[nullhole]

RIP, thanks for the memories.

No sci fi effect has ever given me the same sense of wonder that I got from the shot of the camera slowly travelling over the gigantic ship in the Season 1/2 intro.

Btw: @dang : Grant was the co-creator, alongside Doug Naylor, who is still kicking

[nephihaha]

The intro was actually strangely eerie/bleak. I felt sorry for Lister (I think it is) out there painting the ship. There was kind of a sadness because he had lost pretty much all his friends and you could feel the vastness of space.

[djmips]

Intentional.

[nephihaha]

I know.

[teamonkey]

The practical effects in the early seasons were truly fantastic. It was never quite the same after they switched to cgi.

[nephihaha]

I've said elsewhere on the "Babylon 5" discussion that Kubrick's "2001" has aged better in many ways than Hyams' "2010" which came out many years later. In the same vein, CGI has a nasty habit of aging more quickly than practical effects. There is stuff from the nineties which looks worse than the seventies as a result.

In the case of "Red Dwarf", the genius was in having the ship be an ugly industrial environment in the vein of "Dark Star", "Alien", "Outland" etc. That allowed for sets to be built easily and cheaply. I think some of it was even filmed in a BBC canteen/cafeteria.

[benj111]

I think the main issue with CGI is that it makes it easy to have big space battles, so everything is.

You see this with TNG v DS9. TNG would have one alien ship in an episode at best. It forces you to write story. Come DS9 and you can have 50 bajillion ships on screen so they write a story to make that happen. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, DS9 and B5 are good shows, but I miss the days when Captain Picard would mull over the implications of the prime directive with a cup of tea.

[JKCalhoun]

Oh, I think they admitted (a YouTube interview I saw) that the entire premise of "Red Dwarf" was inspired by "Dark Star"—not just the ship.

[FireBeyond]

Oh yes. I remember them talking about the script and how low budget everything was. Like even the script was written to try to convince BBC it wouldn't cost much money. I think (paraphrasing) things like:

"We open on the corridor of a space ship. Space Odyssey this is not, no high tech serenity here. No, the is very much an ordinary, boring corridor. It could even have been a corridor in a TV studio..."