I’m still trying to get my head around the geeky awesomeness that is the compilation of villainry and monsterness that the Guardian’s Data Blog has assembled for our fannish pleasure:
This image doesn’t even begin to do it justice: the actual thingie is interactive, and I urge you to check it out if you’re simply dying to know precisely how many episodes, say, the Ogrons appeared in. It’s clickable by a long list of villains and monsters. (But hey, since when is Lethbridge-Stewart a villain or a monster?)
Data Blog has more detail on the whys and wherefores, such as:
Here’s a list of all the Doctor Who villains there have ever been since the very first episode in 1963. Whether it’s to help you put your bet on what will make a reappearance next series or just to satisfy hard-core Whovians, hopefully this will help you out.
The chart however doesn’t include villains exclusively in Doctor Who books, audio books and spin-off shows.
You can even download the datasheet from Google Docs.
This could be what the Internet was invented for.
(Thanks to the many readers who sent the link. If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
remember that JP episode where Lethbridge-Stewart and Liz Shaw are in the evil bizarro universe? maybe that counts.
The Cybermen have been in 54 episodes? Unless they are counting flashback episodes during regenerations, I don’t see where they get that number.
D’oh, I take back my previous quibble about Cybermen appearances. I’m counting by number of titled episodes that we get over here in the U.S. The real count includes the serial episodes (the parts 1 through 4 or 6), which boosts the numbers up… but if that’s so, the Daleks ought to have a higher count, right…?
I feel empowered knowing I was one of the many that you thank. :)
It’s a bit subjective, and the numbers are probably off a bit because it was collected by humans going over every single bloody episode, but props to whoever made the catalogue and chart. They’d have to be a big Who fan to pull that off.
PaulW, on the Guardian site, you can change the display to size the circles by “number of stories” instead of “number of episodes” (that gets you Daleks:32, Cybermen:22).
Oh, and, MAJ —
They are only tracking the crypto-Nazi alternate universe Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart from Inferno.
^ like i said…
Ah, sorry, I parsed “JP” as “Japanese”, not “John Pertwee”, so I thought you were referring to some very obscure thing I didn’t know about.