Doctor Who features a space and time machine that is stuck looking like a 1960s British police box purely because the BBC was too cheap to build a new prop.

A closer look

Doctor Who features a space and time machine that is stuck looking like a 1960s British police box purely because the BBC was too cheap to build a new prop. The lore of the show explains that the TARDIS has a broken chameleon circuit, meaning it cannot disguise itself to blend into its surroundings like it was designed to do. In reality, the showrunners just realized that keeping the same big blue wooden box for every single episode saved them a massive amount of the set design budget. Millions of devoted sci-fi fans have spent over half a century romanticizing a broken piece of fictional technology, writing endless fan fiction about a magical phone booth. The entire foundational aesthetic of Britain's longest-running science fiction export is built solely upon the time-honored corporate tradition of cutting corners and refusing to allocate enough funding to the art department