Yesterday, while randomly poking around YouTube, I came across an awesome little bit of fandom and media reappropriation: Remixes of Doctor Who “Next Time” trailers.

For those of you who don’t know, Doctor Who is the venerable British science fiction institution, in production from 1963 through 1989 and then again since 2005. The latest version (originally starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, then David Tennant and now Freema Agyeman) is a lot of fun — it’s still rather cheesy at times, but also much more witty, self-referential, and clever than most expected. There’s only one more week to go in the current series (in the UK, I don’t believe it airs in the US until late summer), and watching it has been a weekly tradition for me and my friends wherever I am (hi there, Matt and Jill and Chris and Sarah).

Anyway, since the show has come back on the air, they’ve put a “Next Time…” preview of the following week’s episode at the end of each episode. Nothing terribly fancy, nothing terribly special, just a quick-cut set of clips to tease the next week’s episode. What I’ve discovered is that there’s a small community of fans of the classic show (mainly the Tom Baker era, ’74-’81) who are now taking clips from those old shows and remixing them, impressively following the style of the new episode trailers.

First, here’s a “Next Time…” for this season’s “Daleks In Manhattan” (a mediocre episode, but decent trailer):

… and then two of the fake trailers made by YouTube user “Mulett,” who has made the best ones so far, in my opinion. Here’s “Terror of the Zygons” and “The Hand of Fear”:

A couple of other ones have caught my eye, but aren’t embeddable. They are “City of Death” and “The Five Doctors” (I like the clever use of the old logo). There are maybe another dozen of them on YouTube, but most are pretty poorly executed — only Mulett’s really stand out for me as excellent.

I’m not really in the mood to over-intellectualize this obviously media literate activity, but I will note this: This is a very different kind of fan activity than most fan fiction/fan media remixing. That is, some of the traditional interpretations of fan fiction are that they are reappropriations of the original “texts” of a TV show, movie, game, comic, etc. for the purposes of telling a new story, enacting a fantasy (often prurient) which is appealing to some subsection of fans, addressing narrative gaps in the original stories, or all of these. An example of these might be the pervasive sexualized fan fiction of, say, Star Trek or Harry Potter (you know, the tiresome Kirk/Spock or Draco/Ron slash fanfic), or the Doctor Who fanfic which tried to explain why Romana’s regeneration was so different from the Doctor’s.

These videos seem qualitatively different, don’t they? Different from other well-known fan remixes of videos (such as The Phantom Edit, which existed primarily to address and repair the perceived crappiness of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace). If the editors of these short movies are trying to do anything, it seems like they’re probably just having fun with the incongruity of the old Doctor Who series’ style shoehorned into the new Doctor Who series’ style.

And this doesn’t seem to get talked about much — what I’ve read about fan fiction and fan uses of media seems to rely heavily upon the reappropriation of text or story content, and rarely on the style of the editing. This kind of thing somewhat reminds me of the recent spate of trailer remixes (such as the heartwarming remix of The Shining and the zombie remix of West Side Story), but in those cases the creators were expicitly trying to adopt a jarringly different style, for, you know, to make the funny. In these Doctor Who videos, it just seems different to me.

By the way, only one more episode of Doctor Who series 3 is left to air in the UK. This has been one of the best and weirdest seasons yet.