Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Daleks Foil Trading Card — Card 3 of 6 🛸

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🛸 DALEKS! — the 1994 Doctor Who Foil Card About the Man Who Invented Them

The man who created Doctor Who did not want monsters. Sydney Newman wanted the new BBC series to avoid "bug-eyed monsters," and the writer handed its second story, a radio comedy man named Terry Nation, had already turned the job down once. He took it only after his work for comedian Tony Hancock ended and he found himself out of work with a family to support. What he delivered was the Daleks, and the show's audience grew by half. This foil card from Cornerstone Communications' 1994 Doctor Who cards, marked FOIL 3 and licensed by BBC Enterprises, tells Nation's story. New old stock.

🃏 The Card

On the front, a green-tinted photograph shows four Daleks in a control room, set on a swirling green marbled border, with DALEKS! in big cream letters across the bottom, the CCI logo at top right and the Doctor Who diamond logo at bottom right. On the back, a panel headed CREATOR OF THE DALEKS sits over a faded background image, with a boxed FOIL 3 running up the side. The fine print reads: "© 1994, Cornerstone Communications, Inc. Doctor Who Diamond Logo © BBC, 1973. Licensed by BBC Enterprises. Doctor Who is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under license. Daleks & Davros © Terry Nation, 1994."

Cornerstone Communications published Doctor Who trading cards from 1994 to 1996. Series 1, in 1994, ran to 110 base cards, and alongside it came a six-card foil set split between the Daleks and the Cybermen. This is the Dalek foil devoted to their creator.

📜 What the Back Tells You

The back gives Nation's life in brief: a comedy writer turned Dalek creator, a reluctant recruit whose first Dalek serial began under the working title "The Mutants," the author of ten and a half Doctor Who adventures with Daleks in eight of them, and the man who finally gave the Daleks a maker of their own — Davros, introduced in "Genesis of the Daleks" and, the card says, his favorite of all his Doctor Who creations.

👤 Terry Nation

Terry Nation was born in Cardiff on 8 August 1930. He started out writing radio comedy at Associated London Scripts, on material for comedians such as Terry Scott and Eric Sykes, and in 1962 he was commissioned to write for Tony Hancock, touring as Hancock's chief writer in 1963. When script editor David Whitaker first offered him work on the new BBC science fiction programme, Nation declined. Unemployed not long after, he contacted Whitaker and accepted.

Nation held the copyright to the Daleks, which is why the fine print on this card credits the Daleks and Davros to him rather than to the BBC. He returned to them again and again, and "Genesis of the Daleks" in 1975, which producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks steered toward the Daleks' origins, gave them Davros. He also created Blake's 7, which ran from 1978 to 1981. He died in Los Angeles on 9 March 1997, aged 66.

🏭 The Designer, the Pepper Pot and the Sink Plunger

Nation wrote the Daleks; BBC staff designer Raymond Cusick gave them their shape. The assignment went to Cusick only because the designer first put on the job, future film director Ridley Scott, had a scheduling conflict. The story goes that Cusick was given about an hour to come up with a design and sketched it from a pepper pot on the table in front of him, though other accounts say he based it on a man seated in a chair and used the pepper pot only to show how it would move. One of the manipulator arms was a sink plunger. Cusick was a salaried BBC employee, so the Daleks brought him no royalties; when he left Doctor Who in 1966, the BBC recognized his work with an ex-gratia payment of around £100.

🧪 A Name From an Encyclopedia That Never Existed

Where did the word Dalek come from? For years Nation told journalists he had seen it on the spine of an encyclopedia volume running from DAL to LEK. No such book was ever found, and in 1973 he admitted he had made the story up to satisfy the reporters who kept asking. The inspirations he did describe were stranger and darker: a dance troupe on television whose long skirts made them seem to glide across the stage, and the memory of the Nazis. The Daleks' xenophobia, staccato voices and fixation on genetic purity were drawn from Nazi ideology.

📺 The Serial That Changed Doctor Who

"The Daleks" went out in seven episodes from 21 December 1963 to 1 February 1964. Newman's objection did not survive the ratings: the show's overall audience grew by 50 percent after the final episode, and Britain went through a craze remembered as Dalekmania. In 1965 the story was remade for cinemas as "Dr. Who and the Daleks," with Peter Cushing as the Doctor. The Daleks changed Doctor Who's fortunes.

📦 Condition

New old stock, shown front and back in the photographs.

🎁 Good For

A Doctor Who or Dalek collection, a Cornerstone set builder working on the foils, a Blake's 7 fan, or a small frame beside a Dalek figure.

❓ Questions People Ask

What set is this card from?
Cornerstone's first Doctor Who series, issued in 1994; the back is marked FOIL 3.

Who is the card about?
Terry Nation, the writer who created the Daleks.

Is it a licensed card?
Yes. The fine print names BBC Enterprises as licensor.

When did the Daleks first appear?
In the serial "The Daleks," which began on BBC television just before Christmas 1963.

Who designed the Daleks?
BBC designer Raymond Cusick.