Red Dwarf: The Complete Guide To Almost Everything featured image

Do you remember a time, a few years either side of the turn of the century, when the internet was mostly comprised of auto-playing midi files and non-HD porn? Back then, if you searched Yahoo, or Alta Vista, or Lycos, you could find tonnes of Geocities-hosted web pages for each and every one of your favourite TV shows, which invariably featured the same handful of low-res jpegs, lists of quotes, episode guides and those ubiquitous auto-playing midi files. Then blogging came along, and we all realised that we could just write about our opinions on our favourite shows, rather than trying to provide a comprehensive mine of information, given that new-fangled things like Google and Wikipedia could do that much better.

So things like episode guides disappeared from fansites. Not entirely, but they were no longer an essential component. It was only recently that we realised that G&T had nothing even resembling such a guide - not even a list of episodes anywhere. When we started, in 2002, we launched an ambitious project of producing detailed "capsules" for every episode, but, well, you can see how that went. We got to thinking that it might be fun to try and write an episode guide now, and see where it ended up. As it turns out, it kind of got out of hand...

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Low & High: Red Dwarf Remastered featured image

It's over fifteen years ago now that Red Dwarf Remastered was unveiled to a waiting public. Ever since then, Dwarf fandom has debated: is there something good about it, something laudable? OK, OK, we've never fucking liked it. But is it time, perhaps, for some quiet re-evaluation? Are the new CGI effects maybe not as bad as we thought? Does the film effect make the show look better? Maybe that cut dialogue was actually a pretty good idea in retrospect?

Well, no. Much as I'd love to be a contrary little shit, I've just re-watched all nineteen episodes and nearly died of a brain haemorrhage. Sure, maybe there's some good changes that people have forgotten - and we'll get to those later. But most of them still leave me blinking with bemusement, or shouting at the telly, or blinking with bemusement and then shouting at the telly.

Yet... there's a part of me that feels an article like this is somewhat graceless. After all, from a UK perspective... we "won". The original versions were those first released on DVD. Repeats on TV are always the original versions as well (aside from when Dave screws up and shows the Remastered version of Marooned). Doug Naylor himself has admitted that the project didn't go as well as he'd have liked. At this point, sneering at Remastered doesn't seem quite as useful as it did fifteen years ago, when it genuinely - if unintentionally - felt like these versions were indeed replacing the originals.

But then, G&T has never really worried about being graceless. So don your pixel-proof gloves, as we present: The Top 10 Worst Things About Red Dwarf Remastered.

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I didn't think there would be commentaries on what is now known as Red Dwarf: The Bodysnatcher Collection. I thought there wouldn't be the money - and seeing as the Remastering is covered in a separate documentary, and the possible difficulties in covering the original programme whilst watching the Remastered version, I thought they might just not bother.

Boy was I wrong.

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Blimey. So, the Red Dwarf Remastered boxset is no more - instead, it's Red Dwarf: The Bodysnatcher Collection.

In fact, we should have predicted something like this was on the cards - last week's DVD Details article simply mentioned "the brand new Red Dwarf DVD box set", rather than Red Dwarf: Remastered. Ever get the feeling Andrew does these things deliberately to see if we're on the ball?

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