Two long-lost episodes of 'Doctor Who' have been found

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LONDON (AP) — Over six decades of “Doctor Who,” the intergalactic adventurer’s adversaries have included evil robots, rampaging Yeti — and the BBC, which erased many early episodes of the now-iconic sci-fi TV series.

A film charity announced Friday that it has found two previously lost 1960s episodes in film cans wrapped in plastic bags among the possessions of a deceased collector. They have been restored by BBC archivists and will be available next month on the broadcaster’s streaming service.

The discovery leaves 95 episodes still missing from the adventures of a galaxy-hopping alien known as the Doctor that debuted in 1963.

“Doctor Who” — the “who” is an existential question, rather than the character’s name — has become a television institution with millions of fans around the world. But the BBC’s attitude to the show in its early years was careless. Scores of episodes were lost because the broadcaster threw out film recordings or wiped video tapes for re-use.

“The main broadcasters in the U.K. in the 1960s, 70s, up to the 80s really, junked quite a lot of content,” said Justin Smith, a cinema professor at England’s De Montfort University and chair of trustees of Film is Fabulous!, which works to preserve cinema and television history.

“In some ways finding missing ‘Doctor Whos’ is the holy grail” of classic TV discoveries, Smith told The Associated Press.

Smith said the charity found film cans containing the two rediscovered black-and-white episodes, “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet,” among the collection of a film aficionado who had died. The collector’s estate wishes to remain anonymous.

The episodes aired during the show’s third series in 1965 and feature William Hartnell, the first of more than a dozen actors to play the Doctor, in a story involving archvillains the Daleks – pepperpot-shaped metal aggressors whose favorite word is “Exterminate!”

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