Red Dwarf reveals a kooky new clip from The Promised Land at Comic-Con@Home

Red Dwarf, the British sci-fi comedy filmed in front of a live audience, has been as US and UK favorite since 1988. Today, the streaming service BritBox is releasing the latest installment of the franchise, the film-length feature Red Dwarf: The Promised Land.

While SYFY WIRE recently shared an exclusive clip from the film, those who tuned into the show’s Comic-Con@Home panel on Sunday got another sneak peek from the movie as well as a delightful 40-minutes of laughs and banter between panelists Chris Barrie (Rimmer), Craig Charles (Lister), Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), and the show’s creator and director, Doug Naylor.  

The panel, moderated by Kyle Anderson (senior editor at The Nerdist), kicked off with the aforementioned new clip from The Promised Land. The clip starts with Rimmer and Kryten undergoing a running gag where Kryten has to repeatedly erase his memory, much to the laughter and enjoyment of the audience. It then jumps to the crew escaping in a ship as the starbase they're on goes up in flames around them. They manage to escape, but only after Lister ejects all the engines (in his defense, they were on fire), and even after vigorously looking through the craft’s instruction manual, the crew is about to crash onto a desert moon

Check out the panel in its entirety here:

After the clip, the panelists joked and talked with each other about their experiences on Red Dwarf over the years. The anecdotes were fun and informative (this US-based journalist, for example, learned that in the UK, breaking character and laughing during a scene is called “corpsing”), but most of all, it was clear that the participants all had a strong bond that has only grown after more than three decades of working together.

“Over the years the material has been strong but the friendships have grown as well,” Charles explained during the panel. “As the friendships have grown, the egos have lessened, and it’s all become about the piece, the production, rather than about the people… I’m so glad of it, because at the end of the day, we’re all invested in Red Dwarf… the amount of emotional investment that we’ve all put into that over 30 years, I think it’s worth a mention, you know?”

The good news for Red Dwarf fans is that everyone on the panel remains invested in continuing to have future installments of the show. What those may look like, however, remains to be seen, although Naylor made clear that there wouldn’t be a final, very special episode of the series. “Nearly always when a show does its final show, it’s terrible,” Naylor said. “Where all the actors ride off into the distance… we don’t want to do that show, we just want to stop when we stop, it’s just we don’t know when we’re going to stop.”

Red Dwarf: The Promised Land premieres on BritBox today, July 26. You can catch all previous episodes of Red Dwarf on the streaming service as well.

Click here for SYFY WIRE's full coverage of Comic-Con@Home 2020.