More than half a century on, the lost Second Doctor story The Macra Terror is coming back to our screens – bigger, bolder and scarier than ever.

Feature by PAUL KIRKLEY

The colony at night, as realised by artist Graham Bleathman.

The pincers of the new-look Macra.

Illustrating some of the Doctor’s many arm gestures.

The existence, or otherwise, of the Macra has been a subject of heated debate for more than 50 years now.

The inhabitants of the colony – a human recreational settlement on an unnamed planet far from Earth – were conditioned to believe these giant parasitic crustaceans were a myth, until events dramatically proved otherwise.

Then the Macra vanished without trace again when their sole TV appearance was junked by the BBC – only to make an unexpected return to Saturdaynight telly some four decades later, lurking in the fumes beneath the streets of New New York in the 2007 episode Gridlock. And now, 52 years after their debut on BBC1, the Macra are back again. Though possibly not quite the Macra you were expecting…

Right: An animation element by Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor.

“It’s not a reconstruction of the original – it’s a new production of that story,” says director Charles Norton, whose 21st-century take on The Macra Terror – matching new animation to the original 1967 soundtrack – comes to DVD, Blu-ray and digital download this month. “The existing set designs and things like that are really more of a starting point than an end destination.”

“We decided not to refer to the original shooting script, but rather cast a fresh eye over the performances in the audio,” adds Adrian Salmon, the artist (and regular Doctor Who Magazine contributor) who storyboarded the production.

Having very little in the way of surviving footage from the original serial was, says Adrian, “both liberating and challenging. We had the telesnaps [off - air photographs] to refer to, which were a help up to a point. But essentially it was a case of sitting down with the audio jacked up to full decibel and trying to figure out what was happening.”

Cards on the table: The Macra Terror has never been mourned as one of the great lost classics of Doctor Who (in DWM’s 50th anniversary poll, readers ranked it 150th out of 241 stories). But is it possible that, like 1967-68’s The Enemy of the World – whose reputation enjoyed a dramatic uplift when it was recovered in 2013 – the serial is ripe for reassessment?