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“Everybody’s Krytocracy”

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I stopped watching in Series II when they brought in that female crew to replace the GOOD characters.

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To be fair they came up with the idea that it was banned like four seasons in, and the pilot is really the only other time I remember them very explicitly mentioning Star Trek or having a cast member cameo.

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“Teleported” doesn’t remotely convey what was actually done here, but it fits better in a headline.

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You know how an early Brittas episode copied the “Lemming Sunday” routine almost word for word? Turns out it was in case Red Dwarf Series III was rendered unviewable by the production of future series and people still wanted to hear that joke.

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It is, but I’d enjoy a social media group where we could goof around and share images and the like. Unfortunately all Red Dwarf social media groups are just eight hundred people sharing the SMEG toaster per day and unironically espousing the opinion that you can’t be a true fan if you criticize the show in any way.

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I feel like a lot of people who hate the new episodes with a passion would find many issues with the classic episodes they hold in highest regard if they could rewatch them brand new today. They saw those original episodes when they were young and completely uncritical, but watch these new ones for the first time much older, with profoundly high expectations and more refined tastes.

I just have to question when I see people who consider Series VIII to be on par with Series III-V, but complain that Series XI “doesn’t feel like Red Dwarf”. If Series VIII feels like classic Red Dwarf to you, then how could you consider something much closer in every respect to not? Or maybe you’d have exactly the same complaint about Series VIII if you hadn’t first seen it in 1999 as a teenager.

Really I’m just annoyed at the kinds of fans you see in social media groups. They’re either the type who claim their favorite episode is “all of them” or the type who unironically bitch that the new episodes are terrible because they don’t look 30 years old. I wish there was one filled with non-stupid people, but I gave up that search a while ago.

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How dare this show continue to exist and bring joy to its fans. Especially since in doing so it retroactively ruins the first six series for some reason that currently escapes me.

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The ship might not have been a pencil. Thank Christ we dodged that bullet.

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Oh wow, Iain Lee IS a cunt. See I never quite knew who he was, just that everyone here said he was a cunt. Seems that’s a very apt description.

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I’m an American. I don’t know your poncy British history where lynching isn’t legal up through the ’50s.

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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”.

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“Rimmer, the only reason you hung around with those prats from the KKK is cuz you could never get a date.”

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For some reason a bunch of people were being chased down a enclosed path by a bunch of T-rexes. The details shifted and it became that this was the audience fresh from watching Pete Part 2, being chased by some sort of simulated dinosaurs after the filming was over.

I was running with them and got out, but I’m pretty sure somebody was eaten down there while I watched from a high vantage point outside the confines.

Keep your “still better than watching Pete Part 2” comments to yourself out of respect for those who died that fateful day.

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Matloff is under no illusion that his colleagues will be convinced, but he remains upbeat: “Shouldn’t we at least be checking? Maybe we can move panpsychism from philosophy to observational astrophysics.”

Scientists would look at stars behaving weirdly and work from out existing scientific knowledge in an attempt to determine the rules by which the star is behaving, and how they can be modeled and predicted reliably in advance.

This guy goes “Dude, like, what if stars have minds of their own? Like we’re all in one big beautiful cosmic neighborhood, ya dig?”

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I am a satisfied consumer of [PRODUCT]. [PRODUCT] changed my life. Everyone loves [PRODUCT]. except for complete and utter [BASTARDS].

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If there was a time where some fan-wanky ties to past episodes would be OK, it would be the potential final episode ever.

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I still think the walker Blue Midget reeks the most of “Let’s do this just because we can” out of any change in the Remastered. Even in Series VIII it was one of the most cartoonish elements, let alone crow-barred into the infinitely more restrained Series II.

I find it fair for someone to prefer the Remastered if they started on it, but if you always watched the originals then the Remastered changes feel jarringly at odds with the tone of the early series. Added Holly lines like the one about urine being caught cheating just feel totally out of place in early episodes, but right at home in those made around the time of the Remastered. Between that and bizarre additions like the Polymorph in the vents, every time I watch Remastered I feel like little pockets of Series VIII’s worst indulgences are somehow infecting earlier episodes.

I just cannot see the Remastered as its own product. I can only see it as Red Dwarf with bizarre, ill-fitting changes tacked in. Absolutely nothing the Remastered ever did has added to my enjoyment of an episode, they only serve to distract and/or annoy.

And I will argue to my grave that Red Dwarf’s original model effects look objectively better than the CGI of the Remastered. I won’t bash VII’s CGI because it’s the only way they could afford all the shots they needed, but the Remastered’s CGI is needless replacement of existing superior model shots. That’s wasting huge amounts of what microscopic budget they had on making something that looks way cheaper than what it’s replacing. I challenge even the most ardent defenders of the Remastered to look me in the eye and tell me the Remastered Bodyswap chase isn’t some of the worst spaceship effects you’ve ever seen on a TV show EVER.

Even with CG spaceships, they should have kept the Red Dwarf model shots and devoted all the time and effort on the CGI to Blue Midget and Starbug. The CGI Red Dwarf holds up incredibly poorly in close-ups, with much of the fine detail blatantly just flat textures instead of actual geometry. Add to that that complete lack of shadow, just flat omnidirectional lighting from all angles and CGI Red Dwarf doesn’t look remotely like a real, physical object. The harsh lighting and dark shadows of the Red Dwarf model shots are a huge part of what made them look so good, and the presence of actual light and shadow are why Series VIII’s CGI spaceship shots look so much better than VII’s and Remastered’s. Though the over-shininess of the Red Dwarf ship itself in VIII pretty much screams “I AM CHEAP CGI” just as much as a lack of any real lighting does.

You know, without the dozens of shots of Red Dwarf to render, they could’ve had the time to render things like Starbug with proper light and shadow, maybe even with higher resolution textures. The horrible pixelly textures are probably the worst thing about Remastered CGI, the biggest issue with the Red Dwarf ship besides the lack of lighting, and also blatantly visible every time a planet is seen in VII. Good thing VII didn’t have eighteen giant planets in every single space shot or those bad textures might’ve been extremely visible.

Why the fuck does every spacescape starting in the late ’90s need to have a billion planets and nebulas in it? Why does it always have to be so busy? I noticed XI got back in the habit of having a planet in basically every shot, but at least those planets actually looked good.

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Red Zeppelin.

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Oh shit, that was supposed to go in another topic but my browser fucked up and I went back to the wrong tab.

Presumably though, since that midsection was seen in a reshoot, XII might have it connected to the cockpit. Maybe because of the budget allocation they couldn’t afford the set as part of XI, but they could build it for XII. It’s not like any XI episodes needed the midsection except for Can of Worms, and they just built an upper deck for that. I can’t imagine they’d build the nicer set if they were only going to use it to reshoot that one scene from Can of Worms.

But that’s wild speculation trying to compensate for a massive fuckup on my part.

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Red Zeppelin.

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It’s a mining ship so as long as its primarily transporting mining equipment and ore. So I guess as of Series X it’s a vending machine ship.

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That set said “Upper Deck” on the wall, or was that just the set in the deleted scenes version?

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The fact that not only did they never show the midsection, but that every time the door opened they’d cut to an angle to hide what was behind it was confirmation enough for me.

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And Voyager made a subtle reference to Red Dwarf by having the same premise.

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As for post 9/11 faux pas’, dare I mention The Lone Gunmen WTC incident from the pilot. I bet the producers absolutely cacked their pants a couple of months later.

It drives the conspiracy theorists nuts, but they’ll never figure it out.

Because they’re deluded.

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It’s the Metric equivalent of Imperial shitload.

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The moons probably already have specific mining colonies already set up. Mining ships like Red Dwarf would delivers new equipment and supplies, and transport the mined ore to its intended destination. If you just contracted miners who were already on the moon itself to continue working, every couple years they could have a Red Dwarf-sized mining ship show up and collect all the ore.

It’s probably a lot cheaper to just make one big trip with fifty thousand fucktons of ore (and drop off the latest Starbugs and Blue Midgets and White Giants) than to constantly send smaller ships to pick up 0.5 fucktons at a time.

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Die Hard 2 suffers from being basically the same movie on a bigger scale, but I still enjoy Die Hard enough to watch it happen again at an airport. One of the things that made Die Hard 2 so effective for me was seeing them destroy a passenger airplane with some incredible model effects. Not only did I not expect to see them destroy a passenger jet, which would be a major faux pas post-9/11, but the model effects were fucking fantasic. Even really good CGI would still look too clean and artificial unless the director really knew what they were doing, but that plane wreck did not look like a model to me. I bought that as a full-sized plane actually crashing on camera.

Not to get too far off-topic, I just love model effects from the last decade or so before CGI took over (late ’70s through the very early ’90s). Special effects got so amazing, and then they started looking a lot fakier with CGI only in its infancy.

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If only I’d watched Pete more often this could’ve been avoided.

I’m still not gonna do it.

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I’m in one called “Red Dwarf Posse…!!!” (sic), and it’s generally fun but…

Today somebody said Series VII was annoying because the audience wasn’t laughing. Every day somebody discovers the SMEG appliances. Back to Earth is fair game to shit all over, but Series VIII is the exact same show as Series V

I’m sorry, I’ve gotten so used to these people I jumped the gun..

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Goddammit, I can’t even quote right. Somebody help me reinstall my core operating system.

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International Debris
Er yeah, I was referring to Archie.

I um..

Well..

This what I get for spending so much time in the Facebook groups where people don’t even know there’s going to be a Series XII.

Sorry.

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The same could be said for the Alien parody in whatever episode it was. I remember really cringing at that when it was on TV. Felt so crowbarred in. “Look, it’s like Alien! But with a penis instead of an alien!”

Whether or not it was good is a matter of opinion, but…to put it lightly, you are grossly mischaracterizing the episode.

You’re straight-up saying Polymorph being an Alien homage is on the SAME level as the random Reservoir Dogs reference in Back in the Red. There’s no comparing the two; one’s a just a simple gag, one is the actual style the episode is shot in. One is a moment that could be seamlessly cut without affecting anything, one is the overall aesthetic of the episode, and one that looks very good too. Storywise, Polymorph really is not that close to Alien, since the monster is mainly a plot device to bring about comedy. Comedy that is primarily focused on the characters, as is usually the case with this show.

And penis? Seriously? That’s your take away, that’s what stuck with you is that the emotion sucker was phallic? What happened to the characters missing their emotions, the bazookoid chase, “This isn’t a meal, it’s an autopsy”, “I’ll let myself trout”? Does “LOL IT LOOKS LIKE A DICK” outweigh all of that in your mind?

I’m not even annoyed that you didn’t like it, I’m annoyed that you’re saying it’s on the same level as that stupid Dibley fanservice slow motion walk from Back in the Red. Even if you hate both, they’re not the same thing just because they’re film references. An apple isn’t the same thing as custard just because they’re both food.

GOD. I’M SORRY EVERYONE. THIS REALLY PISSED ME OFF.

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And I have to create a new ending becasue series 7 ends on a cliffhanger, with Red Dwarf constantly changing size.

Constantly? I mean they turned the planetoid back into Red Dwarf, and then shrank it down in the beginning of Series 8. I’d hardly call one time at the beginning of Series 8 constantly. I mean if someone ate roast beef one time at the beginning of Series 8, one would hardly say that person constantly eats roast beef. No, it would be a rare nay freak occurrence.

Possibly mad?!

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I’m honestly really surprised the Empire Strikes Back reference in The Beginning worked as well as it did for me, because if before Series X you’d told me Red Dwarf was going to parody that scene in a future episode I’d probably cringe. Referencing famous Star Wars moments has become a staple of hackneyed comedy by this point because it’s so easy to get a huge reaction doing it even if there’s no actual joke or reason for it to be there, and I’m pleased they were able to able to avoid that pitfall.

But I shouldn’t be surprised, because Red Dwarf’s film references and homages have always served the story first which is arguably the best use of that type of humor in a show with grounded reality.

Well that Reservoir Dogs parody didn’t serve the story in any way, but Series VIII isn’t a show with a grounded reality.

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-Maybe add some of the deleted scenes (I will have to purchase the DVD’s first, I have only seen the episodes on Dave so far).

I also object to the idea of adding back in deleted scenes just to add back in deleted scenes. Decide based on the merit of the actual material, don’t just restore deleted scenes because you can. They were each cut for a reason, and cramming them back in haphazardly is at the very least going damage the pacing.

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If nothing else, I doubt you could cut the RoboLister stuff without breaking the episode. It leads up to the discovery of the unreality bubbles, and without that explanation you’d need to cut that whole section of the episode.

Not even Remastered would try to do something that jarring.

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That’s not my problem with it. The problem with it is that Kryten knows Lister is a human and he has seen it proved on multiple occasions (in Legion for example, Lister had his appendix removed it again, somehow, but still proves he’s a human), so there is no reason why Kryten would automatically believe that Lister is an android.

The unreality bubble removing Cat also affected their memory of him, so how does it not make sense that they’d accept the unreality where Lister is a robot? The unreality is shown to affect their minds and memory as well as the physical reality.

I’m not just thinking of ways to justify it after the fact, this is always how it’s made sense to me while watching it.

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Why? If there is something to watch, I’d imagine the majority of British fans would tune in and watch it go out, and it’ll be available online – both officially and unofficially – immediately afterwards.

Considering how many fans I see on Facebook who haven’t even watched Series XI yet, or only just did, I wouldn’t be surprised if they missed out on something like this.

What’s that? It’s not gonna be new footage at all?

As you were.

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-Cut out the crap with Lister being an android since it makes ZERO sense.

It’s almost as if it happened inside an unreality bubble.

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I’m betting you the average fan won’t see this until it turns up on the XII DVD.

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Oh, and wasn’t there a Polymorph involved?

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I’d just like to say I’m pretty sure I’ve just written the single most niche article that will ever appear on the Internet

This makes me concerned over my level in interest.

Nice article.

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If you do continue to do fan-edits, can you keep them in their original 4:3 aspect ratio? There times in the Only the Good edit where Rimmer’s entire head was cropped off.

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I do know that. I have no idea why I fucked it up so badly there.

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[quoteblock]I don’t understand why they didn’t just copy and paste a laugh from the actual recording sessions instead of stock laughter….[/quoteblock]
Because that takes slightly more than the absolute minimal possible amount of effort.

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Scully thinks it’s a 14B.

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Doesn’t “The End” open with a man being shot through the head with a sniper rifle?

But yeah, I guess Homer completely nonviolently aiming a gun at Marge’s face while trying to do a cool pose with it is much worse.

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I’ve very happy with the level of quality XI has achieved, and if XII is as experimental as it sounds I’m in for a treat.

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