Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3330 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-11-04
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: English, Esperanto
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 175 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Notoriously, and entirely appropriately, the original outline for Doug Naylor and Rob Grant's comedy SF series Red Dwarf was sketched on the back of a beer mat. When it finally appeared on our television screens in 1988 the show had clearly stayed true to its roots, mixing jokes about excessive curry consumption with affectionate parodies of classic SF. Indeed, one of the show's most endearing and enduring features is its obvious respect for the conventions of SF, even as it gleefully subverts them. The scenario owes something to Douglas Adams's satirical Hitch-Hiker's Guide, something to The Odd Couple and a lot more to the slacker SF of John Carpenter's Dark Star. Behind the crew's constant bickering there lurks an impending sense that life, the universe and everything are all someone's idea of a terrible joke.

Later series broadened the show's horizons until at last its premise was so diluted as to be unrecognisable, but in the six episodes of the first series the comedy is witty and intimate, focusing on characters and not special effects. Slob Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is the last human alive after a radiation leak wipes out the crew of the vast mining vessel Red Dwarf (episode 1, "The End"). He bums around the spaceship with the perpetually uptight and annoyed hologram of his dead bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie, the show's greatest comedy asset) and a creature evolved from a cat (dapper Danny John Jules). They are guided rather haphazardly by Holly, the worryingly thick ship's computer (lugubrious Norman Lovett).

On the DVD: Red Dwarf I arrives in a two-disc set, with all six episodes on the first disc accompanied by an excellent group commentary from Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John Jules and Norman Lovett. (There's also a bonus commentary on "The End" with the two writers and director Ed Bye.) The 4:3 picture is unimpressive, but sound is decent stereo. The second disc has an entertaining 25-minute documentary on the genesis of the series with contributions from the cast, writer Doug Naylor and producer Paul Jackson. Navigate the animated menus to find a gallery of extra features, including isolated music cues, deleted scenes, outtakes ("Smeg Ups"), a fun "Drunk" music montage, model effects shots, Web links, audiobook clips, the original BBC trailer and even the entire first episode in Japanese. --Mark Walker

DVD Description
Episodes:
1.The End
2.Future Echoes
3.Balance of Power
4.Waiting for God
5.Confidence and Paranoia
6.Me 2

DVD Special Features:
Disc 1--Cast commentary; Bonus writers' and director commentary on "The End"
Disc 2--Documentary: Launching Red Dwarf
"Drunk" featurette
Japanese episode: "The End"
Photo gallery
Deleted scenes
Model effects shots
Smeg-ups
Easter eggs
Isolated music cues
Talking book chapters
Original BBC trailer
Weblink

Synopsis
The sci-fi spoof RED DWARF finds chicken-soup-machine repairman Dave Lister (Craig Charles) as the last human being in the universe on a spaceship 3,000,000 years in the future. Along with the holographic image of his deceased bunkmate, Rimmer (Chris Barrie), and other odd characters, Lister navigates the stars on increasingly bizarre adventures. This collection includes the first six episodes of the series: "The End," "Future Echoes," "Balance of Power," "Waiting for God," "Confidence and Paranoia," and "ME2."

Customer Reviews

Reaches beyond a five star universe
It's easy to dismiss this as not the 'best' of Red Dwarf - the characters, situations, production quality, and the writing all become more confident and more exuberant in future series. But this is the starting point. Without these ground-breaking and scene-setting episodes, there would have been no more.

The BBC was highly suspicious of anything with a 'science fiction' cachet - and couldn't accept that space travel, in the company of a dead man, could be funny. You wonder at this reluctance. Previous SF ventures - like "Dr.Who", "Blake's Seven", "Quatermas" - had become cult classics.

But the dominant television SF was American - clean-cut, moral, highly educated crews, travelling in clean, highly sophisticated space craft with the most advanced technology known to the imagination, wearing clean clothes (mini skirts and tight, tight uniforms), and pursuing a clean, glamorous lifestyle in which they made throw away allusions to science and scientific theory (and fantasy).

Red Dwarf is a mucky great space freighter ... the sort of thing you could imagine getting stuck behind just when you were planning on going into warp speed. It was crewed by misfits and rejects. No sane person on earth would employ these people, so they ended up as the crew of this hulk, enduring the boring routines and hazards of space. The best their technology could manage was a talking, existential toaster ... and other devices which made an art out of dysfunction (not least, the ship's computer). This is the working class in space - mucky slobs, boiler suits, not a Shakespearean Company accent in earshot ... and a real Scottish engineer who beamed beautifully.

The potency of Red Dwarf lies in its claustrophobia and the iconoclasm of its setting and theme. We're aboard a freighter the size of a city, wandering alone (?) in the vast infinity of space ... and we have a slob who doesn't appear to have a change of clothing, sharing a cell and bunk beds with a dead man. It stands in marked contrast to the glitz and glamour of other images of space travel.

This is a low budget production - tight sets, no special effects, small cast. "Don't make it look like a space ship", the BBC told the writers, as if a mainstream audience might be convinced it was 'legitimate' comedy. It's strength is in the interplay of the characters. Episode by episode, they will grow, become transformed. Episode by episode Grant & Naylor become more confident, more outrageous. They take the tension between Lister and Rimmer (and the two actors didn't exactly get on, off camera), and stretch it to comic extremes. What starts as a comedy of space-manners will, in later series, push the boundaries of science fiction and make ironic commentary on its themes and settings.

But there is complex science and philosophy from the outset. We start with two inept technicians - Lister the slob, Rimmer the pretentious jobsworth - who struggle even to maintain a soup dispenser ... yet we're aboard a spaceship which has the technology to restore life to the dead, to capture consciousness in a computer and keep the deceased alive as a hologram. The 'science' and the conceits which will make the series work are introduced early.

Television channels are reluctant to invest in science fiction - it sounds like an expensive adventure into special effects, and most people wouldn't understand the science! Red Dwarf proves that SF does not need special effects ... and that the television audience is more intelligent and more sophisticated than the programming experts are prepared to admit. Children and adults, alike, had no problem coping with the fantasies and 'science' of Red Dwarf.

Situation comedy is the hardest form of writing. It demands the creation of a believable situation, believable characters (who can be pushed to the extremes of behaviour yet still retain our sympathy and our conviction that they are, somehow, 'real' people), and enough variety of situation yet continuity of setting to maintain momentum and keep the audience involved. The situation can be pushed to extreme, can be utterly surreal, but as long as the audience is given a chance to identify with the situation and pick up its momentum, you can have classic comedy.

And classic comedy is precisely what you get. Superbly written, a fine, ensemble cast, and comedy which breaks out of the box.

The DVD extras? Well, the commentary is excellent - the cast talk you through the episodes, giving you a lot of insights into the making of the show. The rest of the extras contribute little, very little. But the show's the thing. Utterly riveting television which can be watched again and again and again.

Madcap trek through deepest space
This is the first, and, in my opinion, the best Red Dwarf series. I remember watching this when it first aired on BBC2. I hadn't intended to watch it, it just happened to be on and I remember thinking it would be rubbish. Shows how wrong I was.
Ignore the low budget sets and old fashioned `special' effects and ignore the fact that the cast comprises unknown (at that time) actors. None of that matters with such a wickedly funny script played in a wonderfully over the top manner by its stars.
The Red Dwarf is a mining ship millions of miles from home. Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is about the lowest ranked member of crew possible, senior only to the tiny robotic Scutters. Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie) is only one step above him but is highly ambitious and opinionated (as well as totally deluded about his abilities), and just loves to pull rank over Dave. The two despise each other and swap insults with unfailing regularity. When Dave is found to have smuggled a cat on board he is threatened with stasis for the remainder of the journey if he doesn't hand the creature over for extermination. Dave opts for stasis and this is where the saga of Red dwarf really starts. When he comes out of stasis he finds that something has wiped out the entire crew of the ship and he has been in stasis for 3 million years. His only company is the ships computer Holly, a holograph of his deceased, neurotic, room mate come enemy, Rimmer, and a self obsessed, humanoid creature, simply called Cat, who has evolved from Frankenstein, Lister's smuggled cat. The humour mainly focuses on the banter and sarcastic comments between Lister and Rimmer, two people who loathe each other but are forced together for company. Holly and Cat, in this first season, play low key parts but have some brilliant one liners.
This two disc set not only contains the entire first series but also a myriad of extras including deleted scenes, `smeg-ups' and commentaries by the cast. You don't have to be a sci-fi fan to enjoy Red Dwarf, just a fan of quirky, `off the wall' comedy.

Everythings gone grey
So it's finally arrived on DVD, how does it shape up all these years on? Well the sound and picture quality are fine, much better than the Blackadder DVD's which were not well mastered. The series is presented in its original form with the original 'model shots' which i think are a lot more evocative than the later CGI footage that was plastered over the remastered videos. Also Holly's dialogue is the original and the episodes just seem to flow much better without all the changes that were made to the remastered versions.

Special features are EXCELLENT!! The menus are well designed in close attention to the set design of the series, navigating menus can get tedious with some dvd's but a lot of care has been taken and it shows. The commentaries are funny and interesting, they don't just retrace ground already covered by TV specials. One slight disappointment is Rob Grant's absence from the 'Launching Red Dwarf' featurette.

I haven't checked out the DVD-rom features yet but for the sheer quality of the special features, cast, design and of course the wonderful episodes themselves this is a must have for any Red Dwarf fan, old or new.