That Time James Cameron Was ‘Inspired’ By Classic Who

Let’s be frank, Doctor Who is a show that is unafraid to poach ideas from other sources. The series always finds a way to put it’s own spin on things, but it has been going for nearly 60 years and sometimes the idea well can run a little dry. Planet of Evil’s aesthetic is heavily inspired by Forbidden Planet, The Brain of Morbius is Frankenstein in space and, to really hammer home this point, there’s an episode just straight up called A Christmas Carol. But, what if I was to tell you that there is a film franchise that so clearly took inspiration, as least in part, from a classic Doctor Who episode and has never once given credit for it? Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the evidence.

The episode in question is ‘The War Machines’, a First Doctor story from 1966. To give a brief overview of the plot, the Doctor and his companion Dodo land in 1960s London to see the newly constructed Post Office tower, from which the Doctor senses an evil presence. Upon investigating the tower the Doctor finds that the world’s most advanced computer is situated at the top of the tower and nearing completion. This computer, W.O.T.A.N. which stands for Will Operating Thought ANalogue, will soon be linked up to computers all around the world and act as a central intelligence with, and I quote, ‘peaceful and military implications’.

Now, what is the root cause of all the problems in the Terminator Franchise? Skynet, a central intelligence formed across a network of computers that has control over military applications. Also, before coming fully online, both W.O.T.A.N. and Skynet take a good hard look at humanity and decide that we’re just no good. Admittedly they have different resolutions to that problem. W.O.T.A.N. decides to just take over, hypnotising people into a drone workforce that it can put to some use before it decides whether or not to wipe out whoever is left. Skynet on the other hand immediately goes for the nuclear option and just wipes out as many people as it can before designing infiltration units to finish the job. That being said, if the ‘The War Machines’ was written today I fully expect the whole nuke humanity plot would have been apart of W.O.T.A.N’s plans. It’s become such a prevalent idea in science fiction, especially in machine uprising stories.

But wait, before you all rush to your keyboards I know exactly what you’re about to type. If we’re talking about common ideas in science fiction, then surely the notion of a central computer taking over the world is itself fairly common place. There must be thousands of iterations of this story out there, just because Doctor Who and The Terminator share it doesn’t mean one got it from the other. True, on that I’ll concede your point, but there’s something else that’s always struck me as familiar between these two stories. Let’s move to exhibits B, C and D.

Above is one of the titular War Machines. Now stop laughing for a minute and look at this thing, yes it’s a cheap box with pipe cleaners for arms, but imagine this made with a budget and scaled up to huge proportions.

Something like this, this is from the opening of Terminator 2 and it’s a huge boxy tank rolling around on caterpillar tracks and shooting at people. That’s what the War Machines are! Need more?

Here’s the prototype of said tank from Terminator 3. Yes, it’s got a bit more of a sleek design, but if I imagine that original War Machine design updated and remade in the 2000s, this is exactly what I end up with. (Also yes I know Mr. Cameron has nothing to do with T3, but this is all based off of his design from T2 so the point still stands!)

Tell me I’m not the only one seeing this and, no, this not just because I’m still upset about James Cameron continuing to make Avatar films when I’ve heard nothing about an Alita sequel. Forget about the blue cat people re-enacting Pocahontas James and give me more Alita! Sorry, I feel like I went on a tangent there, but what do you think? Was the Terminator inspired by Classic Who? Is this all just a coincidence born of similar ideas floating around science fiction? Did the Doctor Who creative team from the 60s travel into the future and see the Terminator before travelling back to make this? You decide!

I’m Chris Joynson, aka Neverarguewithafish, I’m a writer and blogger and if you want to chat with me you can find me on twitter @ChrisGJoynson. See you out there in the vortex.