Moonlight

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The good news is that Red Dwarf is surprisingly affordable on DVD in the US

I’m missing the episodes for I and V.

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Meanwhile in 2016, Red Dwarf is not available for streaming in the US period.

And some of my discs are lost.

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Those added starfields never did anything but distract me anyway, especially when they’d disappear every time the camera was about to move. It especially didn’t help that EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE HAD A BRIGHT NEBULA OR SHINY SPARKLY FLOATING THINGS SHOOT BY (as seen in that screencap above).

I don’t understand why people are so allergic to just showing empty space nowadays. There’s always a planet or something in every single shot.

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I noticed this many years ago from watching Re-Dwarf too many times. It doesn’t really make sense.

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He crashed into a pile of hologram crap.

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I’d love to see an entirely new costume this time. If it still goes with solid colors, III/IV green or V/VI red would suit it fine. Hell, the alternate blue Red Dwarf uniform from Ouroborus would be pretty awesome but I know that’d never happen. Again, return of the quilted jacket but in dark green would be cool, but they established in preproduction of BtE it made him look too “big” now.

Red Dwarf visually changes so much it just feels wrong to me for Rimmer’s costume to stay the same for 18 episodes straight.

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Or we could have purple like when he went softlight in Entangled.

Don’t make me crack out the screencaps and the eyedropper to show you; it’s purple and nowhere close to the normal red some clearly colorblind people have insisted to me that it is.

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Region 1 Bodysnatcher with a skutter obscuring the logo.

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Three series of the dark blue tunic is more than enough. I say they play color/costume combo again and give Rimmer a dark green quilted jacket for Series XIII.

Come on, we all know that’s a more interesting subject matter than the well-trodden Rob/Doug split.

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Rob probably wasn’t bored of red dwarf since he did write backwards soon after and that was a pretty long novel

Yeah, but solo-writing a novel at your own leisure is not at all the same experience as co-producing a TV series under massive budgetary and time restrictions. It’s like cooking yourself dinner as opposed to operating a busy restaurant.

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Yeah, but do you have SCREENCAPS AND SQUARES to back it up?

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I’m embarrassed to say that if you Google “Red Dwarf X DVD” you’ll pretty much immediately find a shitty Photoshop I did in 2009 shortly after BtE aired. I’m not linking it, but it’s the one in the second row where Rimmer has a yellow uniform and horrible smeary clonebrush hair.

These on the other hand are top-quality products. Nice job.

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Is Rob Grant the vampire?

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Looks like most people agree with me on Can of Worms than you lot.

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That opening synth sounds fucking terrible, especially since I’ve just heard the wonderful high-quality version of the real thing on the OST.

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I really enjoyed it. It just took forfucking ever to figure out to use the pig on the door.

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Hooray, I indirectly contributed to G&T.

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If you violently splatter blue and orange paint across a canvas there’s a 55% chance you’ll accurately recreate a screencap from Star Trek Into Darkness.

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Throughout Officer Rimmer, Rimmer is given distracting white flashes and glitchy sound effects that drown out his dialogue to indicate his growing ego.

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Lens flares over the skutter’s turn signal.

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Imagine how terrible the underwater stuff in Back to Reality would look, especially with an all-new CGI Despair Squid.

I can’t even make a joke, it’s too depressing for words.

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Poorly paste a shitton of CGI maggots over the low strawberry.

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>I just don’t watch it.

I’ll have way more fun chopping bits out than I ever will watching what I leave in.

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Just for the record, here’s the complete changelog of the entire project so far:

Cut – Entire opening prison scene. 5 minutes approx right off the bat. There’s really no reason for this to be here except to show off to that they’re doing Rimmer/Lister bunkroom scenes again. It’s not any good and it gets in the way.

Cut – Compressed the opening shots of Starbug approaching Red Dwarf.

Cut – Unnecessary Holly fluff. Contributes nothing and isn’t funny enough to justify interrupting what is supposed to be a fast, exciting scene.

Cut – “Brown Alert”. We’ve seen similar, better jokes in the past.

Cut – Cat saying he doesn’t always get through stop signs in one sitting. Hahahahahah. Get it? Because he’s literally retarded now.

Cut – Unnecessary extra joke simile from Kryten about how long they’ve got left because they literally just had one in the previous line, and it was a lot better.

Cut – Kryten line about Kochanski having a teddy bear and “hurdling towards 30”. As if we could believe any of these people are under 30.

Change – Matched Holly’s motion to the shaking of the monitor on his one funny line so they’re not constantly moving in different different directions.

Cut – The following 30 seconds of scene-slowing unnecessary Holly lines.

Cut – The entire rat segment. Red Dwarf isn’t a cartoon, let’s not.

Comment – “Red Dwarf isn’t a cartoon, let’s not” is probably going to show up a lot in this changelog.

Cut – Cat doesn’t know you need engines to fly. One could argue this isn’t really unreasonable for him, but it that still wouldn’t make it funny.

Cut – The shot of Starbug’s front segment grinding across the hangar bay in a completely stationary position without tumbling. That always bothered me.

Comment – Man, that whole sequence feels really nice and tight now. I can actually buy the sense of urgency it’s supposed to have. I like it.

Cut – Removed short segment added in the Extended where Lister is annoyed that he can’t snog an unconscious woman without her consent. They immediately bail Starbug now like in the broadcast version.

Comment – We’re pretty much exactly 3 minutes in as they first meet the crew, opening montage included. That’s 11 and a half minutes into the extended version. Even though most of it is the prison scene, we’ve cut almost 3/4ths of the opening third of the episode and you’d never miss it. Expect the major cuts to slow for a while and then get common again when we hit the material from BtR Part 3.

Cut – Both pointless additions to the missing persons board joke. It was funny, don’t oversell it.

Change – The extremely pantomime megasalute is gone, as I have replaced the entire captain’s office scene with the first version shot. It feels so much more like Red Dwarf.

Change – Swapped in the deleted version of Rimmer and Lister’s scene with the positive viruses leading to Lister’s escape shot in the Series I bunkroom. Graded shot-by-shot, because if Series I was shot in black and white this scene was shot in sepia. Stars greenscreened in. Green reflection on door removed.

Cut – The second prison sequence. It does nothing but get in the way of the story.

Cut – Edited Lister’s line to end after “It is morally inexcusable to use a sexual magnetism virus” instead going on to say he was planning to use it on Kochanski next time she got drunk. I’d like the minimize the unfortunate implications of characters using a virus that forces people to uncontrollably want to have sex with you.

Cut – Lister and Kochanski in the elevator. See previous entry.

Cut – Data Doctor.

Cut – “The Dibbley family!” Please don’t.

Change – Fixed the greenscreened stars behind Hollister to actually track with the small camera movement.

Cut – “Computer programmers!”

Cut – Rimmer smashing his testicals with a hammer. Red Dwarf isn’t a cartoon, so let’s not.

Cut – The Resovoir Dogs parody, which includes the deeply painful moment where two skutters dress as Dwayne Dibbely.

Cut – The Blue Midget dance. Red Dwarf isn’t a cartoon, so let’s not. It is an awkward cut, but it’s far less awkward than Cat leading spaceships in a dance routine.

Cut – The claymation sequence. Red Dwarf actually is a cartoon here.

Cut – Most of the deeply tedious Theory of Relativity routine. I would have cut all of it, but it segways into an important bit.

Change – Undid that stupid stretched head on non-senile Holly.

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I agree with Debris.

Bollocking damn and jumbo LimeWire.

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Very weird seeing the VFX alternate between ropey and fucking fantastic. Overall I think they average out to quite good even if some shots are pretty iffy like the underwater stuff in Samsara which looks so much like a little tiny model.

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I love Ramen if I haven’t had it in weeks, but I hate it the second time in a row.

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If you freezeframe on Kryten’s eyes at various points in Series IX (especially during the Duane Dibbley sing-along in Lister First Bath – Polymorph III), you can see reptile-like slits. I can’t decide if the two vertical lines were a warning the towers were going to fall or if he’s actually the lizard who ordered the attack, but it’s definitely one of those two.

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>Ah, but is she really the pilot of Unit 2?

I rejected when I noticed the term “mind rape” was in the contract twice.

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I could see that being the case, but it seems like a really bizarre thing to use as an example.

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Are you fucking kidding me, forum?

It was MST3K silhouettes.

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>Oh that’s why there are TV shows that are people watching other TV shows

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One of them apparently had “a circus” as a location according to We’re Smegged.

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1914-1918 were the height of the show’s myth arc, and the last few episodes of 1918 wrapped up the story nicer than you could’ve possibly hoped for. It really shows that the writers didn’t want or have any intention to continue with 1919 until they were forced to. I mean look at it, tired old thing about war-devastated Germany that doesn’t have any gunfights or chlorine, what a total snoozefest. However I’m really glad it existed, because things really picked up again in 1920 with the prohibition arc the show had been teasing in earlier seasons but kinda forgot about when the nationalism stuff kicked off. 1922-1927 truly were new classics.

Should they have just skipped over it and picked up again from 1920?

Fucking duh.

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You know, they should go back and do some sort of new master that adds the numbering to every series. And annoying, distracting sound effects over Rimmer’s big scene impersonating the whole crew in Queeg.

Also I will say I wouldn’t mind nearly as much if people did the same “mistake the Roman numeral for a title” thing with any other series, it’s just that Red Dwarf X as in X the letter and not X the Roman numeral for 10 is an awful title, and I hate that some people think the show is supposed to be called that. It reminds me of watching and really liking Sonic X as a kid but being embarrassed to ever bring it up because the title was so lame.

The X-Files is a rare good use of the letter X in a title.

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Well yes, but generally the English-speaking fans will only see it labeled “Back to Earth”, and those are the people who are treating the X as a letter. I think they definitely would have labeled it Series IX from the beginning if they’d known for sure there would be more to follow. Back to Earth is definitely not a series because it’s a three-part special, but from a practical standpoint it has to be considered Series IX now (which streaming services do, but Red Dwarf is no longer on Netflix or Hulu in America) because it takes place chronologically between VIII and X. Not doing so would be absurdly confusing for first-time viewers.

But not as absurdly confusing as trying to figure out how the fuck this Red Dwarf: “X” fits into the whole mess.

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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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