Earlier this year, I was in a store and stumbled across a few DVDs of Doctor Who. Apparently, a bunch of titles came out on DVD (to the US and not just the UK, finally) last year.

Before I plunged into the world of Saturday morning cartoons, this was without a doubt my favorite TV show. Like most Generation-X americans, I was placed in front of channel 2 (PBS) as a child to watch shows like Seasame Street and The Electric Company. So with Doctor Who being on the same channel during the day, it was inevitable that I stuck around to watch that too.

I was only 3 or 4 years old when I started watching, but I've always had a great long-term memory, and there's so much I vividly remember. And I've been on the quest to find those episodes on DVD or VHS. It's been funny trying to search for these titles and ask other people about them, because all I remember are these details reported by my then 4 year-old self. "Oh yeah, what was that episode with the guy whose eyes glowed red, until he drank this stuff that looked like chocolate milk? And at some point he spilled what was left of his drink, and he turned into a werewolf?" Likewise, I've been joyously remembering other scenes as they've come up "Oh yeah! This is the one where the Doctor almost steps on a land mine, and this dude in a black cloak gives him a magic time ring!"

So far I've bought no less than 17 stories, and just ordered another 6. So few have been made on DVD (again, at least here in the US, where UK-region DVDs wouldn't be able to play anyway). But with the VHS tapes going for $9.99 each, it's a steal.

What I didn't realize until years after being a young child, was that Doctor Who had been around since the early 60s, and numerous actors have played the doctor. So far I've bought one DVD each from the 2nd and 3rd doctors, and liked them. But the one I'll always have the strongest connection with is the 4th doctor, and inevitably the only one that I got to see as a child: Tom Baker. Oddly enough, he was their longest-running doctor (7 seasons).

The monsters and sets were hilariously low-budget, but that's part of its charm. I really love Tom Baker's Doctor character: eccentricly dressed in a style all his own, immeasurably intelligent, always outsmarting the enemy, amazing wit and humor (especially when death was approaching), and armed with little more than his bag of jelly babies.

I have to wonder if excitedly watching all that stuff at the age of 3 -- the science, the dark monsters, the humor -- made some very notable indent on me.

"Playing DOCTOR WHO came as a great surprise to me. I had no idea that I would enjoy it so much. All that was required of me was to be able to speak complete gobbledygook with conviction... [Easy because I] had been taught nonsense by priests and teachers on all sorts of subjects." - Tom Baker