Me Own Stunts

[Me Own Stunts]

Okay, that didn’t work. It was a spine-ready image of Ziggy, anyway.

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[Me Own Stunts]

Series XII makes the ship feel more spacious than Series VIII. In Series VIII you get things like the warehouse where the dinosaur walks around, but it doesn’t feel like the inside of the ship, it feels like somewhere else entirely. There’s less coherence there. Series XII feels very coherent and it’s brilliant at subtle things like reusing corridors in a way that you don’t notice.

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> Rundown of the XI extras

We probably don’t need to speculate about the Red Dwarf XI DVD release anymore, though.

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I’m so sorry because I do respect the effort of trying to fix Series VIII. I’m not trying to be a cunt, but I need to be honest. I am criticising Series VIII, not KyoSo.

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(It’s almost as if Series VIII has no comedic or narrative worth whatsoever.)

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“but then the scene would be incredibly short and feel rather pointless.”

It’s a pointless scene already. May as well get it over with, no?

I’ve just sat through Kryten re-corrupting his files through the profundity of ambivalence again, so I’m not in the most generous of moods. That needs to be cut as well.

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If I was editing this, I would be removing more instances of screws going deep into the ground.

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“Comment – I don’t particularly like the overly cartoonish joke about The Cat having a “cool” heartbeat, but I feel we need to see where he ended up after they were arrested.”

Solution: Cut the scene after “Those are his nipples, Frank”. Narratively, no more is needed than that.

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“The Time Wand scene would be SO much better (or less shite) if they’d done it with clever editing, rather than having the actors do it”

This is like trying to pluck the dog shit from a vast dog shit that has had a thin layer of icing sugar sprinkled on top.

If you love icing sugar so much just have some icing sugar. That’s what I say.

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What’s the big deal about having three separate onions? I eat specifically three separate onions all the time.

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Cassandra only seems watchable when it’s viewed in sequence after the first few episodes of Series 8, where it stands out and even gives you hope that the rest of Series 8 isn’t as bad as you remembered. Taken without that context it’s a horrible episode, with pantomime gurning, Series 8 lobotomised characters, and illogical plotting galore. Urgh. Hate it.

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But I like the shit bits. :(

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> two other people have anything they

Looking for an acronym to repeat the CLITORIS gag, I can only find TOPHAT which is not rude enough; sorry.

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Yes, exactly. The “condition” would be whatever it is that impulsively turns Camille into a slave of other people’s desires, although presumably that’s what a Pleasure GELF is designed for. Camille and her husband have probably labelled it a “condition” as part of a process of breaking her from her genetic programming.

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Why are there “examples of the logo in action” for series other than Series 12? And what’s the difference between, say, the “Season 1” version of the Series 12 logo and the “Season 8” version of the Series 12 logo? I am so confused.

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So I’m presuming M-Corp is the one where they upgrade to iOS 11 and realise their devices can’t play 32-bit apps like the Monkey Island 1 and 2 Special Editions anymore, even though they paid for them with their own money.

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There’s also the fact that Irene is the first real human they’ve come into contact with for ages. Even taking into account the shamelessly unfiltered guff that was Series 8, encountering real human beings is rare and this should be an ethical crew that cares about other humans. Instead we see Rimmer doing his “ah Bisto” face when his own brother dies, and Lister and Rimmer both deciding to not even try rescuing Irene when she’s sucked out of an airlock.

I’d like to think Lister would quickly put on a spacesuit and do his best to save Irene, not give up the second the airlock door reseals. Would he give up just as quickly if it had been Kochanski? No, of course not. So he shouldn’t have done it here.

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The prison subplot was entirely unneeded too. How much more interesting it would have been for Lister to have been forced back into the Red Dwarf hierarchy after years of adventure, nobody believing a word of what he says, a metaphorical prison rather than a literal one. It would have been the writers’ opportunity to explore the pre-accident crew in a way they regretted never doing, as well.

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> Either way Chris has been quite open about the fact, making reference to it in the recent documentary. You seem to be taking it a bit more personally than perhaps he would?

I only said the word “cunt” mate. You’re acting like something important has happened.

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> Any need to use such derogatory language ‘Me Own Stunts’?

Depends what you think of jokes about receding hairlines, I suppose.

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I didn’t say “high drama”. It’s a combination of the music and the understandable assumption after the more filmic Series 7 that Naylor would continue pushing Red Dwarf in that direction.

And I’m talking about before we’d seen Series 8. When you’ve already seen the series and you know the scenes that all the clips are from, you’re bound to have a different reaction.

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> But, with the chances of matching its imperial phase receding faster than Chris Barrie’s hairline

LOL RECEDING HAIRLINES!!!

Cunt.

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> Can VIII not be Red Dwarf instead?

Only if you also lose Series 6 and 7. Them’s the rules.

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The trailer gives the sense that it’ll be dramatic and exciting, though. Especially (perhaps only) when you haven’t actually seen Series 8 yet.

It’s logical to presume from the trailer that Series 8 will build on the dramatic elements of Series 7, but with a live audience there to make the performances less dull, and writing that’s sharper due to Naylor’s revisiting of Series 1-3.

It was definitely a shock in 1999 to go from expectations created by the trailer to Series 8 itself – the insanely raucous audience, and performances that are pitched more for a Bottom Live theatre type of audience than a television audience.

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> Hang on. Do people really think series X is named X because IX is meant to be the lost series, and not because Back to Earth *is* IX? Even if you consider the director’s cut the definitive version of BTE, it was originally broadcast as a series of three episodes, and it was the ninth one, so it’s series IX. Doug has stated that BTE isn’t Red Dwarf, mind you, but this lost series thing is bollocks, surely?

I was personally clarifying that if we had no Series 6, 7 and 8 in the 90s, a special made in 2009 with, at first, a name rather than a series number, would retrospectively be considered Series 6, with the current Series 10, 11 and 12 (although they would differ from the “current” versions for reasons already outlined in posts above) being Series 7, 8 and 9 respectively.

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If you are watching Series 8 immediately after Series 7, you should build your hopes up first with the Star Wars parody trailer for Series 8 that makes it look good. Tell yourself “Chris Barrie is back, Norman Lovett is back, the studio audience is back, and Doug Naylor has spent a lot of time studying the first three series for the Remastered project, so the characterisation will be spot on. What could possibly go wrong?”

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I do know what you mean. I think that’s because the technology didn’t exist in the late 1980s to make all the characters into broad, pantomimic stereotypes.

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Ah yes, I was drunk when I started this thread, but I wanted to make the Series 8 and Me2 connection; Series 8 gives us a ‘rebooted’ Rimmer that we didn’t get at the end of Me2. In the first series, the message was that Rimmer progressed with the Red Dwarf team and softened into a more likeable character. The rebooted version of Rimmer was deleted and we moved on from there. It’s weird to think that without a gap of several years – let’s say if Series 9 had come out a couple of years after Series 8 – we’d probably have been left with the rebooted Series 8 Rimmer forever. It wouldn’t have felt right.

Just an observation, not an interesting one.

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“I love Revolution #9, it’s one of the best things on the White Album. So ner.”

I thought that said “so far”, which I liked. I like the idea of the White Album being a process.

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When I say “that’s where I got off”, I meant it like “that’s where I got off a horse”.

I hope that clears that up.

(This post was sponsored by Kleenex.)

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I just never know how to take Helter Skelter. It feels like it wants to be a parody, but also more like it just doesn’t understand what it’s doing. Like a new certain type of music was emerging so Paul McCartney thought “eh up, I’ll do my one of that and show them I can do it just as well”. It feels very self-conscious.

A lot of “feels like”, basically.

I’ve already covered Tikka in previous posts. Doug forgot what the cliffhanger of series 6 actually was; that’s where I got off. Also it was where the quick-one-liners model of series 6 started to fall apart. They have to be funny. If they’re not funny, you start to notice the humour isn’t coming from the characters and their situation anymore.

If you’d like to hear more of this particular drunken trajectory, press ‘red’ now.

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“If we’re just arbitrarily making up rules then can I be in the no-Brexit, no-Trump universe where Victoria Wood is still alive and making a new series of Dinnerladies?”

Having Rob Grant onboard for post-series 5 Red Dwarf isn’t arbitrary! I had it in my mind to include it in my original post but I forgot to put it in.

I’m trying to tempt people over to my alternate universe, alright, and I promise it isn’t as shit as the one where Captain Hollister could play the violin with his left arm because doing that was the opposite of not being able to play the violin.

I promise it is not the same as that.

Well alright it is the same as that but Series 8 wasn’t a documentary.

Alright then it was.

If you think this has crap comedy timing, blame whoever decided on the maximum one line between paragraphs rule.

Thank you.

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“Revolution 9 is great. Dad played it to me when I was 10 or 11, totally changed my perspective on music.”

(notice I have abandoned trying to use the blockquote thing that MADE MY POST GO WRONG EARLIER SO THAT NOBODY READ IT)

I agree that Revolution 9 is great, but most people don’t love to hear the whole track when they’re listening to the White Album. Usually I am in the mood for it once Cry Baby Cry has ended, because you get used to a certain track sequence don’t you. Personally I’m more likely to skip ‘Helter Skelter’ or ‘Birthday’.

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Well, I did say “most people”.

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No it was most people who listen to The White Album.

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The pilot would have been a successful pilot with components that worked (at least enough for the show to go to series). There’s nothing in my premise stating that Jane Leeves and Linwood Boomer would have been tied up with Red Dwarf, as we don’t know what differences made the pilot successful, but it’s a gamble.

I forgot to mention the Rob Grant factor though, and somebody above brought it up so I should clarify.

In the alternate reality, Rob Grant never formally left Red Dwarf UK. He probably would have ultimately tired of the US version but who knows. Anyway because the UK show never had “post-Grant” period (which he has said he couldn’t really engage with, likening them to seeing your ex-wife out and about with another man), the opportunity in 2009 to make a 21st anniversary special may have appealed to him.

So yes, Back to Earth and then series 7, 8 and 9 (thanks for correcting that earlier, Dave Wallace) could have all involved Rob Grant, at least until he’d had enough.

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Just imagine the first chunk being a reply to “We’d also lose Fathers and Suns” and the bit that’s in a quotation box being a reply to “as well as having to go through ever-more-increasing workarounds to account for Rimmer still being soft-light throughout all the recent series”.

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Arrgh what happened to that post?? I thought I was quoting Seb and it ended up like that.

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This is true, but for me only the scene with Lister playing back the footage of his ‘Dad’ matters to me, and it’s nevertheless polyfilla over the horrible crack of Lister not only being his own Dad, but his own Grandfather, Great Grandfather and so on to infinity. He is infinitely inbred; an idea I entirely hate.

It would have been lovely if Lister had just had ordinary parents who’d abandoned him rather than a science fiction background. That’s what we had before Series 7 started looking inwards for what to do next. A show that runs for several series runs the risk of becoming stale and formulaic, and around this time they sometimes start to look inwards for ideas to reincorporate and put surprising spins on. Eureka – Lister’s parents were never explained so let’s have him be his own Dad in a surprising time-loop twist! I hate it, and after it had emerged in Series 7 I didn’t appreciate them going back to it in Series 10, albeit for one good scene.

So yeah I don’t mind that subplot going from Series 10.

I actually wish Rimmer had stayed soft-light anyway. It was good for Legion, and it was perhaps necessary to make Rimmerworld work, but I can’t really think of anything in Series 10 that absolutely needed Rimmer to be hard-light (a few things, but not in the sense of enormous workarounds). It’s just more convenient for the writers (as well as Chris Barrie and the prop team) to allow Rimmer to touch stuff. But for me Rimmer was so much more effective when he couldn’t do things his own way without the assistance of Lister, Cat and Kryten. So officious yet depended on the cooperation of people he struggled to have any respect for and vice versa. It added so well to his layers of neuroses, and I always felt that once he became hard-light a lot of his character was lost. I think in the back of my mind there was the sense he only really stayed hard-light to make it easier for everyone producing the show, as well, which rankled a bit.

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Blimey, somebody who thinks BOTH CHEEKS MAN is good.

I never thought I’d live to see the day!

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Red Dwarf USA could be as good as early Simpsons for all you know. You absolutely certain you won’t take the gamble?

Don’t be so anxious; at the very worst you’ll only be trapped in an alternate dimension forever.

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What more could a special edition X-XII release include though, apart from commentaries?

I agree that sometimes a bit of time needs to pass for the extra material to be interesting, but the series 8 commentary is a prime example of pretty much everyone in the cast laughing along to something that was patently unfunny. And hardly anyone was candid in that series’ documentary ‘The Tank’, either. Naylor was full of disappointment for the rubber crocodile in series 7, but seemingly not bothered at all by the absurdly fake CGI dinosaur in ‘Pete’. Everyone seemed to think the basketball scene was hilarious, and the mirror universe sequence fantastically clever. No perspective appeared to have been gained in the years between the series being made and the DVD coming out.

I’d say the series 10 documentary was far more revealing than that, even though no time had passed at all. And it’s been almost two years now since they filmed series 12. While I agree it’s quite unlikely, I still hope that they’ve used the extra time to really polish up the series and make the DVD release as strong as possible.

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It’s a shame. The DVDs feel incomplete without commentaries, regardless of their quality. They give the episodes another layer of rewatch value.

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