentions that the source design was "modelled from archive data" and that its appearance frightens humans. in
Alien 8 appears to be half-mouse, half-Dalek.
Licensed
Doctor Who games featuring Daleks include 1984's
The Key to Time, a text adventure game for the
ZX Spectrum. Daleks also appeared in minor roles or as thinly disguised versions in other, minor games throughout the 80s, but didn't feature as central adversaries in a licensed game until 1992, when Admiral Software published
Dalek Attack. The game allowed the player to play various Doctors or companions, running them through several environments to defeat the Daleks. In 1997 the BBC released a
PC game entitled
Destiny of the Doctors which also featured the Daleks, among other adversaries, who also seemed to be able to follow the player character up the stairs. In 1998 the BBC released a
Doctor Who screensaver done in
Macromedia Shockwave which had a built-in minigame, where the player controlled
K-9 battling the Daleks through seven increasingly difficult levels.
Unauthorized games featuring Daleks continued to appear through the 1990s and 2000s, including Dalek-based
modifications of
Dark Forces,
Quake, and
Half-Life, and even more recently, a mod of ; many of these can be found online. Other unauthorised online Dalek games include a
DHTML/
JavaScript arcade game
Dalek and an
Adobe Flash game,
Dalek:Dissolution Earth In 1998
QWho, a
modification for
Quake, featured the Daleks as adversaries. This also formed the basis of
TimeQuake, a
total conversion written in 2000 which included other
Doctor Who monsters such as
Sontarans. Another unauthorised game is
DalekTron, a Windows-only game based on and written in the
Smalltalk programming language to coincide with the 2005 series.
They also appeared as a model for an enemy in 3D Game Maker. The player could put a dalek like model in their own computer games.
One authorised online game is
The Last Dalek, a
Flash game created by New Media Collective for the BBC. It is based on the 2005 episode "Dalek" and can be played at the official BBC
Doctor Who website. The
Doctor Who website also features another game
Daleks vs Cybermen (also known as
Cyber Troop Control Interface) in which the player controls troops of Cybermen which must fight Daleks as well as
Torchwood Institute members based on the 2006 episode "Doomsday".
Other major appearances
Stage plays
Audio appearances
Blood of the Daleks broadcast on BBC 7(31 December 2006 and 7 January 2007)
Original novels
War of the Daleks by John Peel (Eighth Doctor Adventures), published October 1997
Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel (Eighth Doctor Adventures), published April 1998
The Dalek Factor by Simon Clark (Telos Doctor Who novellas), published March 2004
I am a Dalek by Gareth Roberts (Tenth Doctor Adventures, part of the Quick Reads Initiative
), published May 2006Further Information
Get more info on 'Dalek'.
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