Red Dwarf is, probably, one of the greatest science fiction sitcoms about 4 characters and their ship's computer lost in the vast absurdity of the universe set aboard a 6 mile long, 5 mile tall and 4 mile wide spaceship called Red Dwarf the world has ever known. For those that have seen it, it enriched our lives with its idiosyncratic characters, quotable lines and labyrinthine sci-fi plots. We won't talk about series VII and VIII though, with the (I can barely say it without my face contorting in abject disgust) the new Kochanski - so let's just act like they never happened and not dwell on them like a shape-changing genetic mutant feeding off my negative emotions. 'K?
Here's a look at some of the finest episodes this epic space farce ever produced, giving us endless silly quotes to mutter inanely like a secret code, you bunch of shape shifting pleasure GELFs.
1. Marooned
This has to be the best ever Red Dwarf episode purely for its total simplicity, allowing for some stunning uninterrupted monologues from our two disenfranchised heroes: Rimmer & Lister, who have crashed (evacuated from the mother ship on Holly's misguided advice) and are alone together on an arctic moon in Starbug. Lister tries to survive by a combination of the heretical burning of books and Rimmer's savings, the eating of Bonjela oral gum gel and dog food (FYI Craig Charles actually did eat cat food). It was one of the only episodes to be given a 15 certificate due to Lister's description of losing his virginity age 12 on a golf course, whilst Rimmer shares his only true comparable tale in which it turns out he actually had his hand in warm compost.
2. Back to Reality
An absolute classic and general favourite, Timothy Spall stars in this 1984 inspired dystopian nightmare fantasy brought on by ink from a suicide squid. The episode employs a genius mechanism when it comes to the car chases and helicopter scenes - which the BBC couldn't possibly afford, even in its most optimistic wet dreams - by switching to reveal the hallucination and showing the crew acting out said heroics in Starbug's hull, running round and round their polystyrene crates, in a truly British homage to community centre, armature dramatic theatricals.
3. The End
The one that kicked it all off, the first episode, and while it was the end for most of the crew of Red Dwarf is was the beginning of a brilliant new sitcom. You know it's going to be something special when the first episode's full of quotable gems like "Is that a cigarette your smoking Lister?" "No. It's a chicken" and Dave's questioning of whether certain members of the crew are still alive only to be told repeatedly by Holly that "Everybody's dead Dave".
4. Thanks for the Memory
This was nearly number one for its combination of awesomely clever narrative structure and ever tragically hilarious excavations of Rimmer's misanthropic mind - all the boys wake up with a dose of amnesia, one broken leg each and 4 pages torn out of Lister's diary. The mystery deepens further with some surf board sized foot prints on an adjacent planet surface, and a grave containing Red Dwarf's black box topped with a headstone which reads 'To the Memory of the Memory of Lisa Yates' - all tantalisingly queued up to be unravelled. Although comparatively I think it's the notion of Lister owning a diary which seems the most far fetched.
5. Meltdown
Whilst Rimmer turns into that power crazed general on a planet populated by warring historical wax droids ("Don't eyeball me, Ghandi"), Lister has to watch Winnie the Pooh being executed by firing squad (after refusing the blind fold). "That is something no one should ever have to see".
6. The Inquisitor
A self repairing stimulant survives till the end of time and comes to the conclusion that there is no God, no afterlife and the only possible point to existence can be to have lead a worthwhile life. Rimmer laments "Why didn't anyone tell me this earlier, if I'd known that the point was to lead a worthwhile life I could have tried. All those charity telethons I called into, I would have given them my credit card number". A concept that has truly haunted me since I first viewed it.although not enough to actually do anything about it.
7. White Hole
"Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite...would you like a toasted teacake?" A superb episode with one of my favourite scenes which I'd like us all to pause and reflect on for a moment, it's the excellent "So what is it?" scene. "I think we've experienced this moment of time before, sir" "Only joking" "And that one." Sublime.
8. Terrorform
Simply one of the best openings scenes of a sitcom, ever. Kryton comes round after a crash, trapped and rapidly expiring, he fashions his one good hand and eye into a rescue party which turns up back on Red Dwarf. The messenger then climbs up the unsuspecting Lister's trouser leg as he sits at a computer terminal, dumb struck with fear Lister then engages in a hilarious typed conversation with the cat (who initially thinks he is playing an adventure game) which involves the lines:
Cat: I'm scared
Lister: You're scared!
Cat: You haven't seen it!!! - it's got an eye the size of a meatball.
Later on a planet's entire terrain is inspired by the landscape of Rimmer's mind. One word: Perdition.
9. Queeg
After another disastrous fail demonstrating - yet again - Holly's impotent intellect Lister is flung across the engineering room after a meteor strike, and the Red Dwarf back up computer Queeg is deployed to relieve Holly of his duties. "Look, Lister, no point feeling sorry about Holly. It's a kindness. Like a blind old incontinent sheepdog, he's had his day. Take him out to the barn with a double-barrelled shot-gun and blow the mother away. And I'm only saying that because I'm so fond of him." An archetypal cautionary tale of 'you don't know what you've got till it's gone' and how to create a dog's milk asteroid in one simple lesson.
10. Justice
"I would describe the accused as a git".
"smeg!"
Added: 15 hours ago by Glen_Beckwad
The holidays are coming. Well, according to one of the most recognisable and powerful symbols of post-industrial capitalist society, that's right Santa Claus, and that jingle that teaches my ears how to hate. Instead of the merry tune tinkling away I always imagine hearing the foreboding trailer for a new zombie movie. *in gravelly voice* "THEY'RE COMING to rip the skin from your wife's eyelids and use your son's intestines as a skipping rope..." But the holidays are ominously coming, to celebrate that strange time of year that mixes religion with greed, gluttony, lust (office Xmas party) and the other deadly sins. But that's because it's a holiday that's formed like a festive snowball rolling down the mountainside of history; starting with the pagan festival of Yuletide, before the Christians hijacked it like they do all good things, and gathering the snowy dust of Dickensian kindness and merriment, corporate mascots, and the modern onslaught of secular festivities: TV specials, Robert Zemeckis performance capture movies that desecrate the name of Back to the Future - all mixed with a dash of primitive-minded religious traditions, making a heady, toxic, mulled brew of nostalgia, farce, hypocrisy, capitalism, screaming children and joy to all mankind that leaves you feeling swollen, defeated, plucked and bewildered just like that Christmas turkey.
It's a hotch-potch of beliefs, ideals, wants and carnivalesque indulgence all sitting uncomfortably together like the image of crucified reindeer. A Frankenstein's monster wrapped in tinsel, something that has evolved over the centuries mutating and changing as our world has mutated and changed, so its greatest symbol is no longer a baby in a manger but a jolly, ruddy-faced bringer of material desires garbed in the colours of a corporation, set to a soundtrack of the lacklustre, nauseating sounds of Christmas singles past. Just another Hallmark holiday.
But what should it really be about? A festival to help us through the cold winter months when we get together with friends and family and drink and dine, a pagan feast? Or a celebration of the birth of the son of God, a celebration of the potent power of myth? Or a time for us to boost our Western economies by buying products we can't afford, to line the pockets of the men and women who can? Who knows. Just as long as I can watch another round of Christmas specials that feel like I'm being force fed mince pies until my intestines feel like a Christmas sausage. Programmes that are about as entertaining as gout. And the greasily sweet-cheese scented distaste of sleigh-bells ringing and chestnuts roasting and all the other sickeningly predictable crud that gets wheeled out, again, ritualistically. Except this is a ritual of excess and swinishness, of corporations and Christmas adverts playing up to the notion of family, love, kindness and sending a goat to Africa. When what's really going on is a world slowly, methodically, depressingly turning to sh#t. The symbol of Christmas should be of a melting snowman, covered in black soot, his smile contorted to a sullen resentment, one eye missing, a scarf hung around his neck like a noose, soon to be a puddle...
Yet we celebrate, celebrate a lie. The lie of Christianity and the lie that everything will be alright if you throw enough money at it, surround it in the warm glow of presents and shiny wrapping paper, and eat enough turkey and drink enough brandy and go to enough parties and fart your half digested bloated meals at your sleeping grandparents.
Christmas is a cliché wrapped in a cliché surrounded by clichés. I can't even bear to hear anyone say, "It gets earlier every year" any more. Yeah, well you say that earlier every f#cking year. People moaning about Christmas, just like me, is a cliché. So, I think, to stop me from choking on my own festive bile we need to take a year off, the whole Western world just ignore it for one year, all just carry on and do what you want. Nothing to see here. No need to shop for presents or act like hearing the same turgid carols again is a reason to grin like an elf that's just got a blow job off Mrs Claus. Let's not put up any decorations and see what happens. Most of us have never had a year in our lives when we weren't surrounded by its red, white and green. In most Western cultures, unless you're sitting in an abyss at the bottom of the Atlantic straits next to a giant squid and looking at the ruins of Atlantis, it's hard to avoid.
If we cancel Christmas perhaps the desolate grey expanse of the New Year with lack of funds and miserable weather might not seem so bad. So let's boycott it starting from right now. If you see some tinsel, tear it down and rip it up. If you hear some carols smash up where they're coming from, unless it's a child's face. Christmas can go shove a 20ft Norwegian spruce up its butt and go hibernate for a year, so we can collectively take a holiday from this holiday. Who's with me?
santa claus you **** where's me f#cking bike?
Added: 3 days ago by Monty the Don
We all remember the Star Wars Kid, that Thriller video by the Filipino inmates, Boxxy, Afro Ninja, the cruelly hilarious Fat Asian Kid and all the many, many others. But, I ask you, where are they now? What has become of these memes, the unwitting recipients of internet infamy?
While their time as internet celebrities is fleeting, their misadventures clogging up inboxes only until the next one comes along, on the intardweb they will live on forever. Stuck in time, captured for generations to lol at, eternally lunging towards us charged with the disillusion they're a Jedi warrior or staring scared and tormented at the camera in a variety of shooped poses, or eeking and squeaking out sentences while twitching like an epileptic Tourette's sufferer who fell in a pot of tar. But like a superhero they have their own secret identities, their humdrum Clark Kent getting on with the daily grind at their own Daily Planet.
After their international fame it's a mighty fall, have they all hit the ground running? Or did they sprain an ankle, crack a shin, or dislocate a hip after such a distance...
The Filipino inmates? Well they're probably still in jail choreographing the dance moves to High School Musical 10. Counting down the days until their release when they'll no doubt storm Broadway and take the great quantum leap from internet celebrity to fully fledged 'real' celebrity, where they'll be the talk of the town, darlings to the Hollywood luvvies - at least for a week.
Boxxy has probably gone viral, literally, like Neo she is now within the internets or at the very least /b/, and that's why nobody has heard anything from her in so long. She's disappeared because she longer exists as an annoying blinking emo and has now transcended her black clothes and eyeliner and is pure information, albeit still annoying. So perhaps she's what causes your train to be late, the traffic lights to stay red for so long or your internet connection to explode.
Afro Ninja? I like to think of him in the Tibetan Himalayas perfecting his art. Waiting until the world is ready before unleashing his awesome power, halting global warming with the flick of a nunchuck and dethroning the world's tyrants with a roundhouse to the face. HI-YAA! Let's hope he's better at solving the world's ills than he is at doing a backflip.
The Star Wars Kid? Well, what can I say after what we've all seen? Leading the Rebel Alliance against the Galactic Empire is something he does in his sleep. Anyone who can wield a golf-ball retriever like that has no doubt where his future lays - a golf caddy. Yep, he's probably a caddy to a golfing pro sweeping up golf balls like Yoda with a 9-iron up his ass, whipping through the golf course like a bumbling bolt of lightening. He pauses to give a self-satisfied look at the fairway, grins smugly, then nods his head in self-agreement and he's off! There are plenty more golfers who need plenty more golf balls retrieved. Get to it ya fat sh#t.
And poor Fat Asian Kid, what can he do? That pleading stare, "Please don't Photoshop my face and plaster it all over the internet." it says, "Please."
Maybe his time will come when the universe has had enough of us and sends that asteroid careering towards Earth - he can be our defence. We'll launch him straight at it at a high velocity and watch as the asteroid glances at us forlornly, mimicking his fat little head, before shattering into a million pieces.
If justice is served then perhaps they'll all end up in a retirement home for ex-memes, sharing urine stains with Techno Viking while Keyboard Cat tickles out a little ditty on the ivories, reminiscing on their glory days of internet stardom when for one whole week or so email inboxes across the globe were full to the brim with their cock-ups, strange behaviour and legendary dance moves.
nice related content!
Added: 6 days ago by artcore
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