Unem

Most predictable headline ever. Yes folks, it’s that time of year again – our first glimpse of those exquisitely divine pieces of art – the Red Dwarf DVD menus! In his marvellous news article, Andrew Ellard reveals that the introduction will be composed of shots of Starbug flying about. Hopefully, these will be the actual model shots from Series III and IV, rather than any CGI shite – the article does say that the sequence is edited together from existing footage. After Starbug lands, we are taken by a skutter down to the Science Room (as I like to call it).

Here, we get the main menu, populated with such items as Kryten’s bow-tie, Lister’s milkshake, Cat’s ear-muffs and some red wine in a large conical flask. Once again, the menu will feature Holly dialogue, hopefully jigged about to form an amusing monologue, as per the Series II menus. By clicking ‘Episode Selection’, you’re taken to some lockers, which are remeniscent of the ones seen in Series VII. Thankfully, the menu features the episode titles this time around – people who aren’t mega fans of the series may have been confused by just seeing numbers on the Series I and II DVDs. The chapter menu is composed of moving polaroids of the scenes in question, which seems jolly lovely. Not too sure about the childish scrawl, probably intended to be Lister’s, but never mind. The first four chapters of Backwards will be called ‘Wilma Flintstone’, ‘htraE’, ‘Novelty Acts’ and ‘Searching’. Hooray!

For the second disc, the news story implies that Series III will continue to have one main extra listed on its own, with the rest all on one menu. This seems a bit daft to us – why not just have them all together? Oh well. Ellard invites us to guess which icon is for each extra, but it’s quite hard to tell. The Scrabble letters are an anagram of ‘Mel Bibby’, so that’s fairly straight-forward. Based on the Series I and II discs, the guitar will be the Isolated Music Cues and the vid-screen will be the trailer. The Food featurette will probably be the mound of mashed potato, although it could equally be the dog food. I hope the the traffic cone is the Dimension Jump footage – the drunken antics of that weekend fit in well. Any thoughts? Add them below!

We also learn from the news article that the extras will have subtitles. This is excellent, obviously. I wonder how they’ll deal with the bleeps in the Smeg Ups? It also explains why the menus are so similar for each two-series block – it’s a budgetary thing. Bah. Still, Deluxe Digital have done another grand job, and this is yet another reason why this set of DVDs will be the best ever produced for a TV show.