Somebody

[Somebody]

This wouldn’t surprise me – plenty of shows, like Who and Life On Mars, have had upscaled BDs, why not Dwarf for better or worse? – but I wouldn’t be buying them. There’s a small difference that could be made by using professional-grade upscaling equipment on uncompressed video compared to consumer-grade real-time stuff on MPEG-2 DVD video, but enough to warrant paying for the shows all over again? I think not.

(And that’s before you consider that whatever they did to the spacial resolution of the episodes, BDs almost universally fuck up the temporal resolution of UK material because US players don’t support 50i and the BD spec doesn’t support 25p at all, so they mostly get converted to 60i or 24p)

There’s always the Star Trek – The Next Generation route which is to utlilise the original footage and re-cut the episodes. Having watched a fair few of them, it’s genuinely night and day when you put the SD and HD transfers side by side.

Uh… no, there isn’t. TNG, they went back to the original 35mm film rushes, rescanned them in HD and reedited the episodes from scratch. That literally isn’t an option for Dwarf, because it was almost all recorded on SD video. (And whether that small amount of film – model shots, primarily – even still exists is questionable. IIRC, they wanted to scan the original film passes of the small rouge one for Back to Earth, but couldn’t find them and had to hack together a low-poly CGI model they could only “shoot” from a distance on low budget)

[Somebody]

(blockquote)quote(/blockquote)
Your post

Obviously, replacing round brackets with angled ones.

[Somebody]

That was Amy Pond, not Karen Gillan!

[Somebody]

Si:
Karen Gillan as Pete Tranter’s sister.

*eyes glaze over*

RD6 was originally broadcast in October 1993.

Karen Gillan was five.

[Somebody]

Odd glitch I have LITERALLY only noticed within the past five minutes:

The forum topic list is http://www.ganymede.tv/forum/
Various links, such as the breadcrumb Home › Forums go to http://www.ganymede.tv/forums/ which doesn’t list topics.

That is all.

[Somebody]

On the reboot point… I tend to think the resurrected crew’s memories must stop about the beginning of The End. Otherwise, why isn’t Kochanski in trouble for freeing Lister from stasis? (Or, alternatively, if there was a rebuilt Lister in stasis, why aren’t the crew bamboozled by this second Lister? Not to mention the lack of a second Kochanski. And why isn’t Lister in trouble all over again about Frankenstein unless the crew haven’t discovered her “yet”.). So Macintyre’s either recently dead or doesn’t have long to go (unless he was rebuilt in perfect health)

[Somebody]

Like this

[Somebody]

It’s become one of those things though – RDX was Autumn 2012, itself three years after BtE (Easter 2009), and we’ve been told they are intending another series for yoinks now without them ever actually getting round to it.

[Somebody]

First S2 episode finished the first showing about quarter of an hour ago now. And It Was Good.

[Somebody]

Well, they got the theme tune indecipherably rendered by five superannuated whistlers on the anniversary panel show!

[Somebody]

Well, here’s the full blog post for relative posterity:

RED DWARF XI
Sunday, October 20, 2013 at 9:06PM

I get asked so often about if/when we are making another series of Red Dwarf I thought I’d better explain the situation as best I know it.

The simple fact of the matter is we are officially making another series but we don’t know when. UKTV, the copmany behind Dave who broadcast Red Dwarf X want another series and we’d love to make one.

I will be sometime in 2014, but I can’t be any more accurate that because we simply don’t know yet.

As far as the main cast are concerned, Chris, Danny Craig and myself are all very committed to making another series, Doug Naylor is working on it like a man posessed but beyond that it’s in the lap of the GELFS.

As soon as I know about when and where and when we will be making series XI, if tickets will be available for the live recordings etc, well anyone who’s followed me for a while on the Twitters will know I will harp on about it like an obsessive loon, until then, I’m afraid I know nothing.

I do know you can get The Man in the Rubber Mask book though, with a right rollicking behind the scenes look at life on the small rouge one from 1989 to 2012. Okay, cheap plug but you’ll love it sirs and ma’ams.

[Somebody]

Someday I want to meet Fuck. They know a LOT of secrets.

They live in sin with B, God of Plans.

[Somebody]

I find this casting choice strange.

It’s stunt casting, basically – different narrators at every venue, with the original radio cast filling their roles otherwise.

[Somebody]

> EDIT: Wow, that image came in way bigger than I thought it would.

Not your fault, see above. They need to change a width: to max-width: in the CSS.

[Somebody]

Re: The tiny image being giantified above. Firefox’s “Inspect Element” sez this is responsible:

td.bbp-reply-content img {
    width: 550px;
}

Maybe switch that to max-width:

[Somebody]

Comedy Central no longer interested in the sort of audience Futurama used to attract:

http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/04/22/futurama-not-renewed-comedy-central/

[Somebody]

So, what’s wrong with the BA Remastered set?

(No, please. I was waiting for that, and then someone got me the original set before it came out and I’ve never been able to justify getting it as a result…)

[Somebody]

Apparently the majority of the UK links to Fraggle Rock have been either deleted or lost entirely… I remember there was an appeal a while back for anyone who had any copies to come forward and donate them…

Isn’t it all something to do with TVS losing their ITV licence/going bust, and most of the stuff in their archive falling into uncertain ownership, meaning it’s in no-one’s interest enough to go through and catalogue it all?

But yeah, the result is that only the twelve (?) episodes that were released on VHS have accessible masters…

[Somebody]

Sounds much like our PCs at work, we’re locked out from doing anything now (despite the fact I put all these PCs and the network up here together) so we have vastly varying versions of chrome, firefox and ie on all of them :-/

Wait… I thought Chrome “phoned home” every time you ran it, and it refused to start if it found it wasn’t the latest version and the autoupdate failed?

[Somebody]

Something screwy:

[Somebody]

Everything’s rolled into the main documentary apart from deleted scenes and smeg-ups then? A two-disc release won’t have room for anything else!

[Somebody]

Reply functionality – Before if you clicked ‘Reply’ next to a comment it would just take you to the reply box. Now, it will take the content of the comment you’re replying to, wrap it up in a blockquote, and stick it in the reply box to make quoting someone a little easier. It’s something I added on a whim, so feedback is welcome.

Useful, but less so since there isn’t an equivalent on the forum! [which is, y’know, standard for fora since UBB back in the 1990s…]

[Somebody]

If I recall his column in this month’s DWM correctly, Moffat said that they just used the first draft for DoaS practically untouched (paraphrasing, “two small notes, don’t bother with a full redraft”) and told Chibnall to do episode 4 with the extra time…

[Somebody]

> Also, i’m fairly sure the ‘Red Dwarf’ sign on the far side of the model shouldn’t be sat near the exhaust.
> Or should it? I don’t know anything for sure any more.

It would have been obvious in the title-sequence fly-by if there had been such a sign.

[Somebody]

Click your heels together three times and call “Ohwhah Tagoo Siam” loudly.

[Somebody]

@Carlito:
It wouldn’t be entirely ridiculous for BBC2 to screen BtE – as Si mentioned, they’ve showed Dave stuff before, and UKTV might consider it good promotion for RDX if they had the chance – but they have no ability to demand it, they’d have to obtain the right to screen it on ordinary commercial terms. (They can’t even get BBCWW’s DVD remasters of classic DW as of right!)

[Somebody]

*looks it up*

Sir Humphrey Appleby – Simon Williams
Jim Hacker – Richard McCabe
Bernard Woolley – Chris Larkin
Claire Sutton [Special Policy Advisor] – Charlotte Lucas
The Kumranistan Ambassador – Kevork Malikyan
Jeremy Burnham [Director-General of the BBC] – Jonathan Coote
Simon Chester [BBC Presenter] – Michael Fenton Stevens

And I checked some pictures, I didn’t get the understudies :)

[Somebody]

I saw the stage show in Glasgow. It was okay, but Sir Humphrey was the only one well cast after the original. Hacker, played as more of a Gordon Brown “Big Clunking Fist” type, wasn’t bad but shouldn’t have been called “Jim Hacker”, and Bernard was just weak.

[Somebody]

They’re the same lot who sell as Sendit, Zavvi (they bought the brand when the ex-Virgin chain went belly-up) and a few other aliases, IIRC.

[Somebody]

I “saw” that back when it was first unveiled, and I ’twerent the only one…

[Somebody]

I am not! :p

[Never had any to start with…]

[Somebody]

The line was “You see? Used the regeneration energy to heal myself, but as soon as that was done, I didn’t need to change. I didn’t want to, why would I?“

And then Handy said “I’m unique – never been another like me, ’cause all that regeneration energy went into the hand. Look at the hand – I love that hand – but then you touched it. *Wham!* “

So, yeah, he used a full shot.

[Somebody]

Re: Danny Stephenson/Doctor’ regeneration limit

He’s only meant to be able to regenerate twelve times per Deadly Assassin & Twin Dilemma – and, given that one of his shots went on Handy/10.5, he should really only have one left (and River giving up “all her remaining regenerations” says there is still *a* limit). ISTR something (Five Doctors?) attributing it to a fear that too many regenerations sent a Time Lord permanently doolally.

OTOH, it’s something that there’s at least a 50/50 chance of them handwaving it away with a line like “they unlocked the limit during the Time War” (which River wasn’t in). Certainly, we know the Time Lords “resurrected” the Master during it (& RTD said in A Writer’s Tale that he believed they’d brought all the dead TLs back), and Eleven claimed he could regenerate 507 times when bugged by Clyde in his RTD-written guest appearance in SJA.

PS: Pagination. Time for new thread?

[Somebody]

> They said that they (the Doctor and River) has met him by TIA. But surely the Doctor wouldn’t have seen River again since LKH in his timeline.
> Or am I hopelessly confused?

The latter. It’s been a couple of hundred years since LKH for the Doctor, and take a look at the diary scene from TIA to see just how many times the Doctor’s met River since then…

[Somebody]

> And the BBC have to make cutbacks – so if it’s a case of cutting the budget of Who, or losing DWC entirely… well, I know which I’d prefer

Who’s from the BBC1 budget (plus assorted monies from BBC Worldwide), DWC’s from the BBC3 budget (plus whatever 2|entertain paid to put the Cutdowns on the boxsets).

Money saved from axing DWC thus won’t go to the Who budget, it’ll go to other BBC3 shows (including, yes, “Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum”).

[Somebody]

Doctor Who Confidential’s been efficiency-savinged: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/28/doctor-who-confidential-axed

[Somebody]

I think it’s more bothersome because it won’t happen consistently from now on – witness RTD’s comment in Writer’s Tale after rewatching Rose that they could never have afforded to keep doing the haze effect the sonic gave off in use during that episode. Same thing here, I imagine.

[Somebody]

> I’ve liked all of Gareth Roberts’ scripts. I *loved* The Unicorn and The Wasp. Don’t know why it… gets people moaning.

Because it was probably the most out-and-out BORING show of the entire New Series (not quite the worst, but the likes of The Last of the Time Lords crashed and burned. TU&TW was a complete damp squib).

[Somebody]

> When did the sonic screwdriver start shooting green laser beams?

Some time in the last 200 years? Been a long time for the Doctor since The God Complex (although technically the last time we saw him before this episode, chronologically speaking, was in the pre-credits clips/references of “The Impossible Astronaut”, “waving from history”.)

[And it looks like a while’s passed for Amy & Rory too, for her to start a new career modelling a perfume with a suspiciously-familiar name & tagline…]

Incidentally, has the Doctor ever looked quite as… well, pathetic as he did here:

Seriously, hiding from his old friends – who are unlikely to reject him – like that. That bit was just depressing…

[Somebody]

One of those eps is not like the others, and it’s Night Terrors. Better than the previous couple of Gatiss eps, perhaps, but that’s not saying much.

[Somebody]

Yeah, I saw that, which is why I targeted it at DWM!

Those dates were all mentioned/shown repeatedly, so there’s really no excuse.

[Somebody]

Odd. She was seven as of “Easter” 1996 (Easter Sunday was the 7th of April, so that’ll do for a baseline even if it wasn’t set on that exact date; 1996 comes from “14 years” before Amy & Rory’s wedding, which was established as 26/06/2010 and that she was seven at the time is repeatedly mentioned).

Then the whole “Doctor dies in Utah” business happens on the 22nd of April 2011 (the shooting itself/cremation/etc actually occurs in the early hours of the 23rd of April UK time)

Then we have “all summer” pass between A Good Man Goes To War and Let’s Kill Hitler. Call that the 27th of August, since Moffat likes stuff happening on the date of transmission (Amy & Rory’s wedding, Impossible Astronaut).

So she’s no less than 22 as of LKH, even without counting her “months” in the Tardis, three months in 1969 between Impossible Astronaut & Day of the Moon, etc.

Old Amy then claims to have been stuck in Twostreams for “36 years, three months, four days of solitary confinement.”

22 + 36 = 58.

There’s no way you can get 57. And the three months, plus four+ months between her birthday and LKH, plus three months between TIA & DotM and a significant number of “months” in the Tardis on top of that makes 59 at least plausible. Someone’s not been doing their sums right at DWM :)

[Somebody]

The Girl Who’s Waiting, there.

[Somebody]

> Old Amy. I still would. And so would Rory…he had no problem with his wife being in her mid 50s :D.

OLD AMY: Controls are stuck. They’ve locked them from outside.
RORY: Can you unlock them?
OLD AMY: Yeah, give me a minute and your cutest smile. That’s the one.
RORY: Can you stop flirting with me! You’re old enough to be…
OLD AMY: I’ve known you my whole life. How many games of Doctors And Nurses?
RORY: Ssh!
OLD AMY: Don’t get coy now.

> *Late* 50’s, by my book. 58, I think.

Hard to say. If she was 7 at Easter 1996, she *should* be 22 in April 2011 (when they get off the bus in Utah). That gets screwed up by all the time she’s spent travelling with the Doctor though – months between the 25th & 26th of June 2011 alone! Then the time after Utah, which includes most of her pregnancy, followed by at least some time at home between AGMGtW and LKH and an indeterminate amount of travelling thereafter.

Probably safest to add at least a year overall, which would make her 59 (maybe even 60) after “36 years, three months, four days of solitary confinement”.

[Somebody]

Rory never had a choice – not a real one, at any rate.

Firstly, the die was cast irrevocably* when the Doctor lied about being able to take both Amys and so tricked the older one into helping to bring past-Amy to the present. After that, it was impossible for the younger Amy to become the specific old-Amy we saw in the episode and only the Tardis (with much complaint!) shielded the older Amy from blinking out straight away.

Secondly, to guild the lily, the young Amy was knocked out and didn’t regain consciousness until after the Tardis left – meaning that if they’d tried to take the older one, the younger one would have been killed by the handbots’ antibiotics as soon as they turfed her out the Tardis, leaving no younger Amy to become ANY old Amy.

And finally, Rory didn’t make the choice. He was about to open the door and damn the consequences until Old Amy gave in and told him not to.

[*Not the first divergence – the first two Amys conversation apparently went differently for the older Amy when she was on the other side – but that was Xmas Carol-style minor changes rather than the “temporal earthquake” of pulling youngAmy forward in a way they couldn’t undo.]

[Somebody]

> In ealier series, Holly and Kryten co-existed and no one thought Holly was unnecessary weight.

Depends – how much does Holly really contribute in Backwards, Camille or Dimension Jump? There are big chunks of even III and IV that she doesn’t have much to do…

[Somebody]

> Because I was bored at work, here’s Hattie’s lines from my (much beloved) Series V:

And, because I can’t sleep, parsing through these….

> Holoship

Hmm… nothing at all there that couldn’t be reassigned/dropped

> The Inquisitor

Droppable/reassignable (slight question over the “name/clearance code”, but this could be changed to a simple siren/visual warning)

> Terrorform

Ah, first scene that really needs Holly – the “We’ve got a visitor” scene can’t be reassigned to Kryten or Rimmer, since this is a result of them being off-ship, and it’d blow the second half of the scene to have it be Cat. Everything on the moon is reassignable/droppable, however.

> Quarantine

Hmmm… trickiest one. The latter two lines are droppable/reassignable, but while she doesn’t say anything particularly meaningful in the “checked/standing by” scene, Rimmer needs *someone* to react to and the other three can’t be there without blowing the later half of the episode. I suppose, in a pinch, the scene isn’t necessarily essential, and could be lost entirely…

> Demons and Angels

All droppable/reassignable

> Back to Reality

Again, one scene where she’s necessary (“Hello, for the 3000th time…” onward).

So, two definite (Terrorform, Back to Reality) and one arguable (Quarantine) scenes that require Holly in the *whole series*. No wonder they dropped her…

[Somebody]

Off the top of my head/without rewatching:
Red Dwarf I:-
The End – Rimmer in jacket, Stasis Lister, Rimmer crouching over pile of dust on floor, Lister eating dust, Lister going down red corridor to “Everybody’s dead, Dave”, Rimmer jumping through Cat, “THE BEGINNING”.
Future Echoes – Old Lister on the bed, Rimmer wigs
Balance of Power – Rimmer punching himself, “there’s no rush Holly”, John Wayne Skutters
Waiting for God – Pictures from Cat Bible, Lister with the golden doughnut, Cat Priest yelling “You weren’t there!”, Lister picking roast chicken out of garbage pod
Confidence and Paranoia – Skutter jabbing Lister in eye, Rimmer agreeing with Paranoia about Lister, Confidence’s head exploding
Me² – Rimmers exercising together, Gazpacho Soup bowl on floor, Rimmer in dress uniform

Red Dwarf II:-
Kryten – “Androids, everybody loves good”, Kryten putting makeup on skeleton, Rimmer-on-toilet painting
Better than Life – Triangular VHS, Rimmer’s dad going “You’re a total smeghead” and Cat popping in to nick cigar, Lister trying to hit golf ball, Rimmer’s hand about to be hit with hammer.
Thanks for the Memory – Gravestone, Blue Midget flying drunk, Holographic Projection Suite, “God Arnold/Dave, I love you so much”
Stasis Leak – Rimmer’s head popping out of desk, Chicken Hollister, Holly-watch, Cat/Lister/Rimmer in shower, calendar on bathroom wall, last scene with all versions in shot
Queeg – NightwatchHolly with Junior Colour Encylopedia, Queeg vs. Holly on monitor, ERASED, Holly’s final wink, Rimmer-as-Brannagan/on knees, Cat & Lister scrubbing floor
Parallel Universe – Listers in bed, Arlene groping Arnold, Cat & Dog, Hilly & lipsticked-Holly

[Somebody]

> “Limited edition”… still on sale six years after release!

Be fair – there’s been plenty of limited editions of stuff that never sold out!

Concept goes: you make a million (figuratively speaking) of something, call it “limited”, solemnly swear you’ll never make any more [without ever saying how many you DID make!] and watch the punters rush to buy it!

*got the limited edition of the series with the mini-skutter (VIII, I think). It broke.*

[Somebody]

Given that:
1) RTD scrapped the Daleks from End of Time after he found out Moffat was going to use them in S5 &
2) He wrote the Master out such that it’s nearly impossible to bring him back without bringing the whole of Gallifrey back

I’m pretty sure Moffat had no plans for the Master…

[Author]

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