Picture the Doctor Who that we know today. It is, in many aspects, true to the original series – the creatures look the same, the Doctor has the same background and the enemies are roughly the same. While certain areas of Doctor Who have been modernized, it is till the same program that our parents and grandparents grew up watching.

However, if the proposed reboot of Doctor Who from the early 1990s had gone into effect, that would not have been the case at all. In fact, virtually nothing would have been the same, aside from the names and some of the enemy/friend dynamics.

In this reboot, the Master would have been the ruler of Gallifrey, and the Doctor’s half brother. The Daleks? Well, those would be tools of the Master, and have legs like spiders. Naturally, this causes the Doctor to flee Gallifrey, as he goes out on his adventures attempting to locate his father. That father? Well, he was known as Blackbeard the pirate. Yeah…

The details only get worse. Cybermen would have been renamed Cybs, because “Cybermen” was four letters too long. Instead of emotionless beings set on upgrading the universe, they would have been obnoxiously vain. Oh, and they would have a cyborg dog with them. Essentially, this Doctor Who reboot would have created the cybernetic Paris Hilton.

Since they would have destroyed virtually everything else in this proposed Doctor Who reboot, what about the Doctor himself? Well, this incarnation sounds as though he would have been quite excellent, wearing a duster, smoking cigars and having a stubbly beard. Basically, the Doctor would have turned into the stereotypical old western gunslinger. The concept sounds to me like it would not have been that bad.

However, the Doctor as a gunslinger would have been about the only positive from this ridiculous reboot idea. The proposed reboot of Doctor Who would have essentially taken everything that was awful about 1990s television and put it into one program. The only things that would have been missing would be obnoxious grunge kids, Hanson, and Zack Morris’ cell phone. Then, all the signs of the apocalypse would likely have been complete, and the Four Horsemen would have ridden off with the TARDIS, as Doctor Who would live on only in reruns.

Fortunately for us, this proposed reboot never happened. Maybe the BBC just did not feel that the time was right to bring back Doctor Who, or they realized that these ideas would truly be the death of the show. At least now, for all of the complaints that people may have about the directions that Doctor Who has taken, we do not have cybernetic Paris Hiltons roaming around the universe. Perspective is important.