With Daleks, Cybermen and Tardi (I assume that’s what a whole shelf of the trusty old Police Box should be referred to as) dominating the toy shop shelves, it’s great to see a very different form of merchandise go on sale.

This neat little spin-off is the collected form of the 3-4 minute long cartoon episodes that featured in the CBBC show Totally Doctor Who which accompanied the last series of the resurrected sci-fi classic.

Acting as an extended series of adventures for the Doctor and his companion Martha, we are whisked off to many weird and wonderful worlds, encountering many of the shows trademark inventive yet humanised alien creatures along the way from oil pirates in the future (if think you recognize Captain Kaliko’s voice, that’d be Liza Tarbuck) to lizard gun-runners and robotic prison guards and many more in between.

The show’s leads David Tennant and Freema Agyeman are ably supported by the likes of the menacing Anthony Head (who fans may recall as being the headmaster in last year’s superb ‘School Reunion’). Head portrays this serial’s bad guy Balthazar, who is hell bent on locating the legendary spacecraft The Infinite and using its powers to destroy the Earth and pretty much anything else in his path. The Doc and Martha are tasked with beating him to a series of data chip and each of these thirteen episodes acts as a mini race to find one such disc and progress a step nearer their goal.

The animation in these stories is extremely well done and compliments the live action series nicely, the voices are perfect and often used so well you forget it’s actually a cartoon. The length of the main feature may be a tad short at 45 minutes, but this actually adds to the tense storyline and keeps the story flowing. A must have for anyone who was a fan of the CCBC show and for the ever-growing number of fans young and old who can’t wait until the much anticipated Christmas special hits our screens.

Released on Monday 5th November 2007 by BBC Worldwide.