Out of this world!
A vintage villainous Dalek from the original “Doctor Who” series was restored for a special episode that will air on Saturday — after the 50-plus-year-old alien prop was stolen and sawed in half.
Built in 1963, the original Dalek faced the first Time Lord, William Hartnell.
It was buried in sand and tossed into a tank of water during filming — and even stolen from the TV studio but later returned, according to Barcroft Media.
When the show ended in 1988, the extraterrestrial prop was sawed in half to become a “walk-in-Dalek’ for an exhibition display, in which kids left behind gum and candy wrappers, according to the team that restored it.
Now, it will appear when Peter Capaldi — who plays the Twelfth Doctor — first meets the Time Lord’s enemy in Saturday’s episode.
“An entire section of the rear, from the bottom of the ‘skirt’ to the top of the dome, was cut off. … It was a tragic end to one of the BBC’s oldest and most often-used original props,” said Jon Green, a “Doctor Who” writer and historian.
It took two years to rebuild the severely damaged cyborg to its original sci-fi glory.
“When it arrived at our workshops, superficially it looked a mess, but as we started to take out the padding and supports that had been put inside, we realized that the underlying structure was actually untouched,” said visual effects designer Mike Tucker, who rebuilt the prop.
He added, “A lousy paint job and several years worth’s of chewing gum and sticky sweets being left inside it by kids had made it look a lot worse that it was.”
Sections had been cut away from the neck and dome, so he made molds from the remaining parts, using material that would have been used in the ’60s.
“Where possible we used materials that would have been used back in 1963,” he said.