It has to be admitted that, for a site which has been bumbling around for almost 23 years, there’s a certain degree of obsession with assembling a collection of nearly 330,000 images and all of the accumulated rules and thoughts that go along with it.
If there’s one bugaboo which drives the THT Brain Trust into apoplexy it’s the deliberate use of a ‘mirrored’ image. Sometimes it’s done sloppily and the produced image is pushed out regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Other times, and we suspect this is more often the case, it’s the regrettable solution to a production problem that simply couldn’t be solved otherwise. Minimize the damage and move on is hopefully the working credo.
Then there are times, and we see this happen most often in magazines, where a mirrored image is deliberately produced for selfish reasons. Try looking for this when aimlessly paging through a bound, print publication, most faces in images point towards the middle binding in an attempt to keep the reader engaged. The theory being looking out causes the viewer to look away. Tour Honchos see this all too often, even in publications like DWM which you would assume would know better, for our liking and attempt to root it out before any content is added to the Tour.
All of which brings us to Castrovalva which has undergone the HD Re-classic-ation treatment. Whereas ‘ol Tom Baker had a reasonably symmetrical face and a mirrored image juuuuust might pass muster, Peter Davison most certainly does not. That alone should be enough of a dead giveaway to doom such images, but we prefer to reserve our ire for the backwards question mark that any such image for Baker, Davison, Colin Baker, and especially for Sylvester McCoy (that sweater!) would produce.
That reversed image of Davison is from the Zero Room in episode 1 of Castrovalva, the new caps though are anything but zero. We think they’re quite nice actually.