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It feels a lot bigger too, somehow. The 24-foot Series XI bigature doesn’t even look as big as it does. I wish there was a model of it. An 8-foot prebuilt would be nice.

Free motion-control rig included.

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I’ve seen pages, Wikipedia included, that always make sure to spell it out as “Red Dwarf X” in full every time despite numbering other series as just “Series Roman Numeral” as you would expect. They actually think the series is titled Red Dwarf X as in the letter X, and that is without a doubt the worst fucking title possible. Does BtE not being called Series IX just throw a wrench into the works and confuse everyone?

I have another questions: do people actually know Roman numerals? Because if not that would explain everything.

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I’ve also been fixing up some of the Red Dwarf Wikipedia articles due to errors like Series X being claimed to have used the “Series 8 shooting model” of Red Dwarf. The only thing people will notice I’ve done is the main article now features the XI logo, but none of the 8000 tiny things. I’m obsessive. Long story short, the most bizarre thing I’ve seen by far was the following sitting in the Production section of Demons & Angels’ article:

“This episode features the last shot of the inside of Red Dwarf until Season 8. The irony is that the ship blows up and reappears at the end, only to not be shown again until Season 8.”

An actual question is why didn’t he just post a topic about it on TOS in the wrong subforum like a normal person?

I also have a hypothesis, but it’s filthy.

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I am going to set myself on fire now.

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Duh, the movie came out in 2003. Don’t you remember the tie-in Corgi models?

I’m so glad the movie didn’t happen. A fucking reboot with Kochanski as a main character, the full crew, the pencil ship and no ten year gap for Doug to realise how bad VIII was.</quote>
While I agree very much, I could live with the pencil ship if the model shots all looked as nice as the test fly-by they did. Minus of course that stupid astronaut floating in the way, I know it’s supposed to give a sense of scale but it doesn’t.

*snorts* good one mr KyoSo sir

Ma’am I can assure you, but I don’t mind because I also assume everyone online is male.

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Backwards better than Last Human?

Nah.

No.

No, no, nope. Last Human was a much better novel. I enjoyed Backwards, but I didn’t get invested in its story the way I did with Last Human. Plus, it also provided the closest thing we’ll ever get to a true ending to Red Dwarf. The stuff with Rimmer’s damaged light bee felt like a great send off to his character.

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Let’s ask the BBC, they’re certainly still interested in the kind of audience Red Dwarf used to attract.

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Please tell me we get Give & Take today. I’ve been looking forward to this for ages.

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Sorry for the double post, but the edit button doesn’t fucking do anything.

Interesting, the American DVD is listed as being released November 8th. That’d be awesome, but there’s no way in hell.

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That temp DVD artwork still looks way better than the real one for Series X.

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Oh yeah, I remember being really confused by that since laughter sounds just about the same backwards and forwards. I figured maybe it was supposed to be “backwards” laughter?

I tend to remember stuff like the topic’s “Ha-HAHA-haha” better because it’s just repeated. I can live with one stupid laugh, but I want to punch whoever thought “Ha-HAHA-haha” should be used seventy times an episode in the goddamn throat.

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Judging from how Series VI was relying increasingly on weak running gags like the Space Corps Directives and Cat’s “Deader thans”, I bet you in the alternate universe where they didn’t split up, Series VIII is also regarded as very comedically lacking.

But I don’t think the storytelling would have ever taken such a massive nosedive as it did between VII and VIII. We’d have none of that “HEY, WE NEED A CURE FOR THIS VIRUS SO LET’S GO WALK INTO THE FUCKING MIRROR, BECAUSE EVERYTHING IN THE MIRROR IS OPPOSITE IN AN INCONSISTENT AND NONSENSICAL WAY, USING A PORTAL DEVICE THAT JUST SUDDENLY EXISTS WITH NO REASONABLE EXPLANATION AND THEN RIMMER KICKS THE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF DEATH IN THE BALLS.”

And that was still better than whatever the fuck Back in the Red Part 3 and Pete Part 2 were supposed to be.

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When watching Red Dwarf, skip right from Nanarcy to Back to Earth.

I thought of this too, but you came up with more reasons than I had. And the idea of using the resurrected crew to do a true series in pre-accident Dwarf is another one I’ve always wished they’d done.

I do think though that the Series VIII ending, minus the Death stuff obviously, could have held a lot of weight in an episode that wasn’t one big pile of nonsense. Need to cure for a virus? JUST FUCKING WALK THROUGH THE MIRROR, THEY’LL HAVE IT. Just build a portal machine using — no, fuck it, just cut to it completed. And by “everything’s opposite” we mean operating on cartoon logic. Mirror Cat is a genius, because at that point Cat’s only personality trait was being stupid. Thank god X and XI came along. Where did Cat even stay in prison, anyway?

And don’t even get me STARTED on how fucking stupid the Remastered Blue Midget was, and VIII even added little arms so it could do air guitar. Because of course they would design shuttlecraft not only with legs but able to dance. And before you go “It was a simulation!”, why the fuck would a simulation that was meant to otherwise mimic reality let you do a fucking dance number with the shuttle craft? So, logically, we must assume that Blue Midgets are just able to dance like that in real life.

You know I’ve seen people claim “Red Dwarf never took itself seriously.” Series VIII is what we get when Red Dwarf doesn’t take itself seriously. It threw all narrative integrity out the window and turned into one of those shows that thinks having jokes excuses it from adhering to any kind of internal logic. That’s the kind of shit Family Guy pulls, and NOBODY should want to be like Family Guy.

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bazookoids and the Starbug model and Skutters

Why would you torment me? Especially with the skutters, I love those little bastards. They need to be the series mascot; Red Dwarf’s proverbial Pikachu.

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My Corgi Starbug has been treated like a right dog over the years and the legs have never snapped.

I have two, and the right front leg broke off of both of them within days. It seemed oddly specific.

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I’d settle for new Corgi diecast models of Red Dwarf in the original and Series X designs, and a Starbug with swept-back legs.

Because the legs on the original one will break off if you look at them wrong.

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I’ll give them credit, they at least shot it multi-camera like an audience show. Or looking multi-camera, anyway.

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Really? I had no idea canned laughter was ever more than a very rare thing after the ’80s, let alone being used for a popular modern sitcom like HIMYM. That seems so anachronistic.

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Nice of people to say it’s accurate but I don’t really see it. A couple of shots were surprisingly exact but most of the footage in the actual title sequence was yet unseen and pretty weird and interesting it was too.

It’s mostly the opening two being identical, that really stuck out. The moment I started Twentica I thought “wait, I’ve seen this before”.

I just think it’s surprising that we had already seen that much of the opening montage in the trailers. That wasn’t at all the case with X.

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Ripping my VII DVD and I notice the second laugh in Tikka to Ride (I always watched the extended version so I didn’t know), not fifteen seconds in, is that fucking awful stock laugh laughing at the fact that Lister has just picked up a camera.

I’m planning to do a fanedit of Tikka which would include replacing all the CGI with model shots, but it now occurs to me I can also mute that goddamn laugh by swapping in the audio from the extended over it any time it appears. Since it never laughs after an actual joke, I don’t need to worry about screwing up the real audience. Since it never laughs after an actual joke, you wonder what dumbass thought it should be there.

I’d love to interpolate too and restore the video look, but from what I’ve found researching the topic that’s going to be annoyingly complicated to do without having to purchase specialty software, if it’s even possible at all.

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This was scarily accurate.

Like seriously.

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Say what you will about the superfluousness of ’60s canned laughter, it was at least well put together. You couldn’t pick out individual reused laughs, at not in any of the shows I’ve ever seen.

I need to watch the deleted scenes from Series VIII again. I want to try to compare the audience reactions to the final, if that’s at all possible.

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I hope they write “XI” in chalk.

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That was a CG matte painting, not a location shot. Somebody didn’t watch the Making Of.

Dickishness aside, I agree with you. Unless they have something way better we haven’t seen, that Starbug shot would make the perfect first shot to the XI opening titles. Especially given the similar (but not as well composited) Blue Midget fly-by that began the titles of X.

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Oh my god, I just heard THAT LAUGH that started the topic in Balance of Power Remastered.

That proves it’s copy and paste canned.

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I have no idea how I fucked up the quoting that badly, but the edit function doesn’t work.

Now I’ll look stupid forever.

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…why would they take this awful laugh and copy and paste it over the places no one laughed, even following lines that aren’t even jokes in the first place? Across an entire 8 episode series, even? I figured it had to be a real audience member because the idea of someone choosing to add that terrible laugh in seems so fucking ridiculous to me.

Look at me, again being wrong for assuming competence.

I know the VII laughter had to be edited as not to drown out dialogue, but the idea of them sweetening it just feels wrong to me. It’s totally unnecessary. Red Dwarf is not an obnoxious American sitcom like The Big Bang Theory where the audience explodes into laughter at every other line, joke or not. The audience should not feel like an entity within the show forcing everyone to pause all the time. Only the especially funny jokes should do that.

That said, VIII’s over the top audience makes more sense to me if it’s sweetened.

The one woman yelling “Woo!” at the triple thick condom line in Emohawk is pretty embarrassing.

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My inkling is that the guest star from one of the set reports (sorry, I can’t remember which) who we’re supposed to know from both drama and comedy is Hugh Laurie. He’d be a great addition to the show.

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I’d love to see the painting the ship opening used in Twentica to introduce the new series. They could finally make this shot work the way they’d originally intended, and not using terrible CGI this time.

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I find YTPs extremely tedious, but I liked this.

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You’re either incredibly simple minded or you’re just not willing to accept that this is what a lot of people think about some of the latter episodes or Red Dwarf

I was saying that I think it’s very easy to judge the performances more harshly when you’re comparing it to the older episodes than you would if you’d never seen them. I never said that everybody does this, or refused to accept people can hate new Dwarf simply because they don’t enjoy it. Of course they can. None of this was intended to discredit anyone else’s opinion. I’m prone to comparing new episodes to the old in the same way.

I’ll remind you one more time that I LIKED series X for the most part, and I also LIKED the new trailer. All of it.

None of that was directed at you. I was speaking in general. I only quoted part of your post because you mentioned the idea of people expecting the show to be the same as it was 20 years ago and that’s what I was expanding on.

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But there’s a difference between saying “wish it weren’t pantomimey” and “these characters should act like they did 20 years and five seasons ago.”

I get the feeling a lot of people are so focused on wanting the show to be identical the the classics that they end up discounting a performance as “off” not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because it’s different.

For example, Homer Simpson’s voice is now very different from it was in 1993. Personally I much prefer his voice and performance from back then, but I’m not going to say the modern equivalent is inferior. It still feels like the same character, it’s just different. Furthermore, my love for the older performance is driven by the fact that not only have I been watching those episodes all my life, they’re also far funnier.

It’s easy to say you should do it this way, but isolating an overall performance outside the context of earlier episodes and judging it purely on its own merits is difficult. You can’t unsee the classics you’ve been watching for many years.

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At the very least I want the see the painting the ship pull out used in a promo. They finally have the technology to pull it off right. The Remastered version is the closest we have to the original vision of the shot, but we all know how shit that looks.

I mean this kind of close-up shot is EXACTLY the sort of thing then new bigature was built for; I can only hope they’re also using it to recreate the fly-over credits of series I-IV, but I haven’t been able to figure out yet if it has a top or is just the side of the ship.

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You know, Doug might be waiting until November because once Series XI airs everyone online will be posting reviews, going into what they think worked and what they think failed horribly. Perhaps he wants to work out how to improve on the show based on the most common criticisms of Series XI, and write XIII with them in mind.

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I don’t think the movie would be better off being released in another medium because it’s a film script, a format paced and written totally differently from a novel or comic. And if we did see Dwarf in either of those forms, I’d much rather it be something developed with the medium in mind.

For example, were Doug to write more novels I’d like to see original stories in an entirely new continuity from the originals since Last Human properly ended the series.

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It’s been years now, but I remember starting And Another Thing. I have a memory of reading the first few chapters, but then nothing. I guess I got bored? I don’t remember thinking to myself that I was bored with it. One day I just kind of didn’t read any further.

Glowing endorsement, right there.

That said, I will definitely listen to this. Considering that it’d only be six episodes, even if it’s not particularly good I’d probably stick with it just to see where it goes. There will at least be the novelty of getting more material with the radio cast, whom I love.

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I want there to be a US release. I’m way too broke to be spending my money on steelbooks, but I’d like the steelbooks to be available to me.

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Even if they no serve no actual purpose in any of the stories, just HAVING skutters around would make the show feel more like itself again.

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I want to replace my entire movie collection with steelbooks.

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Well if they took it down, that pretty much confirms it means something.

Incidentally, a search for “skutters” on Google yields a shitty 3D render I made like seven years ago using a model I didn’t make, and searching “Red Dwarf skutters” automatically corrects to “Red Dwarf scutters” because apparently nobody has ever seen the word written down before.

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I’m not normally this pedantic, but I see EVERYONE spell it wrong. It’s as if they never even picked up Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.

Also, FUCK YES SKUTTERS MOTHER OF GOD I LOVE THOSE BROKEN PIECES OF SHIT

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“Skutter”.

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The Dwarfers time travel to the Titanic, have a lovely meal in the dining hall, and leave. Meanwhile, Taiwan Tony puts on a one-man show for the skutters.

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“Bigature” is a fucking stupid word.

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The rest of our loathes can be one giant, hedonistic flawsh flawfillment!

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I like it when Alphabet Man arches his nostrils.

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Someone to flawtch over meeeeee!

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While I admit the cracks in the show are becoming prominent by season 10 (and season 11 is actively collapsing under its own weight most of the time, especially in the godawful third act of “Saddlesore Galactica”), I didn’t tap out until 12 on my recent watch-through. Although maybe I’m being to lenient on them for feeling so much more like the classic era than the current season that I’ve been following merely the novelty of watching Simpsons episodes I’ve never seen before. Even if they’re rarely funny enough to be worth it. I’ve got nothing better to do, alright? Lay off.

Aaaaaaaand this is turning into a “when did the Simpsons stop being funny” debate. But then again those are a lot less clear cut than the same debate for Dwarf, since almost everyone can agree it crashed and burned after VII. Minus of course those who dislike VI for being too formulaic, but their opinions are bad and they should feel bad. (I’ll just state for the record here that I don’t think that that’s an unreasonable criticism, it’s just that with only six episodes it doesn’t last long enough to become repetitive in my opinion).

Now, the REAL Dwarf debate is whether it got good again, and if so in which season. This will become increasingly interesting to argue about as XI and XII come out.

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>Either way, I’m not convinced cartoonish CGI and library music really helps its cause.

But that wasn’t a library track, it was composed by Howard Goodall. It’s the same tune as the action sequence at the beginning of the episode.

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Series XI will be able to afford not one, but TWO disastrous model shoots before Doug has to step in.

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