Cultural Influence
In 1990, an unspecified K-9 unit appeared with Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace in an episode of the children's education programme Search Out Science entitled Search Out Space, which was included as an extra on the release of the Doctor Who story Survival by the BBC. Another unspecified K-9 unit also appeared in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. In the 1998 computer game Fallout 2, the Navarro base has a damaged robot dog known as K-9, which uses similar speech mannerisms to the Infobox Doctor Who character. If repaired, the cyberdog is willing to join the character's party as a companion. In the 1999 television series Queer as Folk (written by future Doctor Who executive producer Russell T Davies), a K-9 model is given to the character Vince as a birthday present. The prop used was an original, operated — as occasionally in Doctor Who — by visual effects assistant Mat Irvine. In the second series of I'm Alan Partridge (2002), the character of Alan Partridge recalls how his purchase of the rights to K-9 assisted in him mentally breaking down and driving to Dundee in his bare feet while gorging on Toblerone. In the South Park episode "Go God Go XII" (2006), Eric Cartman, being trapped in the year 2546, has acquired a robot dog called "K-10", a parody of K-9. Due to timeline alterations, he is replaced by robot cat "Kit-9" and later robot bird, "Cocka-3". K-9 appeared on a special Doctor Who-themed edition of The Weakest Link in 2007, but was voted out unanimously at the end of the first round, despite answering his question correctly. Anne Robinson (whom K-9 addressed as "Mistress") said "I'm so sorry" before declaring him the weakest link.
The appearance of K-9 is heavily borrowed in the Square Enix game, Secret of Evermore. The main character is accompanied by a dog whose form changes based on the timeline it appears in. In one of the final areas of the game, the player enters a futuristic world, and the dog takes the form of a K-9 lookalike, down to its ability to fire lasers from its mouth.
Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center have dubbed two intelligent mobile robots designed to explore the surface of Mars "K-9" and "Gromit". NASA's K-9 is named after both Doctor Who's K-9 and Marvin the Martian's pet dog, K-9.
Several individuals have built their own personal K-9 robots, ranging from radio controlled units like that used on the show to several levels of computerised autonomy.
On the BBC Glow site, typing the Konami code will make a photo of K-9 appear. This photo was taken during his cameo on the BBC children's show Blue Peter.
Read more about this topic: K-9 (Doctor Who)
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