Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 101
D o cto r W ho Fans Rewrite Their
Program: Mini-UNIT Minstrels as
Creative Consumers of Media
Doctor V\lho, the longest-running science-fiction program in
the history of television, is not well known in the United States. In
Great Britain, where the program was made between 1963 and 1989,
Doctor V^ho is an institution, a show everyone knows about even if
there are few die-hard fans. Frequent references in print and on
television parallel the Star Trek phenomenon in the United States.
Though there have been critical studies of British and Australian
Doctor Who fans (notably John TuIIoch and Manuel Alvarado's
Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text), little has been done on American
fans' consumption of this British science-fiction children's program.
How and why do American fans engage with Doctor Who?
To answer these questions, I interviewed members of a nowdefunct Doctor Who fan club in Minneapolis, Minnesota, unique
because they engaged with their program by performing an activity
that receives little critical attention: they made their own original
Doctor Wlio-based videos. The video-making fans were all members
of Mini-UNIT, a Twin Cities-based fan club. The name is a
combination of "Mini," for Minnesota, and UNIT, a Doctor Who in
joke referring to the imaginary United Nations Intelligence
Taskforce, where the Doctor was an unpaid scientific advisor during
his exile on Earth. Some Mini-UNIT members formed a small,
cliquey in-group dubbed MUM, short for Mini-UNIT Minstrels. MUM
members, who at MUM's inception consisted of about 20 people
ranging in age from 14 to 40 and from all walks of life, wrote,
produced, acted in, taped, and edited eight video stories between
1986 and 1990. Many MUM members were in high school, some not old
enough to drive, when the group started; some were college or
vocational-school students; some were professionals and others
laborers. The group was split evenly between men and women; all
MUM members were white. Most had a long-standing interest in not
only Doctor Who but also other British science-fiction television: