DVD Navigation

DVD Menus - by Andrew Ellard

19 October, 2007

Welcome to The Bodysnatcher Collection's DVD menus.

It was decided early on that we wanted to feature the remastered ships, and so Deluxe Digital - still at the forefront of the authoring - handed the CGI work this time to Chris Veale. After performing a cracking job on Tikka to Ride: Remastered it's good to see what the guy can do.

What he can do, it turns out, is pretty gorgeous.

The first DVD kicks off with a single 33-second shot. As the Red Dwarf rock guitar theme blasts out (just like the start of your other DVDs), the camera travels up, around and down the Red Dwarf ship, then follows Starbug as it whooshes past. Then it circles around the insectoid ship before rushing down a lunar landscape to find Blue Midget striding along. The Midget stops and illuminates a symbol in the rock with its headlamps: the Bodysnatcher logo.

All put together, it's pretty damn cool.

Each DVD's main menu features the relevant ship - Dwarf, Midget and Bug for Remastered series I, II and III - drifting/walking/zooming along. For the Bodysnatcher Disc, essentially 'disc one', you'll see the familiar metal canister of Arnold Rimmer's remains drifting and rotating through space.

The menus have been neatly designed to loop exactly - the last frame of each shot always ends up identical to the first frame. It may have driven Chris a little mad, but it's a nice touch for a DVD menu that has to repeat and repeat.

Aside from these new shots are a pack of still images that make up the rest of each DVD's navigation - a network of submenus and options that we only understand thanks to the brilliant guys at Deluxe. All sub-menus are based around close-up angles of the ship featured in the disc's main menu. You've never seen Blue Midget from so many angles!

As you can see from the images, it's a neat looking set. Sure, they're just a way of getting to the main content - but that doesn't mean they can't look cool.

Speaking of content, we know how much you enjoy hearing about how the chapter points for each episode will go - it is, let's be honest, the highlight of every DVD Details year. Well, prepare for a shock.

There will be no chapter-based update this time.

Obviously you're devastated, but there's a good reason for this decision: Each of the remastered episodes will feature identical chapter points to the regular episodes.

The scene access points used on the main series releases, and duplicated on the Just the Shows pack, will be retained for these discs. It keeps things simple, instinctual. The timecodes, of course, are different - that's remastering for you - but the episode/story points will be the same.

Plus, well, look how lovely your journey will be to get to them.

Finally, and sadly, we have to report the late release of the DVD in Australia. The recent production delays in the UK have had a knock-on effect, and - while we don't yet have a fixed date - you'll certainly have to wait until 2008.

More DVD Details will follow soon...

Red Dwarf: The Bodysnatcher Collection will be out in the UK on November 19th, and in Australia next year. Pre-order now!