Reality Control News Posted by John Hoare on 4th September 2007, 22:18 I love finding weird edits in Red Dwarf – stuff that’s always been there, and yet you only notice on your 100th viewing. Scroll down to the bottom of this article for an example. If this kinda thing bores the arse off you, I suggest you click away now. Well, thanks go to Will Tudor, who’s pointed out to us another of these delicious treats – one we’ve never seen before. In The Inquisitor, at 5:03, just after Rimmer’s “A simple yes would have sufficed”, look over his left shoulder (his right on the actual picture, obviously – in other words, the direction Rimmer is looking), to the piece of machinery. You’ll see it shift to the left! And the explanation? Well, it looks like a repair to paint out a boom shadow, and this was confirmed by a retired VT editor we know: “[It’s] a repair… we did quite a bit of this, mainly ‘painting out’ booms and odd bits of technical equipment. Pre DVE [Digital Video Editing] it was difficult to do; you had to find an identical shot without the intrusion and wipe in (with a soft edge) enough new picture to hide it.” I must admit, I didn’t even know they did things like that back in the early 90s – I thought fiddling about fixing boom shadows only came about when shows started being edited digitally. Fascinating stuff. Incidentally, the guy we spoke to runs the site www.vtoldboys.com. I highly recommend a visit – it’s one of the most interesting sites I’ve ever read. Especially the Confessions section…
See also those bluescreened-on boxes in the foreground at the end of Marooned! Anyway, this is superb. And it’s a great repair, too – just a bit of split screen at the key moment, taken from a few frames earlier. Quite lovely in its analogue way. Now I might be wrong about this, but this scene may have been one that was done as part of the end-of-series re-shoots (replacing the shovel stuff). Didn’t you guys used to have an article on the Inquisitor script…that one could find without an error message coming up? :-)
Agreed – it’s beautifully done. I’d *never* have noticed it! Anyway, yeah, that script article was pulled very hastily, as a precaution for, erm, something or other. Ian’s got the script – I’ll get him to check when he gets back online…
Demons and Angels. As High cat picks up the grenade, he turns, speaks, and then back to a long shot, he then speaks again, but with no sound. What does he say? I’ve only seen this on the original television edit, and not on the later vhs edits. Was this cut tighter to remove this? I agree not a visual effect removal, but when you go to finer detail to remove and repair, why was this left in? I’ve wondered for years, and I’m sure it’s been delt with already, so excuse me if it has!
I always wondered that about too! I always thought it looked like Danny was shouting in pain through burning his foot, as we know he got burned in this scene – but the deleted scenes show that it’s just Danny saying his “What is this?” line. Clearly, during editing, they retimed the dialogue, to go with the wide shot – and just hoped we wouldn’t notice Danny speaking in the close-up…
