What if Red Dwarf had started in 1967 and not 1987?

[Jawscvmcdia]

Interesting question to ponder, what if Red Dwarf had started in 1967 and not 1987? How different would the show have been had it began twenty years earlier?

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[si]

If Red Dwarf had started twenty years earlier, Rob and Doug would have been very talented children.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

By ‘eck, it’s the Red Dwarfers.

It honestly wouldn’t be much different bar the odd special effect and split-screen, at least from a technical standpoint. You can get round a lot of the tape and video board effects of late ’80s Dwarf with in-camera sparkly transitions and Goon-esque sharp audio crashes and bangs to cover the most glaring edits.

The writing wouldn’t be so enriched with cultural references and the pacing would be slower, even through the Series I & II era. You could easily have whole episodes shot from the bunks. From 1971, it would’ve been filmed in BBC COLOUR and we’d have a hastily made theatrical adaptation of two random episodes smushed together with very clear divisions between 35mm and 16mm footage filmed by a second unit to fill in the gaps.

Also, happily, most of the black and white era would’ve been wiped as was BBC policy, leaving the odd off-air recording, photographic archive and script to gleam over.

I imagine John Hoare would write a Dirty Feed post about it and how it pioneered and skewered the Apollo missions at the time and then commented on how improbable it would’ve been, even twenty years later in the late ’80s to take two black and two white actors and put them on-screen together and film a show about the last human in the Milky Way.

Actually, Red Dwarf circa 1967 to 1975 would be a VERY curious animal indeed. I’d love to watch it just to see how they’d tackle social attitudes at the time in contrast to the setting of one or two centuries later.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Wait, if Red Dwarf appeared in 1967, why are we all here?

What was recorded in the seven week run that Series I of Red Dwarf commandeered?

You’re listening to ‘Girls On Top-cast’.

OH FUCKING JESUS CHRIST.

[Taiwan Tony]

There may have been a Soviet character? Or an American one. To reflect the space race.
Cat might have been descended from Leika, which would have made the similie jokes a bit more confusing.

Or it might have been modelled more closely on Steptoe & Son rather than Porridge.
Lister and Son. Both played by the same person, obviously. Someone like – I dunno – Kenny Lynch?
And Rimmer could have been more of an Alf Garnett character, calling Kochanski a silly moo, and calling Lister all sorts of horrible names that most of us will have forgotten about by now.

[cwickham]

Most of Series I-III would currently be missing from the BBC archives, possibly still existing as a soundtrack.

[Taiwan Tony]

Kevin McNally will have been drafted in to recreate the lost episodes in front of sycophantic festival crowds.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

[Stephen Abootman]

Impossible, think how wobbly the sets would be!

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

From an article published on Dirty Feed.

‘Ethnicity In Space Year 2067 – How ‘The Red Dwarfers’ Transformed Attitudes Towards Black Actors in British Comedy’.

Well, just look at Damerae Lister, he’s in the top bunk and Captain Arnold is in the lower bunk. It’s not that fucking hard to explain.

– John Hoare

[si]

What if Red Dwarf had started in 1987 and not 1988?

*pedantic mode*

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The JMCs – 1987 (What the Smeg Is Going On?)

[Phobos And Deimos]

JMC Curry and Chips.

[Jonsmad]

Any jokes about Doug Mclure would have been restricted to his time in westerns rather than the 70’s low budget sci fi b movies he later became associated with that had gone out of fashion by the 90s.

[Moonlight]

Thanks to the new season of MST3K, I finally get those jokes. They featured both “The Land That Time Forgot” and “At the Earth’s Core”.

[Phobos And Deimos]

Doug McClure is real?

[Manbird]

>Doug McClure is real?<

Yeah! You may remember him from such films as Warlords from Atlantis and Cannonball Run II.

[Phobos And Deimos]

Having Googled Doug McClure, how come I didn’t know this?

I thought it was a running joke about some American actor they had made up that appeared in a series of rubbish b-movies.

I feel I’ve opened my eyes yet seen nothing.

[Stephen Abootman]

The BBC are pleased to announced that the long lost Red Dwarf episode ‘Me²’ has been recovered from a TV station in Nigeria. A spokesman said, “we know fans will be eager to see the famous scene where Lister goes to delete one of the Rimmers but accidentally turns him into Patrick Troughton”.

[Phobos And Deimos]

I wish the BBC would restart the wiping policy.

Oh you all know how I feel about the BBC, let’s have a singalong.

[Author]

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