Old Doctor Who question: What's 'DARDIS' supposed to stand for?

[JVTruman]

Acronym Finder lists nothing; Google only gives me pages listing it, not what it stands for. 'Daleks and Relative Dimension in Space'?

[Zeke]

ITS SPELLED TARDIS STOOPID HA HA YOU FALE

(I can't make a post in all caps even for comic effect? I gotta fix that. This is my forum and I'll post in all caps if I darn well want to. Nobody ELSE can, but I can.)

[mudshark]

What's 'DARDIS' supposed to stand for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS

The TARDIS is a fictional time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. The name is an acronym of Time And Relative Dimension (or Dimensions) In Space.

[Nate the Great]

I can remember TARDIS only because of an old Kid Radd strip. The starship High Score is based on either TARDIS technology or Pokeball technology (depending on who you ask) so that the inside is bigger than the outside.

Oh, and that's a lousy phrase to acronize (is that a word?). Talk about arbitrary name and acronym! Or is "tardis" very old British slang for a phonebooth or something like that?

[Zeke]

No, shark, I was kidding. Look at JVTruman's post -- he knows what TARDIS stands for. DARDIS must be something mentioned or seen in another episode. (Or maybe a "James R. Kirk" sort of thing?)

[ETA: Yep, according to Google it's the Dalek equivalent of a TARDIS. I'm guessing it doesn't really stand for anything, but if it does, Scooter or SCMoll will know.]

Nate: Yeah, it's hard to parse. I like the "Relative Dimension" part, though. The dimensions of the TARDIS are relative to whether you're inside or outside it.

[Nate the Great]

That reminds me...uh, mudshark, why don't you capitalize? Just wondering...

One of you guys may have to make an informative satirical Doctor Who glossary. TARDIS aside, I really no very little about the vocab.

Oh, and presuming you pronounce it "tar-diss," I was wishing that there was a popular tar-based villian that I could create a horrible pun around. The only one I know of is from Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

Acronize? Acronyming? The second sounds better, doesn't it?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Trekkers Against Recurring Death Immunity Syndrome. It's an activist group protesting bit players who get killed in one episode and then come back in another as someone else.

I'm not actually a member, so I can't cite any specific instances.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Zeke

No, shark, I was kidding. Look at JVTruman's post -- he knows what TARDIS stands for. DARDIS must be something mentioned or seen in another episode. (Or maybe a "James R. Kirk" sort of thing?)

Yeah, I looked at it again after I posted and figured it was probably a gag, but decided it wasn't a big enough deal to go back and delete my entry.

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

That reminds me...uh, mudshark, why don't you capitalize? Just wondering...

It's a secret.


Actually, you know why? It's this:

If I put one of these [ < ] on the front, thus: See?

Capitalizing it messes up the imagery.

[Nate the Great]

Oh, as for James R. Kirk, I chalk that up to it being a parallel universe, the one caused by Q being slammed through the dimensional boundaries by Trelane. See Q-Squared for details. Suffice to say that Where No Man Has Gone before is portrayed as being in an alternate universe from the rest of Trek.

[Scooter]

DARDIS was used in the third Dalek serial, "The Chase" (1965), to refer to the Dalek time machines. (This is the first time we see directly that the Daleks have developed the capacity for time travel, though some capacity for this might be implied from the earlier "Dalek Invasion of Earth," which seems to take place in a different time frame from the original Dalek episode on their home planet of Skaro.)

But DARDIS was of course only a production shorthand and I'll bet the producers figured to stood for exactly what JVTruman thought it did.

"The Chase" btw has some very cool trivia. It includes a clip of the Beatles from Top of the Pops (which one of the characters refers to as "classical music"); this is the only clip of the Beatles from Top of the Pops to survive, which is a double escape considering how much of Doctor Who from this period was destroyed.

It also features a scene on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, complete with a yahoo hillbilly American. I think -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that this is the only time Doctor Who presents itself as being in the US until this year's "Daleks in Manhattan", 42 years later (I wonder if that episode will reference this scene in "The Chase"?) "The Two Doctors" was scheduled to go on location in New Orleans, but ended up in Seville. And the only two "American" regulars, Peri and Jack, were encountered in Lanzarote and London.

DARDIS parallels another joking acronym which got a lot more mileage: in "The War Games" the time-travel cabinets, which used Time Lord technology, were referred to as SIDRATs in the production notes, and my recollection is that the word actually made it into the hastily written scripts for the episodes, though other sources say no. The writer Malcolm Hulke later decided that SIDRAT stands for "Space and Inter-Dimensional Robot All-purpose Transporter"!

[PointyHairedJedi]

Relatedly, the computer in Joe 90 was called BIGRAT. As an even more aside, the bad guys in Joe 90 never really stood a chance, given that the protagonists worked for an organisation called WIN.