Moonlight

[Moonlight]

Because it can’t be erased from memory and it’s existence has repercussions for the rest of it.

But how is the show not better off just ignoring it and moving on? Series VIII dug the show into a hole, so what would be gained from actually watching it climb back out that isn’t already accomplished by just skipping ahead to when it’s already there?

I mean new fans could literally skip over the worst season of the show and miss nothing important. That’s kind of wonderful.

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and from the bits that I’ve seen I like that it’s prepared to be silly and comedic rather than taking itself too seriously (see: Sonic Underground).

There is a huge middle ground between being too serious and being so focused on silliness that you don’t even try to write decent plots or characterization.

I think maybe it works better as a kids’ show than a show for adult Sonic fans.

The writers of the show have made it very clear they feel it’s a sophisticated cartoon for all ages, and that’s why I’m so harsh about it. It gets very unearned high praise, and because I know so many people in the fandom I was always stuck on the periphery of a circlejerk of adults in their late ’20s touting it as one of the smartest cartoons on TV. People who are WAY too old to be impressed by base-level meta humor that was already being far outdone by shows like Animaniacs when they were little kids. And Animaniacs never explained the punchline to you.

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I decided I didn’t want fans of my work being able to hunt down everything I do online.

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VIII should be erased from existence and memory

Then why are you frustrated that the show is pretending it never happened?

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Clunky as it is, it actually gets into a decent groove once you’ve hit the point where Lister and Kryten are together. But everything up to that point is extremely cringe-inducing, particularly that very first scene.

Chris Eigmann was excellent as a Rimmer-like character in Malcolm in the Middle, so I have to blame the writing for why Rimmer is so poor in this. Chris Eigmann could have been perfect if the role hadn’t been slavishly trying to copy the original Rimmer, who is deeply rooted in UK conceptions of class that don’t really exist in America. Hell, as miscast as Lister is in this, he’s actually decently Americanized. He’s written like an American equivalent to our Lister, whereas Rimmer seems to just be a bad photocopy of our Rimmer.

Why didn’t they just write an American spiritual successor to Red Dwarf instead of trying to remake it? If they actually wrote for this cast instead of trying to poorly copy the original show, they could have actually had a decent pilot here. All the worst jokes are the poorly reworded gags ripped from the original series, whereas all the best material is unique to this pilot.

I’m glad Dwarf USA failed, but I would love to see an American sci-fi sitcom in the vein of Red Dwarf. Although America is now allergic to genre comedies that aren’t overt parodies of a specific work, so I doubt we ever will.

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Instantly better for using the original theme and not that horrific synth garbage that sounded like a title screen MIDI from a game you’d find on a bootleg shovelware CD in 1994.

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I do sort of want them to resolve Only The Good… not because it deserves it but because I fucking hate continuity errors. Such a massive cop out, I suppose I’m the ‘you made your bed, lie in it’ type haha

How is it a continuity error to do a time jump?

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He had so much time on his hands that he probably redid himself to be less eerily human. If that’s your main flaw, and you’ve got three million years, surely you could take a break from all the art and wallpapering and discovery and general pissing about and fix the one main problem with yourself?

Seems like a lot of headcanon to excuse away the lack of something that was never established to be real in the first place.

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Excuse you, being a passive-aggressive autistic cunt is my shtick.

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(the opening setup is that Sonic has been captured – and *tortured* – for months after Robotnik succeeds in taking over the planet. Yes.)

A staple of faux-serious writing: just claim something terrible happened to somebody off screen, but don’t let it impact the character in any way whatsoever.

Forces has fucking rubbish level design. I’ve always disliked the gameplay of the boost system, but Forces brings it to new heights with just absurdly short and linear levels. Sonic was a platformer that made you EARN your speed by playing well, which could for example let you skip over underwater sections in levels like Hydrocity in Sonic 3. That’s almost the polar opposite of how the series now works.

The boost system has always struck me as an overglorified “hold A to win” set up; just press the button and watch Sonic go. The enemies aren’t even obstacles, they’re usually cannon fodder to charge through or a path through the air to traverse with the homing attack. It’s just so simple and unsatisfying to me. It feels like the game is almost playing itself in many sections, and I as the player have very minimal impact beyond holding the boost button. It doesn’t help that the level design is in the boost games is way more worried about making sure you’re always moving as fast as possible as opposed to actually being fun.

The 2.5D segments suffer the most, because the game engine is incredibly poorly designed for platforming. Because all your speed comes from holding a button to automatically max it out, not from actually building momentum, they don’t play anything like the genuine 2D games. Even the Classic levels lack slopes, but Generation’s faux-classic style was always a facsimile that was only superficially like playing the Genesis games. The physics and controls suffered from operating on the same engine as the Modern gameplay, which meant that the actual level design couldn’t really work anything like the Genesis games either.

Mania genuinely works like the Genesis games and in many ways outdoes them, particularly in level design. The levels achieve complexity beyond what the Genesis could have done on a meager 4 MB cartridge, and it makes them so much more replayable.

I don’t think Sonic Team has any clue how to make a Sonic game any more. The most passionate people have either left or were lost in the mass firings after the ’06 debacle, even though SEGA forcing the game to be rushed for Christmas was arguably the biggest factor in its failure. Mania has not only outperformed every single Sonic game in the past 15 years, but it was universally critically well received; even by outlets who normally have nothing but disdain for the franchise. And this was the game that was headed up by Christian “Taxman” Whitehead, a fan developer, not by Sonic Team itself.

Sonic Team needs new blood. The people in charge don’t understand the franchise, and ever since Generations they’ve been desperately pandering by rehashing old content while demonstrating they had no actual idea why those games worked in the first place. If nothing else, I want to see Taxman in charge of a subsection of Sonic Team devoted to making more classic-style 2D installments.

This franchise was my childhood. For the first time in over a decade they’ve released not only a game I liked but a game I _loved_, and I desperately want to see that trend continue. Mania was as big a deal to me as Back to Earth was back in 2009. One of my favorite things ever that I never thought I’d ever see more of, back from the dead long after any reasonable hope had died off.

Oh, and the Sonic Boom cartoon is shit. I just needed to add that because everyone on the internet seems convinced that lame, pandering garbage is somehow incredibly smart and sophisticated. It’s terrible at being Sonic, and it’s a mediocre sitcom at absolute best. I’m glad the damn thing got cancelled.

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From what I’ve seen, the people clamoring to see Kochanski again are the same people who think Only the Good had a cliffhanger worth resolving.

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Series 3000s are supposed to be lifelike! And the cast are supposed to have animal heads! And who’s this “Cat” character? Why does Doug insist on contradicting Out of Time?

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PETE PART 2 XTENDED

Hollister says “See you in ten minutes” for ten minutes, and then he sees them. The audience laughs and applauds for so long that Chris Barrie gets bored and goes home, forcing Craig Charles to fill out the remainder of the episode with his standup act.

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I was going to nominate that post for the Hall of Fame, but now that the Hall of Fame is a literal thing such nominations are probably invalid.

I’m still doing it.

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“What’s the deal with VIII audiences?”

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THE ASS DAY

It’s Naked Man from Stasis Leak’s very own episode! Can he solve the intriguing mystery of who swiped his knickers?

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I’d check for 1-star Amazon reviews. Those are often about technical issues.

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and there’s the bit at the end where they composited some foreground tat in to cover the studio floor.

screencap plz

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Notice the flickering hole in the control panel.

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…I just opened my DVD rip of the remastered episode, and…

Oh my god. That…that literally looks like something I’d have tried to make in CompositeLab Pro in 2009 and given up on when it came out shit. It doesn’t just look bad, it looks like the VFX artist gave up on it after five minutes. It doesn’t remotely match the camera movement, and the background just fucking vanishes in the middle of the shot.

The skutter in The End is a masterpiece compared to this. My God.

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Then there’s the cockpit windows in Marooned. I nearly puked. Looks like Starbug is at sea in a force 5 wind. It’s quite a feat to make something look worse than a mistake made in 1989.

Honestly, I never originally noticed the bad comping in Marooned back in the day. The neutral flat-color background doesn’t bring attention to itself. HOWEVER, trying to put a background in there absolutely brings attention to it. In fact it might have been Remastered that caused me to notice the iffiness of the original in the first place.

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Chr Bar as Rim

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TROJAN

Rimmer sews name labels onto his ship-issue condoms.

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Did they explain why the show ripped off the “Lemming Sunday” routine from Red Dwarf almost word-for-word in the first series?

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Rob Llewellyn was _years_ ago. Right now we’re much more concerned with the quite hideous thing that has happened to Rebecca Blackstone.

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BACKDOOR IN THE RED

Red Dwarf is left without oxygen after Lister leaves a screen door open. Rimmer, Kryten and a team of skutters must travel to close it before Lister suffocates. Meanwhile, the oxygen deprivation gives Cat a raging barbed erection.

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BARBED PENISMORPH

Rob Grant does a pass on the Can of Worms script.

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BARBEDPENISIA

Rob Grant guest-writes his own Cat-centric episode for Series XIII.

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Timewave is still better than Bill Pearson’s Christmas special pitch.

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Remastered looking sloppy and careless?

Surely you jest.

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GUNMEN II: A FISTFUL OF POLYMORPHS

Rejected VII script, later rewritten as the Little Britain episode “The One Where We Tediously Make Fun of Transvestites But It’s Old West-Themed”.

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SERIES IX, EPISODE 6: BACK IN THE POLYMORPH

Red Dwarf falls off a shelf and breaks, interrupting Lister’s bath. The crew are forced to coerce a polymorph into becoming another Red Dwarf, before sedating it to retain that shape. Unfortunately, the new Red Dwarf is a fucking hideous pencil. Lister takes a saw and gets to work, but upon puncturing the hull Kochanski is sucked into space. “Saw that coming,” Lister quips, and goes back to cutting the penciloid abomination in half.

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A new novel which expands on Twentica and uses the alteration of history to introduce M-Corp as the new future of Earth, and then do a massive expansion on that.

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BACK IN THE REDTUBE

Lister uncovers Rimmer’s stash of illegal trivids.

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I think Star Trek should move to the BBC next series.

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“Thoughts on the Series XII flipside cover…and Doctor Who…and Douglas Adams…and presumably a few other things as we go…”

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The first Dirk Gently book is probably the story most randomly clogged with whatever was on Douglas Adams’ mind at the time.

That sounds like my writing ten years ago.

You just need the patience to wait half a book while all the seemingly incompatible playing pieces are moved into place

THAT sounds like my writing ten years ago.

reads like the author’s having a massively indulgent, messy and explosive wank

Have you been going through my archives?!

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I’m a bit late to the bit about Douglas Adams, but my two cents on that as talented he is as a comedy writer, it’s kind of obvious that all his best work is carried by the strength of the humor and never by the storytelling. From a plot perspective, the entire Hitch-Hiker’s series is really just a series of absurdly improbable coincidences happening in succession. The plot device specifically written in to cause improbable coincidences to happen isn’t even responsible for the majority of them past the first series / book. The absurdist storytelling really hurts the drama of the later books that go for a darker tone.

Would I be correct in assuming Adams’ work on Dr. Who suffers from that as well?

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STAR KNOT

Rimmer fails his astro-navs yet again when he can’t remember what a star knot is.

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Red Dwarf should go back to the BBC for Series IX, and then return to Dave for Series XIII.

It’ll drive the casual fans crazy, but they’ll never figure it out.

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Glenn Miller was rumoured to have been abducted by aliens when his plane went missing in the 40s

I invite you to try and find anything from the late ’40s onward that hasn’t been blamed on aliens.

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Ziggy Briceman was actually the 15th President of the United States.

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THE LAST GAY

Ziggy Briceman has a big adventure. A big, hard adventure.

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Red Dwarf is probably better for Dave than it would be for the BBC.

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1. Lister Pretends to Be a Doctor in an Attempt to Molest a Stranger
2. Please Put the Mask Back On
3. The Non-Shitty Prison Episode
4. Blonde Women Are Stupid
5. The One With a Shit Ending (TOWASE)
6. Hitler Part 2

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1. Ovationtopia
2. Fathers and Fucking
3. Lister Forces Himself on Rimmer Without Consent
4. Naked Ass
5. Catch Those Genitals!
6. Masturbation2

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Perhaps more of an audience. Perhaps. But probably nothing else.

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Doug Naylor is no longer interested in the audience Series IX used to attract.

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Holospit

A special extended cut of Holoship with a 10 minute explicit sex scene between Rimmer and Commander Crane.

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They’d probably excise the original bonus features entirely, crop all the old episodes into 16:9, and accidentally include the Remastered version of Marooned but with the audio track of the unaltered episode. It claims to feature brand new commentaries, but they’re just segments of the Infinity audiobook pasted over the top of Series I episodes.

There’s one new documentary, but it’s just 52 minutes of Doug Naylor uncontrollably sobbing.

[Author]

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