For the last two years, Doctor Who has experienced a huge swell in its following in the United States. Finally U.S. fans don’t have to comb through YouTube and Wikipedia to catch up.

Given that Doctor Who has a fifty-year history, it’s understandable that new fans feel lost from time-to-time. One of the biggest questions we get on WhoHype is “Where do I start watching Doctor Who?” Our answer has always been to jump in when a new companion jumps in during the reboot era (2005-present). The reason for this is out of necessity a certain amount of backstory pops up to acquaint the new companion with the framework of the universe, so this makes it easy for a new viewer to catch up as well.

Now many people may ask, why not just send people back to the very beginning in 1963? Well, aside from the problem of 50 years of catch up being a daunting task, there’s the more problematic issue of missing material. The BBC in the late 1960s and early 1970s didn’t realize the value of previously run footage and threw out vast quantities of its Doctor Who stock. It wasn’t just limited Doctor Who, in fact another notable loss was the only live performance of the Beatles on U.K. TV. In fairness, no one had a VCR for yet another decade, and the concept of the rerun hadn’t quite caught on. TV was also seen in its early days as vastly inferior to film, and no historical value was placed on the footage.

So, a byproduct of this great disposal is that the footage of the first three Doctors is incomplete. Often parts or even whole story arcs have been deleted. All that remains are still PR images and audio recordings. Every once in a while an old film canister is found in a broom closet of a remote TV station or an attic of a former BBC worker, but mostly there are huge gaps particularly in the second and third Doctors’ available footage. Fans therefore, struggle to catch up with the mythology, particularly American fans who can’t rely on grandparents and parents to pass along their memories since Doctor Who wasn’t widely shown in the U.S.

Well now BBC America is trying to make things easier for U.S. fans by providing catch-up specials and some classic, iconic episodes.

Are you a classic Doctor Who fan? What are your must-see items?