Video DwarfCast #2 – TOS Trailer Revisited Features Posted by Ian Symes on 16th October 2023, 09:37 Cast your mind back to the year 2000. Series VIII is only a year old, the inevitable Red Dwarf Movie is just around the corner, and an increasing number of people now have the ability to connect their computers to their phone lines, in order to receive midi approximations of popular songs, animated “under construction” signs and slow-to-load-but-very-exciting Macromedia Flash graphics. The conditions were just right for reddwarf.co.uk to begin its two-decade-long voyage of weekly updates, bringing us such features as Doug Naylor’s regular blog, updates on the new GNP series Weird City and of course the animated remake of Asso: Spanish Detective. Or at least that was the future promised by the interactive trailer that was published ahead of TOS’s big relaunch of November 2000. With the current state of the official site, coupled with the fact that Flash itself has now passed on, we assumed that this small slice of Dwarf history had been consigned to the burning bin fire of lost media. But thankfully, during the process of building our unofficial archive, we uncovered the dusty swf file. You can access it here (providing you have a Flash emulator), or if you prefer to consume your important historical documents with a side order of sarcastic nerds making snide comments, here’s your guided tour:
Amazing! I never knew this was even a thing until today. What a strange relic of its time. A time when they promoted Red Dwarf’s online presence with promises of animated versions of barely related radio sketches and nude pictures of the cast. Feels like a different planet. My biggest impressions are: – The Cat’s Challenge was actually pretty funny, uncomfortable uncertainties about image permissions aside. – If they were determined to include the embarrassing-at-best naked pictures bit, it would have been better to promise nude pictures of Holly. Then not only would it have been a funnier and less offensive joke, but it would have been a promise they could have actually kept. (Kryten would have worked too, but they probably would have used grabs of his stupid flesh casing from Krytie TV, so not the best option.) – Them using an image of Rimmer on the cusp of being gang-raped as a visual metaphor for the “rush” on the soon to be relaunched Red Dwarf website (whether they intended it or not) is one of the most deranged things I’ve ever seen in relation to this franchise.
Them using an image of Rimmer on the cusp of being gang-raped as a visual metaphor for the “rush” on the soon to be relaunched Red Dwarf website (whether they intended it or not) is one of the most deranged things I’ve ever seen in relation to this franchise. Interesting that in that image, he appears to be speaking via his nose.
I remember this trailer! Well, I remember its existence, I don’t remember much that was in it. I actually misremembered it as having more sections of autoplaying animation, rather than mostly being something to manually step through. This is probably one of very few SF/F-related publications that thought they’d get a Stan Lee interview and ultimately didn’t get one. Yeah, my brain also went “woo-oo!” when I saw “D-Tales”. I was not expecting this to contain a reference to The Shoe People. On the site’s original navigation menu: IIRC didn’t the first Flash version have loads of blank placeholder deck numbers? And then at some point it was updated, still with a Flash version (with the mouseover effects), but with a more reasonable number of site sections?
This was intriguing. I’d never seen this before and it’s a really interesting snapshot of the era, both Red Dwarf specifically (with the very VIII take on all the characters) and the culture more widely. I think the (ultimately aborted) attempt to turn the site into a more general hub for geek culture is really interesting – this was a time when stuff like Aintitcool was at its peak, so maybe the thinking was to try and build a similar sort of audience with a slightly more UK/sci-fi focus? I also think we’ll all probably re-evaluate Can Of Worms now that we know that an alternative was a story where the Polymorph steals someone’s inhibitions and they flash it to death.
This is probably one of very few SF/F-related publications that thought they’d get a Stan Lee interview and ultimately didn’t get one. Having him billed as the creator of Spider-Man gave me an involuntary reaction similar to the credit for Bob Kane as creator of Batman.
The sound effect for whenever you click on the ‘next’ button has awoken a memory and I’m pretty sure it also appears on the free CD-ROM given away with the first issue of Robot Wars Magazine
This was the version of the site that was online when I first got the internet, which was definitely 2000, so this has managed to narrow that down to a few weeks at the end of the year. Flash not being supported on browsers these days is fucking awful. It makes a whole chunk of old pages completely unusable. I don’t understand the thinking. Weird city – don’t even remember that. Polymorph shoot em up. I remember being excited by that but deep down I knew it wasn’t going to quite meet expectations. I never had a Matrix screensaver. I always used Johnny Castaway. I can’t believe how much stuff was promised on this. Funnily enough I was thinking about the promise of Chloe’s nude photoshoot the other week, meant to bring it up here actually. As a teenage boy, obviously I was very disappointed that the eventual one turned out to be less nude than hoped for. I’m sure there was something after the actual photoshoot where someone wrote in and complained and the official response was that the photos we got were hot enough or something. Lovely stuff as ever. Especially Ed’s face at the end, that never fails to amuse me.
I don’t remember this era, because it fell during the period of my teens when I only used the internet for illegal music downloads, online games and, of course, the all-time No. 1. I do remember that ‘Red Dwarf Online’ banner from more innocent times when we first got the internet, but I was more League of Gents fixated at that point. I remember clicking on one fan site page titled ‘Reece’s Strip,’ hoping for a comic, then quickly exited in gay panic when I realised I was slowly downloading lo-res screencaps of Benjamin on Nude Day. Still, at least he committed, Chloë!
Flash not being supported on browsers these days is fucking awful. It makes a whole chunk of old pages completely unusable. I don’t understand the thinking. It’s annoying but sadly required as Flash ended up being a massive security hole, especially once Adobe discontinued it.
What a brilliant little curio you’ve unearthed. I must have only clicked through this once or twice at the time but checked to see whether the site had launched very frequently, as I recognised that Doug image straight away but don’t remember any of the rest of this at all. I had sheep.exe. There was a naughty dog one too that dug holes to bury bones, left pawprints on the desktop etc.
I also wanted to mention the screensaver that had a load of macaroni dancing to the Macarena. That went round the school lab like a virus and was quickly banned.
Hamster Dance and the Ooga Chaka baby are the ones I remember. Which maybe ages me slightly. Danny is right about the Matrix ‘waterfall’ screensaver though, absolutely everyone had that at some point.
I haven’t done screensaver nostalgia before. We had a cool one on the Amiga called ‘Tron’ (don’t know if it related to the film) where you were flying down a twisty square tunnel, like a minimalist wormhole graphic. You could set the speed and frequency of the squares. The Windows 95 assortment was disappointing after that. Then I downloaded one for the family PC called something like ‘Cascade’ that took a snapshot of your screen and made it warp and collapse, but it deeply unsettled my mum, so I took it off.
Then I downloaded one for the family PC called something like ‘Cascade’ that took a snapshot of your screen and made it warp and collapse, but it deeply unsettled my mum, so I took it off. I remember that one! I think I had pretty much the exact same mum based situation. But back then any software the child installed was always the prime suspect for the computer being broken.
That reminds me of when I took a screenshot of my desktop and used it as the desktop background, then moved the shortcuts along, took another screenshot and used that as the background and repeated it until it was a screen full of copies of the same icons without any way of knowing which were the actual clickable ones. My parents were not impressed (by that point I’d learned to do everything through explorer and the start menu and never used the desktop, so I wasn’t affected and thought I was being clever).
I don’t think I used the Matrix screensaver that was available from the official website.* I think either it didn’t run well on my PC, or it did extra things like flashing up boxes on screen, when all I wanted was the green code. I used a fan-made one instead, which I think ran better and was more customisable. Wish I could remember what it was called. As for the screensavers that messed with things on the desktop: I never really used the character ones, but I always liked the Science screensaver (which I think originated in Windows 95 Plus – or possibly 98 Plus?) that made a lens move over the screen to distort it in various ways: magnify, swirl, etc. There was a dripping raindrops one, too. * Fuck you, Warner Bros, for keeping the Space Jam website online all these years but not the Matrix website!
