K9, the beloved robotic dog Doctor Who companion, is heading to the big screen in his own feature film! The project, titled K9 Timequake, was announced today on K9’s official Facebook page. The K9 Timequake feature film will continue K9’s adventures from the recent television series, bringing K9 face to face with the classic Doctor Who villain, Omega!
K9 (also referred to as K-9), made his first appearance in the 1977 Doctor Who serial adventure “The Invisible Enemy”. Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor and his then-companion, Louise Jameson’s Leela, first meet the friendly robotic dog on a human colony on the outer edge of the solar system. Constructed by a scientist to replace the dog he had to leave on Earth, K9 winds up joining the Doctor and Leela for their adventures across space and time.
Created by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, K9 has has had an interesting fictional trajectory across a variety of different television series. In 1981, a pilot was developed for a Doctor Who spinoff television series, K-9 and Company that paired K9 with another popular Who companion, the late Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith. Although the series did not move forward, K9 and Smith were paired together for a 2006 Doctor Who episode, “School Reunion”. He then appeared semi-regularly on the spinoff series, The Sarah Jane Adventures before getting his own Australian kids television series, K-9, in 2009.
Although the K-9 series was, for legal reasons, unable to make explicit references to other Doctor Who characters the K9 Timequake film will bring back Omega. An early Time Lord, Omega was a hero of Gallifreyean history who, after time living in an anti-matter universe, lost his physical form and found his mind twisted to evil.
K9 Timequake will hit cinemas in the United Kingdom in 2017. Whether or not the film receives domestic distribution theatrically remains to be seen.
