If you’re in the US, you may very well already have your hands on the Series XI DVD/ Blu Ray. For readers in the UK the release will come on Monday, though due to a seeming cock up, you may well have seen most of the special features if you had a digital download series pass when they were released for a day on October 29th.
If we are honest, it’s something that we had slightly anticipated given the cost of there series suggested extras would be included and that they have something of a track record of releasing extras on the same day they release the last episode. Consequently we made sure to check early on the Saturday morning, but it appears that while we had a suspicion it might happen, UKTV and GNP hadn’t predicted it given that they were then pulled again.
In terms of errors, we’d suspect oversight rather than any pre plan as with the UKTV Play release schedule. It was of course one that had the result of splitting when fans could view and discuss the content.
For an all encompassing cockup, we would have to wait a couple of weeks. While the release date for the Series XI Blu-ray is Monday, some people have of course received their copies early, and it’s on the card attached to the back of these copies that a slight error was noticed.
My #RedDwarfXI Steelbook arrived… but I don't remember seeing these episodes?? pic.twitter.com/Six0UWrtxa
— Would I Lie To You? (@OllieBarrett87) November 12, 2016
Yes, somehow the steel book has gone into production with the Series XII episode titles printed. It’s something we’ve debated covering, but given that this has been shipped to distributors and fans are already receiving their copies, there seems no way of just trying to ignore it in the way we did during the run up to Series XI with instances such as a freelance journalist uploading the opening title sequence.
It quite remarkable that it’s gotten this far frankly, seeing as it must have been presumably signed off by several people, and we’d hazard a guess that there will be a few red faces or indeed arses come Monday morning. But seeing as it has gotten to this point, let’s take a quick look at the titles on the back of the cover.
- Here No Evil
- M-Corp
- Siliconia
- Time Wave
- Mechocracy
- Star Knot
With the series note airing until well into 2017, we won’t delve too far into discussion of these and we certainly won’t be linking titles to any of the set reports. What stories these titles suggest will of course doubtless be a source of much speculation over the following months, especially with a potential link in the second title to Mega Corp as mentioned in Samsara.
Fortunately not all merchandise news has been quite so face palm inducing in nature, though it’s come close. Sandbag, the Red Dwarf store operator, now appear to be shipping items at last, though obviously later than originally specified. We’ve had our issues with them but we’ve been more impressed with the products, and we’ve begun the process of reviewing the items available with more to follow very soon.
The Series XI game has also received an update with improvements for the Twentica levels and a brand new set of levels for Samsara. We’ll be covering these in a new video review soon now that the initial fixes to the Samsara levels are in place, but in the meantime you can if you haven’t already view out video review of the Twentica levels:
Of course, all of these things are various forms of merchandise that we were expecting. One we certainly weren’t however was a soundtrack album. Even less expected was the announcement on TOS on Friday that four of them were already available to download, with a fifth to follow after Series XII airs.
Rather than just being a compilation of the individual cues however, Howard Goodall has remastered the music included and combined the cues into several suites which makes for a much more enjoyable listening experience. What’s more, these also contain previously unused cues, which make the albums even more essential.
Here’s how each release breaks down in terms of what tracks are included, running time and what series they relate to:
Captain Rimmer’s Mandolin
- Captain Rimmer’s Mandolin (11:42) Material (mostly) from Series IV
- Bach to Reality (18:00) Material from Series IV & V
Eine Kleine Ductmusik –
- Eine Kleine Duftmusik (25:16) Material from Series VII
Let it Smeg –
- Let it Smeg (14:20) Material from Series X
- Red Dwarf Antique Extras (12:00) Material from Series I-III
Krysis, What Krysis? –
- Krysis, What Krysis? (40:06) Material from Series XI
The albums are available as download online and are available from the likes of iTunes for £7.99 each, though for the audiophiles among you, they are also available from CD Baby for $9.99 in a wider range of formats including a lossless FLAC version.
Obviously this means that for all four you’ll be spending somewhere in the region of £32 minimum which for what amounts to 2 CDs worth of material is reasonably expensive. The cover art also suggests that it may have been knocked up by Howard on his computer, which is a slight shame given that with album titles spoofing The Beatles and Supertramp there was some ground for amusing covers.
However that’s a niggle and in many respects paying roughly £15 for a CD worth of audio is not far removed from what you would pay in somewhere like HMV, all be it for a physical copy. Also, with Series X and XI not having had the same extras treatment as I-VIII, this is the first time we have been able to listen to an isolated version of these cues. For anyone that loves the music of the show and finds it somewhat in separable, we’d wager that this is worth the price of admission alone.
We’ll be sure to cover these again in a bit more detail in the near future, as well as looking over the fifth edition Rhapsody in Red when it is released. We’ll also be covering all of the above in a special end of series retrospective edition of The Garbage Podcast in the next few weeks. In the meantime though, while you wait for these be sure if you haven’t already to check our latest video feature breaking down the Series XI title sequence.
With the series now having concluded, we look at how many clips each episode is represented by with annotated titles and a graph. Yes, we’re that anal. And of course with a brand new title sequence, we also have a brand new update to our previous ‘All the Guitar Titles’ video, making the wall of sound ever bigger.
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