Video DwarfCast #2 - TOS Trailer Revisited featured image

Cast your mind back to the year 2000. Series VIII is only a year old, the inevitable Red Dwarf Movie is just around the corner, and an increasing number of people now have the ability to connect their computers to their phone lines, in order to receive midi approximations of popular songs, animated "under construction" signs and slow-to-load-but-very-exciting Macromedia Flash graphics. The conditions were just right for reddwarf.co.uk to begin its two-decade-long voyage of weekly updates, bringing us such features as Doug Naylor's regular blog, updates on the new GNP series Weird City and of course the animated remake of Asso: Spanish Detective.

Or at least that was the future promised by the interactive trailer that was published ahead of TOS's big relaunch of November 2000. With the current state of the official site, coupled with the fact that Flash itself has now passed on, we assumed that this small slice of Dwarf history had been consigned to the burning bin fire of lost media. But thankfully, during the process of building our unofficial archive, we uncovered the dusty swf file. You can access it here (providing you have a Flash emulator), or if you prefer to consume your important historical documents with a side order of sarcastic nerds making snide comments, here's your guided tour:

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The state of The Official Site and why we've created reddwarf.info featured image

On 25 February 2021 it was announced that reddwarf.co.uk would be moving hosting providers and this would involve "a short break in service". Four months later it returned, with the revelation that after 22 years the traditional weekly updates would be stopping. Also mentioned was that "it turns out that rebuilding a site that can comfortably re-house over two decades' worth of content was actually a much bigger job than we thought it would be" and "At the time of writing, we're still seeing a few 404 errors when it comes to some sections".

Well, it turns out that was a bit of an understatement as it doesn't take long for anyone trying to use the site after the migration to notice that large amounts of content, images and even whole sections are either entirely gone or unnavigable through normal means. It's all well and good saying that everything is pretty much back online, but what good is a 22 year archive of news updates when the archive navigation is entirely non-functional?

Well, to cut to the chase before I go on more after the jump, here at Ganymede & Titan we've come to the conclusion that this isn't getting fixed any time soon and so we've taken matters into our own hands. Using a cunning combination of the Wayback Machine, content that is still accessible on reddwarf.co.uk itself, and a great deal of finagling we've put together a totally fresh, and working, archive of The Official Site. Presenting...

reddwarf.info

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The G&T Review of the Year 2022 featured image

Hello everyone...

Much of my time at the moment is taken up with travelling all over the internet to promote The Coral Canvass, and quite frankly, I am really enjoying it. It's great to see everyone voting, and it marks our first poll where you rate each episode out of ten instead of listing them all in order. I very much look forward to seeing more votes come in over the coming month.

Away from the happy, positive world of anniversary polls, you may have noticed that, as far as the ‘Red Dwarf’ picture is concerned, the legal battle for GNP continues to bore, while our incompetent (by design) production company is as usual hellbent on suing each other instead of making new episodes. This situation looks set to continue as the Grantists now have their man in place, a person utterly and totally suited to pushing on with the new world order’s so called ‘buttski’ programme to enslave humanity under never-ending spin-offs. Look, I know many of you must be thinking ‘Blimey, G&T has lost it big time!’, but believe me, once you can see it, you can’t unsee it! All rather worrying frankly…

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Just what the documentary ordered featured image

As Doug Naylor teased this morning, there has been some NEWS coming out of GNP towers today, in the form of more details about the previously teased TV documentary, now titled Red Dwarf: The First Three Million Years. It will be airing exclusively on Dave (obvs) this August, which gives them plenty of time to have a bit of an extra crack at that logo.

Red Dwarf: The First Three Million Years is THE definitive celebration of the most successful sci-fi sitcom of all time. Over three hour-long episodes we go on an epic journey through space and time to chart the history of Lister the lonely space-bum, Rimmer the failed hero, Kryten the spaceship-cleaning mechanoid and Cat, the vainest non-human ever to be trapped in space, through the eyes of co-creator, writer and director Doug Naylor, the cast, the crew, and celebrity fans.

I’ll not lie… at the moment, this sounds like it could very easily be a collection of all the best bits from the DVD extras, re-told and re-packaged. The mention of Doug seems to sadly exclude the inclusion Rob Grant (which would be odd given how visible he is in the Dwarf world these days) but I guess he could be categorised as ‘crew’? North One certainly have a good track record and I’m sure these docs will be well put together and worthwhile, but I’m left wondering what they will offer for the likes of people reading this. We shall see, and I’m very prepared to be pleasantly surprised. Having said that I’m certainly delighted that the show is getting such a sizable and prominent series of docs, and three hours of extra Dwarf is something I’ll never sniff at.

This is the first time a documentary has been made about Red Dwarf for television since the BBC’s Comedy Connections episode in 2004; and before that, the Red Dwarf Night documentaries of 1998.

*The Making of Back to Earth has left the chat*

In other, meta, news; G&T’s server will be undergoing some maintenance at some point Monday 22nd and Tuesday 23rd June, so if during this time you see an error then please don’t panic.

In amongst all the excitement of Twentica being unleashed to the world, the launch of the brand new Red Dwarf shop has understandably taken a back seat. But on any other day, this would be a huge deal, so let's take a closer look. The first impression is that the site is functional but attractive. Nice big pictures and prices of everything on offer on the front page, with sub-indexes divided between "clothing" and "accessories". It's a bit of a shame, however, that the pictures are quite low-res, and that there's no option to zoom in to take a closer look at the items you're expected to pay good money for. There are details you can make out in last week's TOS update that you can't actually see on the shop itself!

As for what's for sale, we have a choice of nine t-shirts (one long-sleeved, one polo, the others regular), all of which are available in S-XXL and presumably intended to be unisex. There's also two hoodies, a mug, a bag, a poster, a postcard set, a lanyard, a badge set and a keyring. It's worth noting that none of these things are actually available yet - you can order them all right now, but they're all listed as shipping in October 2016. Prices are decent, particularly for the clothing, although the lanyard and keyring seem a bit steep at £8 each, before p&p. I placed a massive order earlier, and the shipping cost seemed very reasonable, but I've since seen unconfirmed reports that there's a minimum shipping cost of £5.60 per order, no matter how small the order.

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