Take Matt's design, give them a similar voice to the Cyber Controller in Tomb of the Cybermen, and watch as grown adults, never mind the kids hide behind the sofa!!
Done right, the Cybermen really are the stuff of nightmares, all we have seen in the new series is a weird mix of either pathetic imitations (the Cybus design) or far too overpowered, yet still not scary (Nightmare in Silver & beyond) To this day, Tomb of the Cybermen is beyond creepy and eerie, when it was rediscovered and released on VHS, me who wa 14 and my brother who was about 7 or 8 watched it, and it spooked me, and gave him nightmares for a month. I believe that Neil Gaiman was not very happy with the redesign for Nightmare and beyond, as he imagined something that Matt Savage's design fits to a tee, the Tomb era Cybes done on a 21st century budget. I love the speed thing, even though it's not been used since Nightmare, but the nanobots and the "they had to blow up an entire galaxy to stop the cybermen" stuff is overpowering them far too much, end of the day, they are a middle weight villain, and only really a threat in human controlled space, they aren't the Daleks. And of course, the internal logic of the show suffers because they overpowered them so much!
In Nightmare, theres a gap in the sky - the Cybermen being such a threat a whole galaxy was destroyed - when Missy upgraded every corpse on Earth, the thing that was incredibly noticeable was that the earth did not get blown up to stop them, and indeed, in Capaldi's second season, the Earth was again, incredibly not waging an endless war against the cybermen, yet in Nightmare we are told that if just the tiniest bit of cyber technology survives, new cybermen will be created as the tech is crawling with nanobots.
The only good thing about the New Series mark II Cybes is the Cybus stupidity is no longer in existence, and the MII Cybes are mostly human beneath the armour - why would you take a human, cut the brain out, stick it into a metal suit, then basically wipe out the brain and install the "Cyberman operating system" why not just build robots and kill humans completely
iirc, RTD hates the Cybermen, so just phoned in a crappy script and ideas - he didn't want them, but knew the audience would be expecting them, being one of the iconic and most hoped for Monsters, up with the Daleks. Moffat likes the Cybermen, thus we got better scripts in his era. The Ipod Dalek abomination and the all the new series Cyber Designs make it clear that the Showrunner should be paying far more attention to the design side of things!
I don't know how credible it is, but there have always been very strong rumours that by the time The Moff realised just how bloody awful the Ipod Daleks looked, it was too late to change things, and the budget would not have allowed it, even if there had been time, which makes you wonder wtf he was doing, did he really not pay any attention at all? It is more likely he has simply tried to distance himself from the whole affair, you can see how well the Ipod Daleks were received by the casual audience as well as the fans, given they have only ever appeared since, in crowd scenes with plenty of Bronze Daleks
If RTD hadn't been so arrogant, and despite hating the Cybes, deciding to do an "origin story" he could have simply adapted the Big Finish Audio "Spare Parts" which is set on Mondas at the birth of the Cybermen - so 99% of the Mondans are still Human, but having realised that Mondas in its hurtling through space (having been knocked out of its parallel orbit with the earth by the arrival of the moon) and is heading smack bang for some sort of deep space phenomena that will tear the planet to pieces, the "Committee" design a giant engine that will stop the Planet, and send it back home towards the Sol system, the problem is, the surface of Mondas having no atmosphere is totally hostile to human life. But, the science of Cybernetics has been developing very fast, the surviving population deep beneath the surface are slowly dying, but cybernetics are helping, some people wear what we would recognise as a Cyberman's chest unit (tenth planet style) and a Doctor, Doctorman Allan has suggested a radical surgery she has designed to perform on volunteers that would enable them to work on the surface. The problem is, the Volunteers wake up after Surgery, or as we now know it Cyber Conversion and go completely batpoo crazy, both the physical pain of something so horrific being done to their bodies, and the mental, emotional and spiritual pain is too much for anyone to handle, then the Doctorman experiments with removing the volunteers emotions... and the rest is history!
Another thing I love in Spare Parts is just how chilling and spooky the actual process of Cyber Conversion is - unlike the new series which of course has the sound of a drill or something activating them screaming, SP just has this awful throbbing buzzing noise, and despite "showing" less than the new series (if that makes sense given SP is an audio) it is far creepier somehow.
For fun, a couple of videos using clips from Spare Parts, the first one is just toy figures but still cool, I suspect that some of the Animated videos have been done by new series fans who dip into the BF Audio's but not classic who TV, as they are using later cybes or their own design based on Invasion and beyond designs rather than the cloth masked 10th Planet ones, like the first video which are of course the correct ones.
