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| - In late 1963 we had Doctor Who, the series which spawned the Whoniverse. Then in 1964, in the pages of TV Comic, the first Doctor Who spin-off comic started. Overall, the Whoniverse has encompassed three stage plays, webcasts, animation, choose-your-own-adventure books, novels, novelisations, audio dramas, comics and feature films (adapting two of the earlier television stories).
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| abstract
| - In late 1963 we had Doctor Who, the series which spawned the Whoniverse. Then in 1964, in the pages of TV Comic, the first Doctor Who spin-off comic started. Overall, the Whoniverse has encompassed three stage plays, webcasts, animation, choose-your-own-adventure books, novels, novelisations, audio dramas, comics and feature films (adapting two of the earlier television stories). The three different Sarah Jane spin-offs serve as a lesson in how you can spin off the same character in different ways, using different tropes and for different audiences. Expanded Universe material in general and without the Doctor, in particular, tend to be Darker and Edgier and skew more towards the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism than their parent series. The Sarah Jane Adventures and K-9 & Company stand out as notable exceptions. (Sarah also appeared in the semi-professional direct-to-video production Downtime.) Up to the present, the franchise's Expanded Universe continued usually in the form of comics and novelisations. During the "wilderness years", though, following the cancellation of the original regular series in 1989, and its revival in 2005 (it also came back for a television movie/BackdoorPilot in 1996), a number of other spin-offs in the form of original novels, audios and webcasts have picked up the slack, some of them involving characters other than the Doctor. Over time, a number of these have evolved into their own sub-continuities. Notably, by the time Doctor Who came back following the wilderness years, the books and two Web Original stories, Death Comes to Time and Scream of the Shalka (which existed in an Alternate Continuity from each other), had all written out the Time Lords; when the TV series returned, it did the same thing. The Expanded Whoniverse has branched in diverse ways into separate fully licensed and semi-official sub-continuities, divided (in some cases) by the BBC's copyright restrictions, further complicated that no one person, including the BBC, owns all the rights to the monsters and characters which have appeared in the Whoniverse. Sometimes they acknowledge each other, sometimes they ignore each other, Depending on the Writer. Those who expect consistency, or even, in some cases, sanity, will find themselves sorely disappointed.
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