LogFAQs > #943561653

wolfy42 posted...

but I never heard/listened to the radio broadcast. I think I will save that for when I'm traveling somewhere, it would be pretty freaking awesome actually.

Just for reference, it's about six hours long. There are 12 episodes, each one's about a half-hour long.

Since you're aware of the story from other versions, the breakdown goes like this - the show was divided into two "Phases", the Primary Phase and the Secondary Phase. The Primary Phase is the first six episodes of the show, and the Secondary Phase is technically the last five (Episode 7, in-between the two, was originally meant as a stand-alone Christmas episode). Though most people just divide it up as 6 and 6 (or about 3 hours each).

The plot of the radio episodes is basically the plot of the first two books - the first book is literally just the first four episodes of the radio show, rewritten and expanded a bit, but mostly the same things happening in the same order for the same reasons. Restaurant at the End of the Universe is episode 5-6 of the radio show and some elements from episodes 7-10, though they're in a completely mixed-up order and a lot of the radio show never made it to the books (if you listen to the radio show, things will start getting unfamiliar in the Secondary Phase episodes).

The novels then go into entirely new material starting with LUE, and just sort of become their own thing.

When they did the TV show, they filmed the six episodes in the same order as the radio show (so it's basically just the Primary Phase), but with elements from the books incorporated in (like Hotblack Desiato), so it's sort of a weird hybrid of the two. And again, because of that, the Primary Phase episodes of the radio show (1-6) are going to be fairly familiar to you, but the Secondary Phase (7-12) episodes are going to get more and more unfamiliar as you go.

They eventually did a Tertiary Phase radio show (like 25 years later and after Douglas Adams was dead), but it's mostly just an adaptation of LUE, and it directly retcons most of the Secondary Phase, so I kind of hate it.

Radio show Ford and Trillian are still my favorite versions of the characters, though. Arthur and Zaphod are the same actors as the TV show.



wolfy42 posted...

We seem to have very similar taste, so i'm pretty sure you have already watched Red Dwarf

Yeeeeessssssss.

Have seasons 1-7 on DVD. Kind of hate the show after that. Though honestly, the show sort of peaked between seasons 4-6, and took a huge blow when Craig Charles had to take a couple years off to deal with (apparently spurious) rape allegations and the Grant/Naylor writing partnership broke up.

Basically, the early seasons were a perfect blend of comedy and sci-fi, and Rob Grant and Doug Naylor admitted they both had their own strengths (Grant was the comedy guy, Naylor was the sci-fi guy). Once they split and Naylor takes full control over the show, it starts to move away from comedy and more into harder and harder sci-fi, and I get less and less interested. You can kind of see the difference in the novels as well - the first two novels are collaborations, but then the last two are split (Grant writes one, Naylor writes the other). And you can definitely tell the difference between Naylor's novel and Grant's novel.

Then the big gap between Season 8 and Back to Earth/Season X (10 years) kind of disrupts the entire feel of the show so the newer seasons don't really feel like the original ones did. It almost feels like someone pretending to do Red Dwarf rather than actually BEING Red Dwarf.

As an aside, though, I love the theme song. Not so much the jazzy version of the theme song they use in later seasons (though that's also good), but more the original, instrumental one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrNLLvAokO8

Though I also like the "fun" version with the lyrics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8b4NQhMZms

The incidental music on the show was great in general, though. It was really good at conveying mood. Especially in the moments where they were sort of letting the comedy lie to the side while they tried to gut you emotionally.



wolfy42 posted...

the books are good too

I never really liked the books. Part of it was that the tone always felt off from that of the show, but the first two at least, and they mostly explored aspects of the story I was never overly interested in.

In some ways, they felt like novels based on what the show was originally supposed to be in the first couple of seasons, not what it eventually became in seasons 3-6. It was kind of like the parts of Red Dwarf that weren't necessarily the parts that made me LIKE Red Dwarf.

Part of that's the lack of the charm that the specific actors each bring to their roles, as well as the presentation of a live-action scene as opposed to a written one. On top of which, I basically bought the books because I already loved the TV show, so my nostalgia made me judge them more harshly (sort of like the reverse of people who read books first criticizing films for being poor adaptations).
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