Based on my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between skeptical thinking and science fiction. I attend functions of a group of skeptics, sometimes physically at local venues, and at other times online with people around the world and I find that a large number of them are aficionados of science fiction and are knowledgeable about the minutiae of those stories.
Recently I created some mild astonishment within this group by saying that I had never actually watched any complete episodes of favorites like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or Dr. Who. I knew about them of course and had read about them and seen the odd clip of something from them. It is not that I avoid them. I do read the occasional science fiction but had never had any great interest in seeing science fiction on TV or the big screen. This surprised others who seemed to expect that with my science background, I would find them appealing.
One thing that had always puzzled me were the Daleks, the evildoers in the Dr. Who stories. They seemed to me to be laughably comical and totally not frightening. Eddie Izzard shares my puzzlement as to what the creators were thinking when they created them as conical objects with flat bottoms, like pepper and salt shakers, who moved on wheels and had weird appendages where arms would be.
I think it was mostly the flanged voices that made them scary. Also, Dr. Who was originally intended as a children’s show. When it was syndicated here in the U. S., the creators were astonished that college kids liked it.
The first comment moarscienceplz is likely right on the older daleks, but let me tell you about how they briefly became excellent (and terrifying!) when Dr Who restarted back in 2005.
(Also it’s been a long time since I’ve commented and I can’t remember how to declare linebreaks so I used ellipses instead)
…
It’s the drive! The will to find a way!
How many smirking designated bad guys have you seen who start with every advantage possible and do nothing…. just sit around being smug and talking about how they couldn’t possibly lose, only to melt down the first time something goes wrong?
…
Well, not the daleks. They may hate life/the universe/everything but it hates them right back.
Their pathetic physical forms are actually a huge selling point -- trapped in a little fish bowl, a plunger and a weapon mounted on top of a clumsy rolling life support that they can never leave. They start with every possible drawback but when the time comes to kill people, they organize, problem solve, then give it a red hot go and get out there and act on their beliefs and try to make murder happen no matter what.
…
Too many people seem to think and act like having moral superiority is enough to win a conflict, and it’s refreshing to see villains that just don’t respect that.
…
I’ve got a great example for you: here’s the start of the final episode of the first series.
The daleks here are a tiny pocket of scavengers hanging outside earth in a very weak position -- no great ships or energy sources, not at all powerful. And we know that the Doctor is essentially the greatest ever dalek killer, so they are essentially screwed, right?
…
We had met a single dalek earlier in the series but never seen them otherwise. The single dalek was cold, intelligent, dutiful and so that’s what we expect.
However, that’s not what we get, but the drive still remains. Immediately after this scene they spend the next 40 minutes or so successfully breaching defense after defense and murdering everyone they can find every time they do so.
Scary, no? To meet something so driven?
In an era where “alien” generally meant “completely human with a funny hairdo” and even the average movie robot had two arms, two legs, and a head all in the normal places… the Daleks were alien. They didn’t look like a human, didn’t move like a human, didn’t sound like a human. There had been nothing like them before. And on a TV budget, no less!
That and the obvious Nazi analogy is what made the Daleks popular when they first appeared. It certainly wasn’t the script. That story had some of the worst pacing in the entire series!
As an old bloke who was there at the time:
Other commenters are spot on.
The daleks were very early in Dr Who when it was still considered a kids’ show intended to educate about history and science. The daleks were more pure sci-fi action adventure.
They were conceived as “space nazis” -- relentless, amoral, supremacist.
Weirdly non-humanoid. It didn’t matter they looked like pepper pots. They didn’t look human.
The voice. Dalek voice was like a children’s version of Hitler crossed with a robot. Ranting, shrill, monotone, frenzied; “Ex-ter-minate! Ex-ter-minate! Ex-ter-minate!” -- Every schoolkid could mimic that robotic murderous voice. They caught the imagination.
This was the 60s and the blitz was still quite recent memory. Because the daleks were so popular they were quickly brought back and instead of being far off space monsters, they invaded and occupied “contemporary” London. That had a big emotional impact at the time. The daleks had done what Hitler failed to do.
Basically, they just resonated with the concerns of the time and became iconic.
Also, they may look like pepper pots, but also like tanks. Tanks were still very much on people’s minds as terrifying symbols of military superiority.
For those unfamiliar; a video of “dalek voice”.
Arnold as the unstoppable T-800 was by far the most frightening robot I recall.
Non-anthropomorph baddies -- like for instance the organisms in Alien: Earth -- can work, provided the film/TV program has a good budget and is well made. Otherwise it looks like a Japanese production aimed at children.
Extra! The drugs have killed far more than any robots. Trump claims drugs have killed 300 million Americans!
re birgerjohansson @8: Wow! I haven’t noticed the traffic being any less maddening. I don’t see how that could be when 3/4 of the people here are dead from drugs. Maybe all those cars are filled with driving zombies?
Echoing much of what has gone before:
Dr. Who is a family show. It’s is NOT a “kids’ show” -- it is and always was intended to be a show the whole family sits down and watches on a Saturday evening after the football results and before the big gameshow or whatever. It is here you begin to see why it struggles in the modern era of streaming, time-shifting, channel fragmentation and multi-screen watching.
The Daleks were revolutionary in their time because of that design -- not just a bloke in a rubber suit. The guy who wrote most of the old series Dalek episodes -- Terry Nation, who also created “Blakes 7” (don’t tell me it needs an apostrophe) -- on the page wrote some fairly generic alien Nazis. The real genius was Raymond Cusick, who actually turned the vague description in the script into a costume/prop that actually worked in a TV studio and even on location (kinda). What he was thinking of was, presumably, tanks… and how they could get half a dozen of them built on a shoestring from plywood.
It’s hard to overstate the impact the Daleks had on British culture in the mid 60s, closer in time as it was to World War 2 than we are now to the beginning of the most recent series in 2005.
The fear is something you can only really experience viscerally if you first encounter them as a small child. The best summary of why they’re scary is to misquote from Terminator: “Listen. And understand. The Daleks are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until every single living thing in the universe that is not a Dalek is dead.” The voice is a large part of it, and it helps that it’s fairly easy to do an impression of.
I would recommend anyone vaguely interested seek out two stories:
First, watch “Dalek”, from 2005. It’s a good introduction, and has a properly unhinged performance from Christopher Ecclestone.
Second, check out “Genesis of the Daleks” from 1975, with the greatest Doctor, Tom Baker finding out how the Daleks came to be. Michael Wisher as Davros, their creator, is absolutely chilling in a story with hardly any actual Daleks in it.