Storytime again, kids. When Brian was a wee lad of five, he went downstairs to his basement and started fiddling with knobs on an old TV set. Somehow, he called up a fuzz-drenched image from New Jersey public television on the screen. A fuzz-drenched image of squat robots exploding through a wall, shrieking and firing bolts of blue death.
The scene I'm referring to is the bit from Resurrection of the Daleks when the Daleks smash through some cardboard and zap some spacemen who are wearing green outfits that make them look like a cross between the Merry Men and McDonald's workers. Somehow it hypnotized me.
The next day I was cobbling together model Daleks from bits of plastic and upturned styrofoam cups. I had misunderstood the British accents in the show, and I thought they were called "Garlics." Anyway, I loved the stupid things.
I wasn't alone in my feelings, of course. Twenty years earlier, the bizarre fad of "Dalekmania" (not to be confused with that lesser phenomenon, "Beatlemania") had swept Britain, flooding its stores with literally hundreds of Dalek-related items of merchandise. Two Dalek movies had already been made starring Peter Cushing as the Doctor, though he took second billing to his own villains.
The Daleks are, quite possibly, more famous than the Doctor himself. I had a picture of them on the door of my dorm room during college, and I occasionally heard people pass by and remark, "hey, those are those cool robots from PBS! Y'know, they were always killing people on that...that show." The Daleks continue to be spoofed mercilessly by British comedians, a sure sign of their success. Only Darth Vader could possibly be a more imitated, more popular science fiction villain.
And the global love affair with the Daleks is still going strong. You can buy the bloody things if you like and keep them in your living room. And hey, they were featured on Britain's millenium entertainment stamp just last year. If I held my breath for a Klingon stamp I think I'd die...
It's occasionally been pointed out that, whereas British Who fans tend to adore the Daleks, American fans merely find them annoying. Even I was not immune to this syndrome; for a time, I too was embarrassed by the screechy clunkers, and I preferred the show's more "mature" human villains. But I grew out of it.
There is, I think, a uniquely "British" appeal to the Daleks. They are obviously based on the Nazis, and overall the British seem to have a much stronger memory of World War II than the Americans do. This is possibly because the British have a generally deeper appreciation of history than us Yanks (believe me, most Americans my age don't even know what political party Lincoln belonged to, or when he even lived!).
Americans tend to miss the joke where the Daleks are concerned. The creatures' high, shrill voices are, to me anyway, a spoof of shouted German, and their gray-and-black casings are uncannily similar to German uniforms. They're like Panzers on a BBC budget...
Americans also have a tendency to romanticize villains; hell, many of our most famous movies are about cool criminals and endearing murderers (for recent examples, Tarantino's films spring to mind). The Daleks, formidable as they may seem on occasion, are fundamentally pathetic. Mostly blind, whiny, and unimaginative, they are constantly outwitted and outdone by more moral, smarter humans. Sylvester McCoy taunts Davros in Remembrance of the Daleks by calling him, among other things, fundamentally "impotent" (surely a nasty insult on quite a number of levels). The Doctor's remarks apply just as well to the Daleks as they do to Davros himself.
One of the nice, moral things about Doctor Who is that it never allows the villains to appear heroic; it never suggests, like Tarantino does, that murdering random people is a-okay so long as you're a bad-blank mother-blank. The Daleks, though in some ways cool, are always exposed as fundamental wimps and emotional weaklings, as indeed all mass murderers tend to be (and I hope we agree on this point)...
So maybe that's why Americans don't quite get the point. The Daleks aren't supposed to be romantic villains. Far from being all-powerful, they are satires with a veneer of respectability.
The Daleks are also an effective "cautionary" metaphor; they represent the ultimate end of factionalism. Spawned by nuclear conflict, they became the ultimate survivalists, condemning all other groups to destruction so they would be the sole masters of a devastated universe. The Daleks tapped expertly into the fears of the Cold War period, which is why, despite their rather sweet appearances, they were considered terrifying in their day.
In this comparatively quiet day and age, not too many people dwell on World War II or the possibility of nuclear destruction. The once-revolutionary concept behind the Daleks has dated, like their once-revolutionary designs. A couple of my friends have suggested that the Daleks are too archaic to be adapted to suit a modern audience.
But I find that view too needlessly pessimistic. Remembrance of the Daleks took the first step towards modernizing the creatures, drawing them out of the World War II / Cold War symbolism as casting them as more "modern" racists. Plus that episode saw the updating of their design from dumpy robots to grime-encrusted tanks in the form of the Special Weapons Dalek. That's all the proof I need to say that the Doctor's arch-enemies can thrive in the 21st century (in other words, if this damn Doctor Who movie ever gets made, I hope they're the bad guys!).
So I'd like to take this opportunity to uplift a plunger and thank the Daleks for being the only, the ultimate science fiction villains. They're like old pals, aren't they?