Hardly worth bothering really. Anybody half way interested in this series will have a hundred other sites to choose from. Don’t suppose any of you fancy some old Son Of Cliché shows do you? Naaah, course not…
1.
In ‘Kryten’ (Series 2, Show 1, 6/9/88), Rimmer’s opinion that the three salvaged skeletons have ‘less meat on them than a Chicken McNugget’ was originally censored for fear of litigation by McDonalds. This simply involved dropping the audio on the syllable ‘Mc’ and washing some rather fake-sounding audience laughter over the top to disguise the gap. The 1998 ‘re-mastered’ version of this show features no censorship whatsoever.
2.
The ‘re-mastered’ versions do, however, suffer other short edits, mainly for running time reasons (due, in part, to the extended title sequences and unnecessarily expensive new model shots), but also - since the reasons behind the ‘remastering’ were to sell the series to American TV - lines which were considered ‘too British’ have been cut or replaced. Jokes about Felicity Kendal’s bottom have been substituted with similar gags about Marilyn Monroe. A joke about a Berni Inn was cut in favour of something about a trainset. Norman Lovett, who played Holly, quite happily re-dubbed or re-shot these lines, but whose orders was he following?
[NOTE: The ‘remastering’ process, incidentally, consists of little more than playing the video picture at less frames per second: the resulting texture is supposed to resemble ‘film’, but it inevitably always looks cheap and nasty. The technical name is ‘Field Removed’ and was so unsuccessful with Red Dwarf fans that they scrapped the process for the eighth series. Mind you, that horrendous scene where The Cat dances with a space ship was a mixture of both normal video and John Hoare's Woof! site (one overlaid on the other) which left it looking like mid-70s Dr Who.]
And, on a final sad note, it’s recently been announced that the Three Bears animation team won’t be contributing to any more Red Dwarf projects as apparently Cadi, Linnhe and Bryony have discovered what their cunts are for…
