"The Government Urges the Court to Allow Mr. Goodman to Continue!"

The final production draft of the script for the sixty-third and final episode of Better Call Saul, "Saul Gone", is available to read here, one of ten standout scripts that year submitted by their writers for the Emmys published on Deadline. There are a number of small tweaks and differences between the script and what ultimately ended up on screen. The opening flashback to "Bad Choice Road" opens a bit sooner, with dialogue from Kim over the phone that isn't in the broadcast version. There's a small addition to Gene's attempt to escape Omaha where he has an altercation with a homeowner, which was filmed and can be seen on the deleted scenes on the DVD. When Saul hires Bill Oakley as his advisory counsel, in the script we don't hear the start of their conversation, we only see Oakley's reaction. When the plane arrives in Albuquerque there was originally meant to be a shot of the remains of Jimmy's Suzuki Esteem in the desert, providing a link back to the "Bad Choice Road" flashback (a remnant of this idea still appears in the trailer for the episode). Various other odd lines and moments are different. There are other little touches that seem to have been thought of later on -- if you compare the establishing shots of desert scenery in the pre-titles sequence with those in the pilot of Breaking Bad you'll see how similarly they're framed, building on the final episodes' theme of things coming full-circle.

But perhaps the most important change -- at least to me -- is during the climactic scene where Saul Goodman confesses all his crimes on the stand:

Top Dad Homer

On 19 November 1999, it is announced that Tony Blair is to be a father again. Amongst the coverage of this on BBC News is this piece, which links it to recent comments from Charlie Lewis, a professor of psychology at Lancaster University, on how Homer Simpson is one of the best examples of modern fatherhood. One quote leapt out at me: "He has recently started going to parenting classes, so at least Homer is trying to be a good parent in his old age." Which recent event, precisely, did Professor Lewis have in mind when he made these comments?

Whilst the BBC News piece doesn't state the origin of the comments, a quick Google of "charlie lewis lancaster university homer simpson" brings up this Guardian piece, indicating they were made the previous day at the first national conference on fatherhood. At this time, the most recent episode was "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder", which had aired in the US four days earlier, on 14 November. And that episode does indeed have a plot where Homer tries to bond with Maggie, and in its final minutes he goes to a daddy-daughter swimming class with her. This episode would not air in the UK until the following month, but it's the only recent episode that seems to fit the bill. Even if Professor Lewis had been watching at BBC Two pace (and it seems more likely he would have looked up the most recent episodes for any developments he could cite), they were showing seasons five and six at the time, and there's nothing there that would seem to be an example unless you really stretch the definition.

Every Thursday I'm in Love

In October 1986, the fifth annual Smash Hits yearbook was published. A slight departure from the sort of thing this blog usually covers, you might think.

But on page 49 there's a photo of The Cure's Robert Smith, as part of a feature entitled Books, Batteries and the Beano. Now things might fall into place. That particular feature has been scanned in here, so you don't have to suffer with my low-quality photography for a change, but amongst Robert's possessions is an issue of the Beano:

We worked out which issue of the Beezer is in One Foot in the Algarve. We worked out which issue of the Beano is in The Comic Relief Revue Book. Can we work out which issue of the Beano this is?

Curse of the Numbers

I have found myself writing quite a lot about Fighting Fantasy of late, and one recurring element has come up: The use of items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow the reader to take a nonstandard action not expressly given by the text. So, for example, in House of Hell you can find a key with the number '27' inscribed on it; when you find a door you want to try and unlock with it, you should take the number of the section you are on at the time, deduct the key's number and turn to that numbered reference. All of the recent examples I've written about come from early entries of the series, so I thought I'd look at the fifty-ninth and final entry of the original Puffin series, Curse of the Mummy, where author Jonathan Green perhaps takes the idea to its logical extreme.

From the Topper

This is the cover of the 1968 edition of The Topper Book, the annual super-sized hardback edition of the weekly British humour comic. As is frequently the case for comics annuals, it depicts several of the weekly Topper characters together -- the different strips rarely crossed over, and getting to see all the comic's characters in the same scene was very much the Infinity War of its day -- but one of those characters is not like the others.

That's because one of them is Nancy, whose syndicated daily comic strip has appeared in American newspapers since the 30th October, 1938, initially written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller (with the authorship changing hands a number of times since Bushmiller's death in 1982), and which also appeared in the Topper by way of reprints of those strips from its first issue in 1953 up until the late 1970s.

As far as I can tell, Nancy was one of only two cases of an American newspaper daily being transplanted into a British humour comic in this way, and was presumably chosen because she didn't clash with the other strips in the Topper; Mutt and Jeff ran in the Topper's sister publication the Beezer in 1962, but this does not appear to have been a great success, as it was phased out after about a year. (Nancy started out as a "topper", which in American newspaper comics is a second comic integrated into the larger Sunday strip, but that just seems to be an amusing coincidence.) The cover of the 1968 Topper Book was the only time Nancy was featured in a cover illustration alongside other, original characters from the comic, and looks like it may have been done by a DC Thomson artist directly tracing over some original Bushmiller art; it's interesting to note that she made it onto the cover of the book with the comic's most popular and recognisable characters, ahead of Topper originals such as Nick Kelly.

Chaos Theory

In March 1983, the very second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Citadel of Chaos, was published in the UK. Having each written one half of the first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone divided their labours for the next books, and Citadel was Jackson's solo effort; Livingstone's offering, The Forest of Doom, was released the very same day.

The Citadel of Chaos is an unusual gamebook in many ways. There's the original cover art pictured above, for one thing, which was the subject of much criticism for its low quality (it isn't even clear what the monster in the foreground is meant to be, as it doesn't match any of the creatures in the game); it was provided by an artist credited only as 'Emmanuel', who has very few other professional credits to their name and about whom we know practically nothing. It became one of the very few Fighting Fantasy covers to be entirely replaced during the original series' 1982-95 lifespan, with the replacement coming from range stalwart Ian Miller, who also provided the covers for several other entries by Jackson and worked on the range right up until it was cancelled by Puffin Books.

It's also an unusual, possibly unique, book in that even if you roll the lowest possible numbers when calculating your statistics, you still have a very good chance of managing to beat the game, primarily because there is only one mandatory combat in the whole thing, and very few other STAMINA penalties outside of combat or stat checks. It only once uses Jackson's signature tactic of having items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow you to take an option not expressly given by the text, in a relatively simple way; the combination to a lock is written down somewhere and you have to turn to that number section when prompted. That isn't to say it's an easy gamebook to beat by any means -- in particular the Puzzle Boss approach to the final encounter with the master of the Citadel, Balthus Dire is excellently engineered. It's a good challenge that never reaches the hair-tearing levels of frustration some of Jackson's other books could provoke.

No Cigar

In late 1979, the Dandy Book 1980 was published in time for the Christmas market. This was the 42nd straight year such a thing had happened, and I don't have much to say about the event itself. But contained within the book is a Desperate Dan story where, put off at the prospect of paying 50 dollars for a box of six Christmas crackers (where he found a shop in the Wild West selling Christmas crackers is another matter), he decides to make his own super-crackers and, to cut a long story short, the punchline of the whole thing involves him smoking a cigar.

We must now leave 1979 behind for 1990, and the publication of the Desperate Dan Book 1991. Dan was actually relatively recently installed as the Dandy's cover star, taking over from Korky the Cat in November 1984, and this was the first of three 90s annuals he received, following one-offs in the 50s and 70s; Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Beryl the Peril and Bananaman were also on the hallowed list of DC Thomson characters popular enough to receive their own dedicated annual.

With the exception of the Bananaman ones, which were all-new (as they tied into the TV series and not the comic strip, but that's another kettle of fish), these character-specific annuals featured a smattering of new material but were principally made up of reprints from past years and various sources, recoloured and with the speech bubbles redone to bring them up to date but otherwise unaltered. And for the first latter-day Desperate Dan Book, the aforementioned story from the Dandy Book 1980 was recycled.

But here the book runs into a problem. Smoking has seemingly become a bit more of a taboo, at least in children's comics, in the eleven years since then, and the original version of the story isn't going to be acceptable. The offending object only appears in the last page and a half, and it seems a shame for a perfectly good, Christmas-themed story that will take up twelve pages to be rendered completely unusable when you only have to alter a few panels. So the cigar is going to have to be changed to something else. Something that looks like a cigar (since the last panel in particular really boxes you in), and allows you to come up with an alternative punchline. But what?

That Letter, That Letter, and That Letter

In the Red Dwarf episode "Bodyswap", originally broadcast on BBC Two on 5 December 1989, Lister (who has temporarily swapped bodies with Rimmer) and Cat are playing a game of Scrabble:

CAT: Hey-hey-hey! I've got you now, buddy! [He holds up his letter rack.] J-O-Z-X-Y-Q-K.

LISTER: That's not a word!

CAT: It's a Cat word!

LISTER: "Jozxyqk"?

CAT: That's not how you pronounce it!

LISTER: What's it mean?

CAT: It's the sound you make when you get your sexual organs trapped in something. "Jozxyqk!"

LISTER: Is it in the dictionary?

CAT: Well, it could be. If you were reading in the nude and you closed the book too quick. [He mimes this.] "Jozxyqk!"