Ailing Doctor Who superfan spends fortune to recreate 97 lost episodes to see complete series before he dies
Sometimes truth is stranger than science fiction.An ailing “Doctor Who” superfan spent a mini-fortune to recreate 97 lost episodes of the series using AI – so he’d be able to watch it all again before he dies.London music producer Ian Levine, 71, sold his royalties to finance his mission to fill the gaps in the archives of the beloved British TV series that he said cost £100,000, or more than $130,000 — even though he knows they will likely never be widely seen.“I’ve come very close to death four times,” said Levine, who is battling nasal cancer and has been confined to a wheelchair since a stroke 11 years ago left him with limited use of his left side.“I thought, ‘I don’t want to die not having seen them,’ so I made it my mission to see them before I die,” he said.
“I made a lot of sacrifices to do this.” Levine — who has previously suffered from bladder cancer, sepsis and single sarcoidosis — estimates he spent £70,000 of his own dough while a group of other Who fans chipped in another £30,000 through a donation campaign.He searched the world as far as Bangladesh and Turkey to find designers up to the job of making moving AI images out of production photos, notes and the actual audio from the stories.
“For every good one I found, I found 20 scammers who wanted you to, ‘send £100 first or I won’t do it and then I’ll send you a clip,'” he told The Post in a phone interview from England.“Nineteen out of 20 times the clips were absolutely laughable, just countless trash… I got ripped off by 19 different people.
It cost me about at least £10,000 in rip-offs.”Since the AI remakes aren’t authorized by the BBC he is now only sharing the videos with the small group of friends and fellow diehards who also contributed to the effort, said Levine, who has been hooked on the show since it debuted in the UK in 1963, and was an unofficial fan adviser to the program in the 80s.The BBC one had a policy of purging film aft...