Nick R

[Nick R]

Samurai Jack Region 2 DVD release, please! (Who needs a Daredevil film when you’ve got the Samurai Jack episode with the archers?)

I like Meet the Beat-Alls – it?s very successful at what it?s doing – but it?s far from my favourite Powerpuff ep. I find other episodes far more emotionally satisfying, have far better stories, and are far funnier.

I think Meet the Beat-Alls even tops The Rutles (which it also references!) as my favourite Beatles homage ever.

I had cable around 1995-96, so I was able to see the original What A Cartoon! pilots on Cartoon Network – but soon after that we went back to terrestrial TV and I lost interest in kids cartoons that weren’t Animaniacs or Earthworm Jim. So I never really appreciated the Tartakovsky/McCracken cartoons when they were first shown. It was only thanks to sharing a house at uni that had NTL/Virgin Media that I was able to watch Cartoon Network’s 11-till-1 Cartoon Cartoon blocks and realised how great Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends are. (Ed, Edd & Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Kids Next Door and Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy… much less so.)

[Nick R]

The video game Rez has always seemed very 2001-ish to me, especially Area 5… an insane computer; fast, low flight over alien landscapes; the theme of evolution (with the player character’s highest form being a baby)…

I watched 2001 on video when I was very young – I think my mum wanted to explain to me where the joke about Homer’s vibrating chair came from. I think I’ve watched it one or two times since then, so I think I’m fairly familiar with the film and consider it a fantastic achievement… even though I’d rarely set aside 2 1/2 hours to watch it.

I think Arthur C Clarke’s novel (writen at the same time as the film, so it’s hard to say which bits of the screenplay and novel are Clarke’s and which are Kubrick’s) is also excellent. It’s somewhat more literal than the film (what the Star Child does at the end is more explicit), so it probably appeals more to the hard-sci-fi side of me. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s such an interesting film – the science geeks can appreciate the story on a literal hard-SF level, and the wishy-washy philosophers and Humanities students can have fun finding ever more layers of symbolism in the film. :-) And everyone can agree the images and music are incredible.

Some examples:

http://www.modemac.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/2001_and_Beyond_the_Infinite
http://www.kubrick2001.com/
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0009.html – written by a 15-year-old (although it reads to me more like Rorschach…), and according to the blurb at the top, it was supposedly Kubrick’s favourite interpretation.

Although I think that this theory is stretching it a bit:

Wheat often uses anagrams as evidence to support his theories. For example, of the name Heywood R. Floyd, he writes “He suggests Helen – Helen of Troy. Wood suggests wooden horse – the Trojan Horse. And oy suggests Troy.” Of the remaining letters, he suggests “Y is Spanish for and. R, F, and L, in turn, are in ReFLect.” Finally, noting that D can stand for downfall, Wheat concludes that Floyd’s name has a hidden meaning: “Helen and Wooden Horse Reflect Troy’s Downfall”.[11]

@hummingbird:
> I?ve never seen Citizen Kane or any of the Godfather movies.

The Godfather is probably the most disappointed I’ve been in a “classic” film. So boring. And I’ve tried three times to see what all the fuss is about. I can appreciate the film, grudgingly – it’s not technically bad, in that it doesn’t contain cheesy dialogue or plot holes – but I didn’t particularly care about the story of Michael Corleone becoming the monster he never wanted to be. And Marlon Brando? Mumbleman Brando, more like, lol! (Although I would still like to see Part 2, even though I’ve never heard of someone liking one but not the other.)

[Nick R]

I’d like to see (hear) commentaries on:

Holoship
Marooned
Out of Time

And how about doing some Father Ted or Alan Partridge fan commentaries to put on Noise to Signal?

> That?s what I was thinking – I also wanted Waiting for God just because most RD fans consider it to be bad and I wanted to know why?

Waiting for God is my least favourite series 1 episode, but I’ll stick up for it – all the Quagaar stuff is great, and, dare I say it, I prefer that episode’s Talkie Toaster to that of White Hole.

[Nick R]

I’m sure I’ve seen that cover linked to long, long ago as an example of bad cover art. It’s almost down there with Phoenix Games levels of crapness, only with less Disney infringement.

[Nick R]

You’re playing with them?

[Nick R]

I only really caught the tail-end of the ’80s cartoon crazes: I was really into Turtles, Ghostbusters and Thundercats, but not He-Man or Transformers. Sadly I never saw many episodes Bucky O’Hare or Dungeons and Dragons.

But I really loved the pop-culture-referencing, freeze-frame-gag-filled cartoons that came along in the early ’90s in the wake of The Simpsons and Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Taz-Mania, Freakazoid, Rocko’s Modern Life, Earthworm Jim (although I haven’t really enjoyed EWJ as much since I found Doug Tennapel’s blog and read some of his opinions…). I spent far, far too long learning the words to all those “list” songs. Somehow the fact that I didn’t get half the the movie references actually added to the enjoyment (and made me feel like those cartoons were more sophisticated and grown-up than they probably were).

The blog Something Old, Nothing New has done lots of posts about behind-the-scenes stuff on those ’90s Warner Bros cartoons… well worth reading:

http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2004/07/freakazoid.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2004/06/animaniacs-part-1.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2004/06/animaniacs-part-2.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2005/12/puddin.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2008/03/beginning-of-end-for-wba.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2008/10/taz-mania.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2007/11/squash-and-stretch-and-sing-off-key.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2007/03/you-cant-write-drawing.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2005/12/best-gag-credits-ever.html
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2005/10/pip-pumphandles-deep-thoughts.html

I loved the late-80s Mighty Mouse cartoon, but I was never into Ren and Stimpy. But John K’s blog is a great resource for anyone interested in animation – as long as you can put up with the things he has to say about 99% of cartoons made since the 1960s…

[Nick R]

> For the record, I read the Smegazine adaptation of Future Echoes before I?d even seen the show itself. (And I bet I?m not alone on here in doing that)

These days I go out of my way to avoid spoilers. But when I first got into Dwarf, I eagerly devoured information about episodes I hadn’t seen by reading the novels, the Soup script books and the Programme Guide.

I was really disappointed when I first watched “Holoship” and found that the scene where Holly politely delays Rimmer was missing…

[Nick R]

This whole thread could be filled with examples from Hong Kong action movies, but to pick one each from John Woo and Jackie Chan…

Hard Boiled – THAT single-shot sequence alone includes two examples (at 0.15 and 2.45). But I still say The Killer’s the better film. :-P

Police Story – bus crash

And one with a Red Dwarf connection: just before the tank chase in GoldenEye, James Bond swings out of a window (with a soft landing on a handily-placed crash mat).

[Nick R]

“This isn’t one of those shady ‘pyramid schemes’ you’ve heard so much about. No, sir! Our model is the trapezoid, guaranteed [something something] within hours of your inital… uh-oh, the cops!”

(Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten some of the line, and every quotes page on the internet only has an incomplete version copied from The Simpsons Archive. Sorry.)

There are many other Simpsons examples, including Ned’s talent for arobatics, Moe’s Homer escape strategy, Homer’s gay escape strategy, and of course “Stop him! He’s headed for the window!”

And I know you didn’t specify video games, but Timesplitters 2 and Future Perfect have player statistics keeping track of how many panes of glass you’ve shattered.

[Nick R]

I have fond memories of The Brittas Empire. When I was about 10, I did an impression of him as my entry in my primary school’s talent contest (somehow I came third!). However, it must have been at least 10 years since I last saw an episode, so I have no idea what I’d make of it now, and whether it’d live up to my memories of it…

But having just checked Wikipedia, most of the epsiodes I remember (the leisure centre being computerised, the lion within, the magician one John mentioned) were in the last series. And I enjoyed those a lot. So maybe I hadn’t seen many of the early, good episodes at all…

[Nick R]

Yes, I’ve wondered why this site has never done an article on the Smegazine… I’ve never seen an issue, but it must have been a pretty important part of Dwarf fandom in the early ’90s.

Nigel Kitching?s artwork in particular has always struck me as fantastic, and I loved the way the comics would mix concepts from the TV series with the novels.

I was a big fan of Kitching’s writing and artwork on Sonic the Comic (which Dwarf-disliker Julian Hazeldine wrote about recently). It wasn’t very long ago that I first heard he’d worked on the Smegazine, but since then I’ve been curious to see what his contributions were like.

There’s an interesting interview with him here.

Last I heard, he was a graphic design lecturer at the University of Teeside… a couple of people in STC nostalgia threads in other forums have mentioned they were taught by him!

[Nick R]

I: Me^2 (Runner-up: Future Echoes)
II: Queeg (Runner-up: Thanks for the Memory)
III: Marooned (Runner-up: The Last Day)
IV: Dimension Jump (Runner-up: White Hole)
V: Quarantine (Runner-up: Back to Reality)
VI: Gunmen of the Apocalypse (Runner-up: Out of Time)
VII: Stoke Me A Clipper (Runner-up: Tikka To Ride)
VIII: Cassandra (Runner-up: Back in the Red Part 1)

Having written it out like that, I’ve just realised how many of my favourite episodes from the first six series include elements that were shared with the novels…

Since people are including parts of Back to Earth: notice that with the ad breaks, it can be split into six “episodes”. In which case: episode 2, pre-adverts. :)

[Nick R]

And the decision to make so many references is from Die Another Day?considered by many to be the worst Bond film so maybe not the best idea Doug has ever had.

It’s better than Moonraker!

[Nick R]

It’s great to see Red Dwarf getting an article as in-depth as that. It’s not far off the length of the VFX articles I recently read about Watchmen!

The fact you can’t tell which shot(s) they zoomed-in to crop out Chris just shows how ridiculously high-res those cameras are.

After watching the Making Of, I had a thought about what they might do for special effects if new Red Dwarf episodes are filmed in front of a live audience. Some of the virtual set scenes in Back to Earth (such as the Rimmer/Katerina corridor scene in part 1) were still focused on dialogue rather than action, and only only done green-screen because the budget wouldn’t allow for a full-size corridor set.

If those budget restrictions continued into a new series, they might need many more virtual sets. From the comments in the Making Of, it sounds like green-screen setups don’t have to be as time-consuming as they used to be, and they don’t require as controlled an environment.

My point is: would it be feasible to set up a small green-screen stage in view of the audience, right next to the the bunk-room set and anything else they construct for real? That way, you’d retain the performer-audience interaction (as VII proved, laugh tracks benefit from being captured live), while still allowing the final shot to have all the the grandeur of a CGI set.

No doubt someone’ll point out that it’s already common practice for live audience sets to include green screen elements…

[Nick R]

Bill Bailey’s Holly would probably have more luck decimalising music than Norman’s did.

[Nick R]

V
VI
IV
II
III
I
Rimmer episodes of VII
Cassandra
Rimmer-free episodes of VII
Back to Earth
[[[Everything above this line is watchable]]]
All of VIII except Cassandra
.
.
.
.
Pete Part 2

Bearing in mind my fave episodes of each series are Future Echoes, Queeg, Marooned, Justice, Quarantine, Gunmen of the Apocalypse, Stoke Me A Clipper and Cassandra,

That’s close to my list, although I’d have Dimension Jump instead of Justice, and possibly also Me^2 instead of Future Echoes.

[Nick R]

I like this fan edit. Beginning with the grave scene means you can introduce the Cat straight away and get the plot moving as fast as it would have in one of the old episodes. The jokes aren’t changed, but trimming the time between them makes it all feel funnier.

Well done for making the “it was big” joke work!

…But then again you trimmed Rimmer’s list of things they’ll need to take with them! Booo. :(

It’d be great to be able to keep the corridor special effects shot as the opening, but Lister’s chuckling obviously means it can’t go directly before the grave scene.

(Incidentally, I wonder what the reaction would have been if the episode had opened with Lister singing Ganymede & Titan – perhaps the second verse, Lunar City Seven – while he walked down the corridor? It would have fitted with all the other fanservice…)

Just watched the opening couple of minutes, and I?ve gone from ?fairly sure? to ?utterly convinced? that the grave scene should have been pre-titles after seeing you actually do it. Putting it there accomplishes three things:
1) It manages the viewers? expectations better, as it?s both more in-line with the tone of what?s to come, and gives an important plot point to the viewers straight off the bat rather than burying it in mid-ep
2) It tidies up the transition to the follow-up scene in the bunkroom enormously – originally, that was virtually a jump cut
3) It deletes the ?ironing? scene, which is both pretty much a complete failure in what it aims to do (?be funny?) and doesn?t give any particularly useful exposition for later that isn?t covered adequately by other scenes.

I completely agree with all these reasons. Then again, if it had actually been broadcast like that I’d probably still find some reason to complain…

[Nick R]

Cuts off a bit abruptly, doesn’t it?

He doesn’t seem too keen on Doctor Who… I think I read a transcript of a webchat he did a couple of years ago in which he said he hadn’t been too impressed by the revived Who, but had enjoyed Torchwood, particularly the early first series episode with the children and evil fairies. I’m not surprised; I got a very Lords and Ladies vibe from that episode.

[Nick R]

From that Digitalspy review:

Strangely enough, the Dave channel foray succeeded far more as an intriguing sci-fi drama than as an actual comedy. Naylor, for all his flaws, structured the ‘meeting the maker’ plot very cleverly and Craig Charles engendered Lister with genuine pathos. It was not hard to care for the fate of the Boys from the Dwarf and urge Lister to keep bashing away on the typewriter to keep them alive, especially as the cast still have that special camaraderie. Still, the moment compares unfavourably to Lister’s previous Red Dwarf typing endeavour when he was accosted by a ‘taranshula’ (Kryten’s severed hand and eyeball) making a nest in his loins. It’s hard not to long for the glorious old days, especially as ‘Back To Earth’ is so self-referential.

I agree with this. Dramatically the emotional conclusion of the Lister-Kochanski plot was satisfying, I liked the metafictional mindbendery, the cast had still got it, and as a Red Dwarf geek I appreciated the self-indulgent fanservice (which I think stems from the fact “Back to Earth” began life as 21st anniversary tribute shows). Overall, I’m glad it was made. But purely in terms of comedy: even though it had its moments, the humour was definitely not a patch on series I to VII.*

* (Not a typo.)

I agree with the Digitalspy reviewer’s point that many of the jokes paled next to similar ones from the classic run: the initial recognition of part 2’s twist on a Bunk Scene was much funnier than its actual content. Likewise, Rimmer volunteering his crewmates for the expedition into the tank and then backing out wasn’t a patch on some of his similarly-structured jokes in the past (such as “I’ve devised a fair and equitable system of choosing who should survive…”). Having said that, even though it wasn’t particularly witty I still appreciated that line because of its familiarity – as I mentioned in the part 1 comments thread, it was a nice reminder that we were back with the same characters we know so well.

The reviewer points out that the typing scene compares unfavourably to taranshula. Actually, that didn’t come to mind for me – they both involve typing, but that’s about it. No, that scene merely had to contend with Futurama! ;)

Possibly my favourite joke in “Back to Earth” was the ultra-high-tech image enhancement in part 2. Having forgotten most of Blade Runner, I hadn’t realised it was yet another parody of something specific from that film – I just interpreted it as a sharp (and rather geeky) dig at the “enhance button” trope in general. But I think it’s telling that in this new spin on Dwarf such a visual joke was my favourite, whereas in all the classic episodes many of my favourite jokes involved elaborate, meticulously-worded sentences (preferably involving something character-based, preferably Rimmer-character-based). Maybe in order to give those wordier jokes the funniest rhythm and phrasing you really need two writers to hone them to perfection.

One gag I really liked which people haven’t mentioned much is Katerina’s deadpan description of the over-the-top manner in which Rimmer’s hologram data would be destroyed – “erased, fired from the ship, then detonated with a thermonuclear device”. However, I felt it could have gone further in its OTT-ness – much like Hitchhiker‘s classic “beware of the leopard” dialogue. Again, perhaps that’s the sort of joke that benefits from being written by two people – bouncing phrases off each other in an attempt to outdo each other?

[Nick R]

Dimension Jump:

The elastic was intact on Carbug’s furry dice, which means they had a slightly less tasteful windscreen.

[Nick R]

A separate 18-rated edition with unbeeped versions of all three post-episode Dwarfcasts.

[Nick R]

> There was a guitar in the bunkroom, too.

Lister was also preparing to take it with him through the portal.

[Nick R]

Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation. (I remembered the full stop!) is the king of metafictional headfuckery. It seems to get mentioned less often than Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine, but I like it just as much.

I’ve only read one volume of Alan Moore’s Promethea (though the TPBs have recently been reprinted, which is great news for me). I don’t know if anything in there is similar to what was in “Back to Earth”, but given that said volume contained such messing with the medium as double-page spreads where the dialogue looped round on itself in an infinity symbol, and given that it’s about a superheroine who’s the personification of storytelling and this is Alan Moore we’re talking about…
…it’s probably a safe bet!

[Nick R]

In my first post I said…

So I?m wondering: what if part 3 ends with an appearance by Chlo? Annett, and Lister reunited with Kochanski once and for all?

Well, I was right about the first bit… and that Chlo? would appear as Kochanski, rather than “as herself”. But I thought she’d appear on board Red Dwarf, rather than as part of Lister’s happy ending within the hallucination.

I’m quite pleased that I didn’t guess the full story! Quite satisfied with the way it turned out… a good balance between resolution and a jumping-off point for anything else in the future (whether that’s a full new series, specials, novels, comics, or dare I say it: films). At the very least, it was ten times the ending “Only the Good” was!

[Nick R]

> Those with good memories? has any character in Red Dwarf ever been known to speak fleunt Chinese?

M’aiden Ty-One? ;)

[Nick R]

Re: The merchandise in the comic shop:

ARRRGH TOO MUCH PRODUCT PLACEMENT IT’S ALMOST AS BAD AS IN THE LAST TWO BOND MOVIES

…is how some people might react. Not me though!

[Nick R]

Was it just me who, every time the bus took off, half-expected the wheels to fold over horizontally like Back to the Future’s DeLorean, and found it slightly jarring when they didn’t?

[Nick R]

> People at the xkcd forums liking it:
http://echochamber.me/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=36892&p=1500460&hilit=red+dwa…

I started that thread! My review post there was just a slightly altered version of the one I posted in the big comments thread here.

[Nick R]

> There?s also a very positive review in the independent (or was it the guardian?).

In the Grauniad, Nancy Banks-Smith thought that they were too old to be fighting squid, seemed to like the car chases joke, and doesn’t think that repopulating the earth is a very good idea:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/apr/11/red-dwarf-easter-trilogy

[Nick R]

A truly glorious sight.

[Nick R]

> I don?t think they were born, yet.

Eee, where’s my cane?

(I’m 23.)

[Nick R]

It’s disappointing to see he feels that way about the programme and its crew. But compared to the sort of things musicians say about each other after their bands split up, Norman’s comments are pretty mild.

[Author]

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