You may have noticed that "Dr Who, The Movie" with Paul McGann as the 8th doctor is in a peculiar position regards the Dr Who stories. First, there's a 7 year gap between the last story of the 7th doctor Sylvester McCoy, and the single Paul McGann story. Sylvester McCoy was dumped by the BBC for no known reason and later restored for one episode to do a Regeneration scene to Paul McGann, the same situation Colin Baker was in when it was time for the 6th Doctor, Colin Baker to Regenerate to the 7th, Sylvester McCoy, except that Colin Baker refused to do it. The new movie was an attempt to get a Dr Who series started in the USA and the effort partnered Universal Studios in Hollywood and the Fox Network (I'm not sure which one of those three was Larry, which was Moe, and which was Curley!) The movie flopped in the USA and was only a mild sucess in the UK. The BBC could still have continued Dr Who episodes in the UK, with Paul McGann, but perhaps depressed and despondent by not snaring the Bazillion dollar USA market for Dr Who, they cancelled it again!
The second cancellation was for 9 years. Dr Who fans eventually settled on a name for this 16 year period, they called it The Wilderness Years, some even divided it into Wilderness-A, the period between Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann, and Wilderness-B, the period between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston. Neither wilderness was completely lifeless, in fact every form of Dr Who life except TV shows, which the BBC didn't allow anyone else to do, thrived. The Dr Who magazine continued to be popular, Virgin Books started writing and publishing Dr Who stories, Dr Who conventions were sell-outs, and a company called Big Finish that produced audio CDs started to make Dr Who audios and attracted quite a few of the Dr Who actors to be a part.
No one really knows why the BBC decided to get serious about Dr Who again, and when they did, why they didn't continue with Paul McGann as the Doctor, but they did find an excellent 9th Doctor in Christopher Eccleston. That left "Dr Who, The Movie" and Paul McGann more-or-less stranded in the Wildnerness between Sylvester McCoy and Christopher Eccleston. Too bad, I thought the movie was good although perhaps a bit too Americanized for the UK Who-nerds, and I thought Paul McGann made a good Doctor.If all this wasn't annoying enough, the fans also were cheated out of a regeneration from the 8th doctor, Paul McGann, to the 9th, Christopher Eccleston. Christopher just appeared at the start of an episode called "Rose" with no explanation of how he got there and the new Dr Who series was off and running. An interesting possibility taken from some of the future stories is that this had something to do with the "Time War" which had certainly included the 9th Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, the 10th Doctor, David Tennent, and may have included the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann. If so, perhaps Paul had been killed in the Time War and regenerated into Christopher Eccleston far from the myopic eyes of the BBC and the Who-Nerds. Ok, it's more likely that Paul McGann, the actor, was off making another movie and couldn't be bothered to show up for a single scene in a single Dr Who story, but what can we do but struggle for continuity?
After "Dr Who the Movie" opened, bombed, and closed, a question remained as to who owned the DVD rights. A brief three-way feud developed between the BBC, Fox Television, and Universal about that question, that is if you call 14 years "brief!" Now (November 2010) it appears that "Dr Who, The Movie" will be available on DVD sometime in the next twelve months, yup those folks are smokin' fast.
The dvd for "Dr Who, The Movie" has always been available in the UK and someone from the USA could always buy a UK copy, it's just that it wouldn't play on their dvd player. The problem has to do with something called DVD Regions which goes something like this.
So if a USA (Region 1) purchaser bought a dvd from a UK (Region 2) seller it might not play on his dvd player. There are some hacks and minor surgery that the USA purchaser can use to work around this problem but it may not be worth the effort. Converting Region 2 dvds to Region 1 isn't all that difficult, in fact its been done for scores of other Dr Who dvds as well as all the English detective series, so there's probably some hanky panky going on in the background.
But these are things that we Who-Nerds just aren't meant to know, all I want to know is why Japan and South Africa are linked in with Europe, and New Zealand and Mexico are on the same team?