Fun and Games

So, there you have it, should anyone ever ask you then you can answer with confidence from this day on: Garfield's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop today, which is remarkably similar to Ludo but with the added twist of having certain 'safe' squares which you can't be bumped back to the start from.

Curiously, Dennis the Menace's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop a few weeks ago, from the same company, which is also remarkably similar to Ludo but with the different twist of an additional token representing Dennis' Dad, which patrols a section of the board and can also send pieces back to the start.

Funny how that works.

32 on E4

It has been a weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil time to be a British fan of The Simpsons over the last few months, and I want in. The first clue something was up was when we hit mid-November and there was still no sign of Season 32 making its premiere on Channel 4, but nobody could have guessed the multitude of bombshells that would come our way in December. Disney+ would become the exclusive home for new episode premieres in the UK beginning with Season 36. Sky would be cut out of the picture entirely as far as new episodes were concerned, although they retain repeat rights for now. Channel 4 would move their airings of the show to E4 in the New Year, becoming the only place to see new episodes on linear television, beginning with the long-awaited arrival of the 2020-21 season on free-to-air TV.

Any fears that this would be a sideways move or demotion were quelled when we finally got a look at how the show would be scheduled in its new home: episodes were plentiful, with up to seven a day running between 4pm and 9pm, and the newbies were given a prominent slot not dissimilar to how Sky used to schedule them (and, it must be said, a far more convenient one for me): a double-bill every Sunday at 8pm, starting on the 12th January (with 7pm repeats on Thursday and Friday) and running until the Sunday before this post was published. The show also retains a presence on C4 with the daytime repeat block on weekends.

With the new episodes airing later than usual, you might expect them to be more lenient with regards to censorship (Season 31 having already been significantly less cut on C4 compared to the previous few years). Some things I'd warned about in my preview of the season back in September suddenly seemed like they might not be issues at all. (For effect, try reading back the fourth paragraph of that post with "The Eve of the War" playing in the background.) Was that to be the case?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? was the ninth title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, authored by the range's creator Edward Packard and first published in 1981. Its premise is exactly what the title implies: millionaire Harlowe Thrombey (president of Thrombey Plastics Company) is scared that someone is out to murder him and hires you (despite the fact the text heavily implies you're still a teenager), but before he can explain things further, he is fatally poisoned, leaving you to interrogate the four suspects -- his wife Jane, nephew Chartwell, niece Angela, and Angela's fiancé Robert.

Robot Wares

The images in this article are all nicked from eBay listings, I'm afraid to say.

At the height of its powers at the turn of the millennium, Robot Wars was one of the most merchandising-friendly shows on television, and shortly after the third series concluded in early 2000 the BBC duly obliged fans with a set of action figures -- generally referred to as "pullbacks", after the friction motors they used which meant the toys would move forwards on their own when pulled back then released (which would also allow for rotary weapons to really spin as they did so).

These toys came in three distinct waves or phases, but just to be confusing, the first wave was in two halves released over 2000 and 2001. Phase 1A, as we'll refer to it, featured all the House Robots with Hypno-Disc as the sole competitor robot. Each toy came with an accessory, and for these first figures the accessories were based on the popular Pinball trial -- the intention being that when you collected all six toys, you could recreate the entire Pinball arena and have Hypno-Disc run it against all of the House Robots (the accessories were, respectively, a stack of barrels with Dead Metal, a breezeblock wall with Hypno-Disc, the car door with Matilda, tyre targets with Sgt. Bash, the multiball release with Shunt and the see-saw ramp and sphere with Sir Killalot). These figures also featured swappable components not found on the real-life machines -- for example, Killalot's lance could be switched for a hammer. (The spiked back featured on Hypno-Disc from Series 4 onwards was specifically inspired by the interchangeable one included with the toy!)

Who Drew It?

I am going to take it as read here you don't need me to tell you which popular television series the British comic strip Junior Rotter took inspiration from.

Junior appeared in IPC/Fleetway Publications' Whizzer and Chips from around mid-to-late 1980, shortly before the fourth season of Dallas -- which promised to resolve the mystery of "Who Shot J.R.?" to a global audience -- began airing; by this point, UK viewers were able to see episodes air on the BBC just two days after their CBS transmission, and Larry Hagman, firmly established as the show's star, had made a well-publicised visit to England in the break between seasons where even the Queen Mother had asked him if he knew his character's assailant. A story parodying Dallas in a Fleetway title was pretty much inevitable.

In fact, Fleetway's big rival D. C. Thomson trod on very similar ground with Jay R. Hood ("He's Anything But Good!"), who launched in Nutty around the same time -- Nutty being an attempt by D. C. to produce a comic that was more anarchic and off-the-wall than their other publications, and a bit more like Fleetway's titles. D. C. Thomson's strip also featured a girl called Sue Helen as the character's main target, the difference being they were unrelated in the Nutty strip.

Blog Questions Challenge

There's a set of questions about blogging going around which originated here and turned into a chain letter type thing, and the existence of which I was made aware by John J. Hoare the other day.

What the hell.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It's something I'd meant to do for years, but the actual impetus was seeing Andrew Ellard asking on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd owned as a child, and if anyone remembered who the author was.

The book in question was one of the Horror Classic Gamebooks, The Curse of Frankenstein, and I was also able to let him know there was a second book in the series, Dracula's Castle, which I'd had as a child and still owned. This ended up with me tracking down a copy of the Frankenstein book, to which Andrew replied when I let him know this "Excellent! Please report your progress?" And so, needing a place to stick my review of them, this blog was born.

(At the time it wasn't called Ludicrously Niche, but had some placeholder name. I'm still not entirely thrilled with the name I settled on after a few more posts, but at some point the blog attracted a genuine following and I think I'm stuck with it now even if I could think of a better one. I have a vague idea I might commission an artist to design a logo depicting a literal reading niche at some point. But I haven't yet.)

It's So Bloody Nice!

The comic strip It's a Nice Life, drawn by Reg Parlett, originated in IPC Magazines' (later known as Fleetway Publications) weekly comic Jackpot. It was a mainstay throughout the comic's modest run of just over two and a half years from May 1979 to January 1982, and regularly finished near the top of reader polls during that time. It survived Jackpot's merger into Buster, where it lasted for over six further years, finishing in the issue dated 30th April, 1988; a pretty decent innings for a story that originated in another comic.

Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. It wasn't (and indeed isn't) unusual for strips in weekly humour comics to parody or take inspiration from current films and TV shows; other strips that ran alongside this story in Jackpot include Angel's Proper Charlies, The Incredible Sulk, The Teeny Sweeney and Jake's 7. But It's a Nice Life, a strip about Stan and Babs Nice attempting to live a sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle whilst their next door neighbours, snooty social climbers Ollie and Maddie Jones, watch on in bafflement, seems to take things a step away from finding inspiration from or spoofing The Good Life, and a step closer to, well, just being a comic strip version of The Good Life, down to not only the very similar title but also one of the characters having the same name as their equivalent in the series; that said, there were some notable differences, perhaps the biggest being that both families have children in the strip.

It's tempting to imagine that IPC might have had some kind of arrangement with the BBC in this instance; such a thing would not be without precedent, as they ran several strips based on licensed properties or even real people over the years. Perhaps most pertinently, a strip starring the Goodies had run in Jackpot predecessor Cor!! earlier in the seventies, and the short-lived School Fun (33 weekly issues, October 1983 to May 1984) featured both Coronation Street School and Grange Hill Juniors (the latter of which has a copyright notice expressly crediting Phil Redmond). Officially licensed stories continued to feature right up until the end, with a strip based on the animated series Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop being one of the last new stories to appear in Buster near the end of its life from 1994-96.

You might also notice that It's a Nice Life debuted nearly a year after the final episode of The Good Life was broadcast in June 1978, and continued for almost a decade after that. This seems unusual for a strip referencing a specific TV show; similar strips generally began whilst their inspirations were still on screens, and if their inspiration were to drop out of the zeitgeist they tended to be lucky if they lasted a year afterwards.

A thought comes to mind: what about repeats?

Gold Rush

The Dandy and the Beano -- Fifty Golden Years was published in 1987 to mark the golden anniversary of the Dandy (its sister publication the Beano having begun just a year later). It was I believe D. C. Thomson's first publication devoted to reprints of classic material from its weekly comics, and a popular one; demand far outstripped supply, necessitating several republications (the book was offered as a competition prize in weekly editions of the Beano and the Dandy for a while afterwards!), and its success led to the creation of the quarterly reprint comics Best of Beezer and Best of Topper the following year, showcasing classics from two titles which got left out of Fifty Golden Years.

In 1996 those two publications were superseded by the monthly Classics From the Comics, which as you can probably guess featured a variety of strips from across most of D. C. Thomson's humour titles (generally mixing big hitters such as Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan with a rotating selection of more obscure characters). CFtC had an impressive run of nearly a decade and a half, lasting until the end of 2010. The success of Fifty Golden Years also prompted a follow-up book, More From the First 50 Years, in 1989, and that began a tradition that continues to this day: a new hardback book of classic reprints has been published every year.

(I suspect the fact that by the time I started reading comics, there was a 64-page publication of assorted D. C. Thomson archive material available from my newsagent every month, and no equivalent for other companies such as IPC/Fleetway, is a big part of why I've always gravitated towards it more than any other comic publisher... but we can leave the amateur psychoanalysis for another day.)