Before Star Wars mania had fans all over the globe wielding light sabers, before Kirk and Spock had gone anywhere near where no man had gone before, there was Doctor Who, a youth-targeted educational sci-fi program broadcast, beginning in 1963, by the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) . The Doctor, as he's most commonly referred to, is a Time Lord from the distant planet Gallefry with the ability to traverse time and space in his Tardis, fashioned to appear as a disused police call box from the outside but, through sci-fi dimension bending, was a large space ship on the inside.
The Doctor acted as an intergalactic trouble shooter saving entire races and planets from extinction on a weekly basis. Not only that, but he's nearly immortal. When you kill the Doctor, he regenerates into a seemingly different person with a distinct personality and physical appearance. A handy gimmick for those times when an actor needs to move on without ending the series.
The Doctor has regenerated no less than eight times over the last 35 years. The first Doctor Who was portrayed by veteran thespian William Hartnell and the first of the Doctor's many companions were the Doctor's young granddaughter Susan and her over-inquisitive teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. It was also during the series' first season that the public got its first taste of the Doctor's greatest foe - The Daleks!
The second greatest Who villain, the Cybermen, saw the first Doctor away in Hartnell's final story after four seasons, "The Tenth Planet." "The Tenth Planet" also marked the Doctor's first regeneration as Patrick Troughton took over the role for three seasons to be regenerated as the marvelous Jon Pertwee who played the Doctor for five classic series.
I asked noted Whovian scholar Carrie Brennan how the whole regeneration concept came about.
"Well, what do you do when you have a top-rated children's show, have basically an endless supply of plots (considering the format of the show), but your star wants/needs to leave? Actually, the producers could have simply replaced the star with no explanation. Thankfully, they decided to show a bit of respect to their audience and came up with a more creative idea. Of course, it wasn't entirely selfless, as they very much needed to make sure that people would continue watching the series even if the actor playing the Doctor changed.
"At the beginning, regeneration wasn't a very complicated issue. The Doctor simply had the ability to change the way he looked. In the first story of the second Doctor, the Doctor refers to this as "renewal."
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