MISCmedia for 2/15/01
'Red Dwarf,' The Special Edition

MANY OF YOU already know this, but I just discovered it recently: They've gone and re-edited the old episodes of Red Dwarf, the BBC's sci-fi sitcom.

When RD began in the late '80s, it could be seen as the opposite of Doctor Who, the BBC's long-running shot-on-video space opera, which at the time was slowly spiraling toward its demise after 26 seasons of low-budget heroics.

Where the often-recast Doctor was a do-gooder genius and all-around take-charge guy, RD's protagonist Lister was a drifter in character and in plot. He was stuck in an old mining ship millions of years in the future, capable only of reacting to events outside his control. He hopes to somehow get back to his own time but is repeatedly thwarted--often by his fellow passengers Rimmer (a hologram of a dead shipmate), Kryten (a moping android), Holly (the ship's computer voice), and Cat (a humanoid distantly descended from Earth house cats).

But that comparison alone doesn't explain the show's enduring appeal, to sci-fi fanatics and to PBS pledge-drive callers. RD is no mere space-opera parody. It's a real comedy show that happens to take place on a spaceship. That's why its video look is as important as its studio-audience laugh track. It's not a send-up or an attack on the space-opera genre. It respects the form's conventions, even as it plays them for farce.

RD originally ran for six seasons (only six to eight shows per season, the customary quota with most BBC "Britcoms"). Four years later, continued demand on both sides of the Atlantic (and, apparently, a possible movie deal) brought the show back into production for at least two more batches of episodes. The new shows were shot on film, with significantly slicker production values and special effects; as if to prove to potential film investors that the show's humor would still work on an expanded "stage."

But at the same time, they went back and re-edited the old shows. They added fancier FX to some scenes, and digitally altered the video footage with that clumsy Filmlook process that makes everything look dingy and hazy. The only series I ever liked that were done in Filmlook were The John Larraquette Show and Showtime's Rude Awakening. Both are sitcoms in which the lead character is a recovering alcoholic; the Filmlook matched the sense of seeing everything through a permanent hangover.

Presumably, this was done to make the old episodes look more like the recent ones, and also to sell a whole new set of videos to pledge-drive callers. But I liked the old versions better.

Too bad I can't go back in time to get tapes of the old versions. (Wait--with online auctions, I can.)

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