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Red Dwarf taught me the important of three dimensional characters in comedy. I’m so glad I discovered it as a kid. It’s really influenced me as a writer, and I think is responsible for my work getting as good as it has.

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I watched Pete Part 1 again. It was boring as fuck and not funny. Nothing interesting happened, and the structure was clumsy and padded out beyond belief. I have little interest in viewing Part 2, but I probably will.

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I nominate this Cloche for Hall of Butter status

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I really don’t understand why so many people hate Back to Earth so much. I just watched it again, and I still think it tells a really nice story and does it well. It struggles for a bit at the beginning, but it picks up as it goes.

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I just think the idea of Rimmer running a political campaign sounds potentially hilarious. Like, seriously potentially hilarious.

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I personally love Samsara. And I think Mechocracy will be great.

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Those all sound really intriguing.

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Namely the shower stuff actually made me uncomfortable, which had never happened when I was younger.

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I watched Krytie TV again recently, for the first time in a while. It was…bad.

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A better question is what fucking moron adding those pots and pans sound effects?

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Reposted because I utterly fucked the tags on my first try:

What exactly is the interesting premise of The Orville? The trailer makes it appear to simply be like Star Trek but with jokes. (I’m not suggesting there isn’t an interesting premise – I’m genuinely asking)

It’s Star Trek but the cast is made up of bickering children and stereotypes. The dialogue is ungodly annoying and unfunny, and the world is made up of nothing but Star Trek conventions without any interesting twists on them. There’s nothing remotely interesting or creative to be seen.

There is a lot to like in ‘The Orville’

Um…where? If I wanted the half-baked sci-fi I’d watch a mediocre Star Trek episode, and if I wanted unlikable characters spouting terrible jokes I’d watch The Big Bang Theory.

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What exactly is the interesting premise of The Orville? The trailer makes it appear to simply be like Star Trek but with jokes. (I’m not suggesting there isn’t an interesting premise – I’m genuinely asking)<bllockquote>
It’s Star Trek but the cast is made up of bickering children and stereotypes. The dialogue is ungodly annoying and unfunny, and the world is made up of nothing but Star Trek conventions without any interesting twists on them. There’s nothing remotely interesting or creative to be seen.

There is a lot to like in ‘The Orville’

Um…where? If I wanted the half-baked sci-fi I’d watch a mediocre Star Trek episode, and if I wanted unlikable characters spouting terrible jokes I’d watch The Big Bang Theory.

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I watched the pilot. It was complete fucking garbage.

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case in point- http://imgur.com/a/ifHA1 .either starbug is abnormally big or red dwarf is tiny.

Or Starbug is just really close to the camera?

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I want a Sonic Series XII.

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Sonic Mania needs to be Sonic’s Back to Earth.

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The crew has been whisked to plenty of strange dimensions in the past and their first instinct was always “ok how can we escape this place and get back to our own dimension”.

In BTE they just immediately resign to the fact that they are TV characters? It didn’t feel like we were watching the RD crew.

In Back to Reality they immediately resign to the idea that their previous lives were nothing but a VR game. Both the experiences in BtR and BtE were hallucinations induced by the same kind of creature. The entire point of the Despair/Joy Squid’s defense mechanism is throwing predators and prey into a hallucinatory experience that renders them completely defenseless.

It isn’t a matter of “oh, we’re in a strange alternate universe/place, we gotta get back to Red Dwarf” – as in Backwards – this a matter of a mind-altering hallucinatory experience in which you are convinced that your life up this point was a work of fiction. Especially comparing the more subtle dreams-coming-true experiences in Back to Earth to the over-the-top despair-inducing experiences of Back to Reality, you wouldn’t expect the characters to immediately jump to the conclusion that the same thing is happening. Especially because they identify the creature as a dimension-hopping leviathan, with no idea as to its true nature. Once they actually acquire evidence pointing to it being a drug trip from a despair/joy squid, they are able to piece together what happened and conclude that this is a false reality.

Unless you’re willing to level the same criticism at Back to Reality, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. It’s certainly not hugely out of character, because it’s 100% in keeping with what we’ve seen from the hallucination caused by the Despair Squid. It makes sense to me.

And the whole Blade Runner (and to a point Coronation St.) thing was ridiculous. Why just copy Bladerunner outright? A real artist would never be as uninspired as to copy something else literally beat for beat, scene for scene

I agree the Blade Runner parody aspect is flawed, that much I won’t argue with. But in exactly how it was flawed I feel very differently than you. I would say the flaw is mainly in the sheer amount of Blade Runner nods, making it seem like you’re missing something important if you haven’t seen the film. I feel they actually would have been more effective if less heavily featured. But I would very much insist that calling it “copying” is blatantly unfair, since that implies the entire plot is simply a ripoff of Blade Runner rather than structured as a Blade Runner parody because of the thematic relevance of its plot. Whether or not it was successful is the point of contention, but it’s hardly beat-for-beat, scene-for-scene copying. That’s a huge exaggeration.

Having seen Blade Runner before BtE can give you a false impression of how important knowing Blade Runner is to following the story, because most of the Blade Runner nods will fly right over the heads of anyone who hasn’t already seen the film. I’d always followed BtE fine before I’d ever seen Blade Runner, and finally seeing the film this year didn’t change my impressions of it in any major way.

It’s like watching a Batman movie and he suddenly makes webslingers for his wrists and starts swinging from buildings. Imagine the end of a Nolan Batman movie playing out -identical- to Sam Raimi’s Spider-man II, scene for scene, beat for beat. With Batman being a Spider-man.

I’m sorry, I have to call bullshit on that comparison. Back to Earth was a comedy structured as a Blade Runner parody because it was exploring the same kinds of themes as that movie. You can’t talk as if it was just thrown in there for absolutely no reason and had nothing to do with anything. There’s a VERY clear relation, and it’s a perfectly valid use of parody in principle if not in execution. You have a story about seeking out your creator to plead for more life. In Blade Runner, it was replicants who literally wanted more life, and in Back to Earth it’s our cast wanting more episodes when their show is about to be cancelled. The initial idea for Back to Earth clearly begat the Blade Runner structure because of the thematic similarity, since the core of Back to Earth’s plot already comes from Back to Reality.

Again, I’m not arguing it worked. That’s up to individual opinion. What I’m arguing is that it’s not a completely random, pointless copying of another film for absolutely no reason. That’s a huge jump to make, and one that I feel very much misses the point.

A real artist would never be as uninspired as to copy something else literally beat for beat, scene for scene

Excuse me? “A real artist”? I think dismissing the man as a hack is a little extreme, don’t you think?

There’s a reason I’m specifically not commenting on how well Back to Earth works as a whole. It’s because your criticisms are delivered at the core ideas of the story, but you’re dismissing them out of hand without taking time to consider why they might make sense, it’s extremely unfair to completely dismiss Doug’s entire creative process as that of a dumb teenager fooling around with a video camera, especially when you don’t seem

What you’re doing is saying “I don’t like this, so the writer must not have tried”, and I don’t think any fan is in a position to make that assessment, especially not over someone so clearly passionate about his work. Especially not when there’s major reasons for these creative decisions you’re overlooking.

Don’t get the impression I’m furiously angry, or that I’m trying to pick a fight. I’m not. I just like to be very clear and precise about what I think, and that can get wordy when it’s something I’m passionate about. I love Red Dwarf and I love film-making and I love writing. This is discussing all three of those.

Personally, I like Back to Earth. It’s flawed, it’s not as funny as it could be, it feels like Doug hasn’t quite recaptured characters like Cat, but for the no-budget rush job it was I feel it was successful in what it set out to do. I enjoy it as dramatic story about characters I love. It brought them back from their cartoonish VIII selves, restored the original setting, and brought the show back to its roots. It’s a bit tonally and stylistically different, but structurally and thematically returning to what Red Dwarf always was before: character-based stories rooted in a strong science fiction premise. I first and foremost expect Red Dwarf to give me a good story about these characters and make me laugh. To me, Back to Earth strongly succeeds in the former if not always in the latter. Same as how I feel about the better entries in VII.

Goddamn that was long.

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What, are we supposed to believe this is some sort of _magic_ xylophone? I sure hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

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OK, here we go, I’ve been thinking about Back in the Red’s plot holes for a while and I’m happy to have an excuse for get it all down in text. You guys are the only people I know who would even know what I was talking about, so I thank you for the opportunity.

We’ve already heard about how everyone is arrested for crimes only Rimmer and Lister commit, and they didn’t actually commit them in real life. My issue is that the Blue Midget dance renders the simulation completely worthless.

Due to his blindingly self-centred nature and inherited ignorance of the world, the Cat doesn’t realise that such a thing is impossible, therefore it is a perfectly logical scenario for his brain to have contributed.

But _everyone_ is in the simulation witnessing this happen. If Kochanski notices it’s suspicious the mop head disguises work, why does something completely impossible happening not raise any red flags?

If they had established that each person is witnessing their own unique tailored version of the simulation, then that would be a valid justification. But they make it very clear everyone is experiencing the same thing. Nobody as much as reacts to the Blue Midget Dance. That would require the AR program to be clouding their judgement…which completely violates its intended purpose to accurately measure their responses to a successful escape attempt, as it would be altering their behavior. And because simulating Cat doing a dance number is not remotely relevant or useful for this purpose.

I was being facetious anyway,

I know, I gathered from the quotation marks. I was saying that even though you’re joking, I constantly see that thrown out as an excuse to 100% justify every plot hole with no questions asked.

If the crew can turn into claymation, the cat can dance with blue midget.

But the claymation sequence was _not_ part of the escape simulation. They crew tried to exit the simulation and ended up in the screensaver. Not that a screensaver makes any kind of sense for an AR suite. Regardless, it doesn’t contradict the story like the Blue Midget dance because a screensaver doesn’t have to mimic reality, whereas a simulation specifically designed to measure someone’s response to a real-life escape situation for use as evidence in a criminal proceeding about things that actually happened absolutely should mimic reality. Allowing random cartoon shit happen is just muddying the useful information that can be gleaned from it.

Up to that point, nothing physically impossible has happened. Their escape attempt has been facilitated by suspicious convenience. What does an impossible dance number contribute to the simulation’s intent of measuring their response to an escape attempt that couldn’t have been handled by just finding a Blue Midget left running that already has clearance to take off?

Red Dwarf before and since Series VIII would be smart enough to take this into account.

The dance was funny and memorable, so it gets a pass from me, in the same way that Backwards makes less and less logical sense the more you think about it but it’s funny so and memorable so who really cares

Backwards consistently makes the same amount of sense (consistently inconsistent) and takes place in a bizarro alternate universe. Back in the Red takes place in a simulation designed for an expressed purpose and then does things that totally violate that purpose. The Blue Midget dance is clearly tacked in because they wanted to do it, not because it logically fits into the story.

Backwards is a lesser episode to me because of how gimmick-reliant and inconsistent it is compared to most other Red Dwarf episodes. Also, because watching things go backwards isn’t the novelty it used to be in the olden days of 1989.

This discussion has reminded me of this old article, in which John cites the baby skutters in Parallel Universe

That joke always felt extremely out of place to me in Series II. It’s a really bizarre joke to suddenly pull out of nowhere, even in an episode as silly as that one. But even though I don’t think it works, it’s only doing something especially silly for one gag. Like the Atari Pac-man screen in Officer Rimmer (which I find hilarious enough to not be bothered by).

The Blue Midget dance, however, is a major plot point that completely contradicts the rules of the story established up to that point. This isn’t elastic reality for the sake of one joke, this is bad story structure. And that shouldn’t be so surprising coming from a Series VIII multi-parter. Again, I don’t actually dislike the sequence in of itself. I think it’s cute. But it does not fit into the larger whole, and like many Series VIII scenes it comes across like a totally disconnected sketch. Particularly considering the atrocious padding throughout BitR Part 3. Holly’s Theory of Relativity line wins my award for the single lamest joke in all of the Red Dwarf.

I hope there are no typos in this, because the edit button has never worked on the forum.

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Makes about as much sense as anything else in Series VIII.

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“It was a dream sequence!”

I’m really perplexed by how often I see people argue this as if it logically justifies the Blue Midget Dance. And I never see anyone point out the obvious counter argument:

The whole AR simulation is _not_ a dream sequence where random things can just happen. It’s explicitly a simulation designed to mimic reality and show how the crew of the Starbug would behave if given the opportunity to escape, as evidence to either corroborate or disprove their story.

Why then, would that that involve anything so completely divorced from reality as the Blue Midget dance? Suddenly Cat does a literal dance number with the shuttle craft? Why that instead something more along the lines of another convenient coincidence to assist their escape, like finding a Blue Midget left running? Wouldn’t that fit the pattern of earlier events without compromising the reality of the simulation? And how come, Kochanski already having found the guards falling for their Dibbley disguises suspicious, nobody questions this reality-shattering dance routine? But later, Cat solving a riddle is enough to prove to them this isn’t reality? It’s almost as if they just wanted to do that sequence so bad they didn’t care whether it made sense or not.

There’s that rock solid Series VIII plotting for you. There’s plenty I like in Back in the Red, but it totally falls to pieces in Part 3.

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I somehow managed to beat the Oil Ocean Act 2 boss with no rings. It was a total million to one fluke and I wish I had it on video.

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The portal device in Only the Good just kind of…appeared.

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I know those old layouts like the back of my hand, and I didn’t mind. The majority of the game is new content, and it’s good stuff.

Tying this into Red Dwarf, I’m currently writing and producing a Sonic parody in which Tails is heavily influenced by Rimmer. He’s deeply resentful of being stuck in the sidekick position, power hungry, ignores his real talents in favor obsessing over what he doesn’t have, and hates that an airhead like Sonic is allowed to get all the praise while he (thinks he) does all the work.

Or maybe _I_ am just kind of like Rimmer. That would probably explain why I like writing the character type so much.

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As a longtime fan from childhood, I’ve obviously been waiting quite a while for a new Sonic game that wasn’t one of those tedious “Hold A-to-Win” boosting-based Modern Sonic ones they’ve been making for the past decade. Of course, it took hiring talent from the fanbase to make that happen, because SEGA has long ago lost its heart and soul and is just struggling in vain to replicate past games without any kind of understanding or insight on what made them fun to play.

Mania is well so designed it’s actually making me spot flaws in my beloved Sonic 3 & Knuckles that never occurred to me before; to name a more harmless example, how boring a level Angel Island is. I always considered Sonic 2 to have the unequivocally best level design of the Genesis trilogy (Sonic & Knuckles is literally Sonic 3 Part 2, not a fourth game), but Mania beats it out not only in what made it good but with a design complexity the Genesis could never have achieved on its meager double digit kBs of RAM.

The bosses are wholly more clever than anything from the original Genesis games, with the vast majority requiring you to figure out the gimmick/work out a way to indirectly attack Eggman’s robot. You can’t just jump on him easy peasy 8 times the way you can in practically all the old bosses. They’re great, and an actual challenge at times.

I could go on forever about what I love about Mania.

Mania is the real Sonic Generations, and the Sonic game we all should’ve gotten on the Saturn in 1996. God help me, I love the new Sonic game, but before Mania was announced I never thought I’d say those words again.

The best level design in Mania came from the original levels/new sections of old levels, so all SEGA have to do to top this is do what Christian “Taxman” Whitehead knew to do from the very beginning: just make a wholly new 2D Sonic game, all original levels and elements. You finally know for sure it’ll work, you don’t need to keep rehashing levels and other stuff from the past as a crutch any more.

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If the release is the same content, you could fit the whole thing on one disc and cut the production cost in half while charging the same price (or higher) for it. This is making sense now.

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There has to be some sort of difference in the releases for this to make financial sense. DVDs work in Blu-Ray players, so I don’t understand why anyone would be rushing to buy a Blu-Ray. Even if they present the program in a higher bit rate than on the DVDs, that’s only something a miserable pretentious cunt of a videophile like me would care about.

The best I can come up with is perhaps the original DVDs are out of print in Japan, and they feel a Blu-Ray rerelease would be more commercially successful than a reprint of the DVD.

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Of course, the most important thing a Remastered VIII could do is replace those awful mop heads with proper CGI Dibbley wigs.

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Perhaps holograms have the sickness and symptoms etc that they have when their back up discs are made.
That would explain why McIntyre looks so pale and dying at his funeral.

Isn’t looking pale kind of Series I’s thing?

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So…do we know if this is actually happening? It just seems like a really weird thing to do for a show shot on video tape where a full series already fits on a single DVD.

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There’s seriously never been a Marooned one? :o

Because there’s only so many variations of “This is the best episode of Red Dwarf” and “That bit’s brilliant” you can go through before you run out things to say.

Personally I’m more interested in seeing VII and VIII filled out, along with the eventual XI commentaries.

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doesn’t he also shit himself in Demons and Angels?
they mention in it that he’s been “using his uniform as a temporary latrine”

I also always took that as hyperbole.

Regardless, I don’t think either Rob and Doug expected this joke to be under scrutiny by anal-retentive nerds 30 years down the line.

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Now let’s turn this into a 5,000 reply debate about whether or not holograms can shit themselves or if it’s just another shocking example of the writers eschewing logic for cheap laughs, shall we?

Must we really assume that he literally shit himself, considering it sounds just like the kind of hyperbole the show makes use of all the time?

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“This is an episode of Red Dwarf.”

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How visually distinctive did it feel from XI? Does it still have the general blue wash to the lighting, or have they changed that around?

I’ve always felt altering the color tone of the lighting from XI’s blue would be the coolest way to make XII look very visually distinct.

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It’ll probably look very nice, if nothing else.

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I’m going to be watching the first episode with friends at some point so we can loudly comment on why it doesn’t work. BUT, if it turns out to actually be a fun show that just had a shit trailer, then we can just enjoy the show. As much as I’m expecting the whole pilot episode to feel like that trailer comedy-wise, I wouldn’t be that surprised if FOX just took the dumbest jokes to advertise the series with. Plus, pilots are often super broad on purpose, because that’s more likely to get sold to a network. Then once they have a show, the creators are free to be more sophisticated.

Really depends on how much the actual day-to-day writing of the show is handled by MacFarlane. He most likely wrote the pilot or was one of multiple writers, but I can believe that other writers could make this show into something good even if it doesn’t start out that way. I feel like he has the right ideas for how to do a Star Trek-style show, and better understands what Star Trek is supposed to be than the Kelvin films have, but I just don’t think he’s remotely the right person to write the actual scripts.

I want this to turn out to be good, because sci-fi comedy is an under-utilized genre. But I’m not expecting anything particularly clever out of the pilot even if the show finds its feet in coming episodes.

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And the marbles gag?

The way to do that joke is to have him under-react to learning he’s been eating marbles or start choking in an over the top manner, not spit them out like a normal person. It still wouldn’t be funny, but it’d feel less of a hackneyed non-joke.

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Family Guy is the laziest lump of shit on television. Which, obviously, is saying something.

I’m glad somebody else said it, because I was still afraid to go there in case I offended somebody.

For someone who doesn’t like him, I think I’m relatively well-versed in his output, as his shows always aired around other things I wanted to watch.

A friend of mine very deliberately finds supposedly well regarded Family Guy episodes and forces me to watch them so we can tear them apart. “PTV” is supposed to be a “classic” but was ungodly awful, and the episode genuinely felt like they started with a series of random gags and tried to build a story that gave them an excuse to use them all. The so-called satire on censorship really annoyed me, because they seemed to be very genuinely trying to make a point that the FCC’s censorship was preventing them from doing sophisticated comedy about adult topics – but then every time they’d resort to the cheapest, filthiest middle school bathroom humor to illustrate what the FCC wants to take away.

This show is literally aimed at fourteen year olds. I refuse to believe its genuinely targeted at an adult audience, unless that audience is stoned.

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Oh, I definitely respect MacFarlane as a voice artist. In fact he narrated the preface for this audiobook I’m listening to and I kind of wish he was doing the whole thing. He’s got a very good voice.

I just don’t think he should be allowed near a script.

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There’s jokes that fall flat, and there’s jokes that make me think “What intelligent adult could possibly find this funny?” Seth MacFarlane’s work consistently falls into the latter category for me. Even ignoring that, his shows tend to lack even coherent storytelling, instead having plots driven by randomness. I’m convinced any English professor worth his salt would tear you a new one for writing something as narratively lazy as his shows tend to be. Structurally, they remind me of the shit I wrote when I was like ten; stories that can be summarized as “This happened, then this other thing happened, and then we forget about all of it because then THIS unrelated thing happened!”

The satire is at best glaringly obvious and not remotely subtle, at its worst horrifically backwards and offensive in its treatment of serious issues. The “parodies” usually just consist of the most basic Baby’s First Fourth Wall trope subversions (which they helpfully explain to the audience), or taking a famous characters and making them talk about poop or masturbation. It astounds me when people defend his stuff as “smart” or “sophisticated” when it’s some of the most hackneyed comedy I’ve ever seen. As an aspiring comedy writer myself it legitimately makes me angry to see him make a quadrillion dollars forging a media empire off his garbage writing while millions of people praise it as sophisticated and claim I “just don’t get it”.

I do not have high hopes for the man doing a Star Trek parody, especially not after how Family Guy-esque that trailer felt. I get that comedy doesn’t trailer well, but those aren’t just weak jokes; they’re pretty awful.

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So, Star Trek with awful Family Guy jokes then?

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I’ve played almost all the way through Mania. It’s very fun and well put together, and basically what Sonic Generations _should_ have been. The little touches are great. I’m particularly amused by the way the fire shield interacts with the different levels.

Namely setting Oil Ocean Zone on fucking fire.

Now I just need XII.

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Who has time for Red Dwarf right now? Sonic Mania just came out. We haven’t had a good Sonic game in well over a decade.

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BACK TO EARTH WAS TERRIBLE BECAUSE THE AUDIENCE WASN’T LAUGHING.

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Is Kryten wearing a wig?

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What a charming man.

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Should Red Dwarf have continued after Spitting Image?

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I have to question whether or not there is a large percentage of people who are just laughing along with the studio audience when watching sitcoms and not actually at the jokes themselves.

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