Dr. Who Theme Making-Of Video

Permanently etched into my inner ear is the tune from the Dr. Who theme. Dr. Who is a very long-running (20+ years?) British sci-fi television show meant for kids, though it's tone is deadly serious and at least until recently, its special FX laughably (charmingly?) awful.

The show's original theme by Ron Grainer was arranged using elaborate electronic equipment not meant for making music, manually adjusted and spliced together using magnetic tape by the late Delia Derbyshire. I grew up with this version, hearing it on the episodes with the fourth incarnation of the Doctor, played by Tom Baker.

The version demonstrated in the video is for the fifth season with Peter Davison as the Doctor. It's still quite good and I love seeing the old Yamaha CS-80 and ARP Odyssey (1970s era) synthesizers, which are pre-MIDI (hence the need to record them directly to magnetic tape). But it's not quite as mysterious and other-wordly as the original.