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I performed a little experiment this evening. I sat my seven year-old son in front of YouTube and showed him a clip of K-9 playing chess with the Fourth Doctor and Leela and the new teaser trailer for the upcoming K-9 kids' series. His reaction: the old K-9 was amusing but the new one is "cooooooooooooool"! Keep that in mind as you listen to my reaction to the trailer that seemed to vex so many fans….
(P.S. I do add myself to the chorus calling for John Leeson to perform the voice.)
That's very refreshing!
I enjoyed the podcast, but couldn't disagree more with your premise that "it's not going to harm DW" and that "it's not going to soil the memory of K9".
As I've followed the development of this series for the past couple of years, I've been quite enthusiastic. It was supposed to be a mostly CGI project set well in the future aboard a small space ship. The K9 involved wasn't to have had anything to do with the Doctor. The closest the original premise came to having continuity with DW was to have validated the 10th Doctor's statement in "School Reunion" that K9 tech was "cutting edge in the year 5000". What I'd come to believe about this series is that we were going to get some background on where the K9s came from, and possibly explore the notion that the professor from "The Invisible Enemy", went on to create a whole industry based on the original K9 model.
But no. Park Entertainment changed their mind over the premise of the show. Now we learn that this K9 is actually K9 Mark I, rather than another, unrelated version of the robot. Thus, the memory of this character as Leela's steadfast pet and, ultimately, wedding present is directly challenged. Moreover, how they're going to get this character from Gallifrey to Earth without destroying one of the core precepts of new DW — namely, the absence of Gallifrey — boggles the mind.
So now I'm officially one of the angry Who fans who's not going to relax or calm down about this. If there were no connection with the DW mythology, and it were a crap show aimed at kids, I wouldn't care. If it were a kids' show that deliberately eschewed a connection to DW in order to carve out a new mythology for a new K9, I'd be positively excited.
But it's bringing back a character we know. And it's doing so for absolutely no reason I can divine. Kids don't need to have this K9 connected to the one in "The Invasion of Time". Seven-year-olds don't remember back that far. Hell, they barely remember back to "School Reunion". So why piss off the potential adult fan base of the show who actually DO remember a time when this character's mistress was a wild huntress? To put Leela's beloved Mark I in the hands of kids is like giving Lassie to some punk from New York.