Sim. O produtor da BBC Philip Hinchcliffe se opôs à idéia de "um ator em um terno de borracha ou poliestireno ..."

De uma entrevista com o produtor da BBC Philip Hinchcliffe, responsável por Doctor Who em seus anos de Tom Baker:

On the Daleks and whether he [Hinchcliffe] had a favorite villain:

The Daleks were foisted on me, I didn’t really want the Daleks. If you look at what I did that first season when they didn’t know who was going to take over and they didn’t know who the Doctor was going to be - this was in 1974. They thought, right, let’s go back to famous monsters and we’ll be safe, even if we’ve got Mr Pastry playing the Doctor - don’t you know who Mr Pastry was? He was a guy on a kids’ show but inappropriate really for the role – so they were playing it safe with old monsters.

I wanted to move away from that and take it more towards science fiction, or have more science-fiction stories and not have every story based on it being a variation of Invasion of Earth. I’d read quite widely science fiction and dystopian fantasy. Now they look fantastic, the Cyberman and so on, but in those days you knew it was an actor in a rubber or polystyrene suit, so to just keep trundling out monsters that were actors walking around in funny costumes was not my idea of what you could do with the show. What I did in a way was to deliberately and consciously divide up what I used to call ‘the monstrous element’ in the narratives so that they might not just be a monster, but there had to be something that was monstrous going on, and then something else, so there’d be elements that would add up overall to a kind of spooky and threatening feeling.

( Source )

Quanto a Daleks especificamente, note que eles foram inspirados por pimenta e sal em vez de lixeiras, como relatado em uma retrospectiva da BBC sobre o designer de Dalek Ray Cusick, que faleceu recentemente. A motivação era ter um alienígena que se movesse como um pote de sal deslizando ao longo de uma mesa:

He [Cusick] explained that, in fact, the pepper pot detail came from a lunch with Bill Roberts, the special effects expert who would make the Daleks, when Mr Cusick picked up a pepper pot and moved it around the table, telling him: "It's going to move like that - no visible means."

"Ever since then people say I was inspired by a pepper pot - but it could have been the salt pot I picked up," he said.

( Fonte )

Eu acredito que você está pensando na citação

No bug-eyed monsters

Esta sugestão inicial para evitar alienígenas esquisitos e estranhos foi abordada no docudrama Uma aventura no espaço e no tempo . Eles inicialmente queriam se concentrar em educação e história.

Isso foi abandonado em favor do uso de muitos alienígenas e monstros após o sucesso das primeiras histórias de Dalek.

_{Nota: Para a introdução do full Dalek, comece em 34:36}