Get Into Jail Free

The Robot Wars Wiki is an amazing resource, thanks to its tireless editors who never stop looking for new information about the show. Here's a piece that recently came to light on the Internet Archive thanks to their diligence - the sad story of Series 3 entrants The Jailer, who successfully qualified only to withdraw on the day of filming due to a broken speed controller.

So, The Jailer had to pull out at the last minute. And diligent readers may recall there are two robots that were pulled off the substitutes bench at the last moment. Does it follow that either Steg-O-Saw-Us or Triterobot were the replacements for The Jailer? Possibly not, because we can't be sure the robots listed in that article were the only substitutes - there may be other robots who were also pulled in at the last minute but not identified as such onscreen. But wouldn't it make sense, given how late in the day The Jailer had to pull out and how late in the day those two were brought in? We're halfway to another piece of the puzzle, surely? And there must be another robot who had to pull out at the very last minute, quite possibly also on the day of filming - is their story still out there somewhere?

I CYOA What You Did There

Having been writing this blog for nearly three years now, it is perhaps surprising that this is the first time I've ever written something about the Choose Your Own Adventure series. It was a range that popularised the gamebook genre, to the point that its title is to this day used as a synonym for interactive fiction. Edward Packard, who wrote the first ever title in the series and went on to write nearly a hundred more of them, may very well have invented the idea of the gamebook with Sugarcane Island in 1969 - certainly that book was one of the very first gamebooks ever written. The historical importance of this series cannot be denied. So why has it taken me so long to get round to it?

Well, this series is absolutely fucking massive. There are 184 books in the original series alone, and once you include all the various spin-off series (variously aimed at younger and older readers, intended to be more 'educational' or scarier than the parent series, featuring licensed Disney characters, an Indiana Jones series, a Star Wars series, not to mention the early noughties revival with revised versions of the original books designed to bring them up-to-date) that number swells to well over 300. I devoured adventure gamebooks as a child, and I doubt I got through any more than a small percentage of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

And yet... many of them aren't remarkable by themselves. They generally run to just over 100 sections, there's no game system of any kind (no statistics or inventory to keep track of), and with so many entries in the series - cranked out (largely) monthly for the better part of two decades between 1979 and 1998 - it's hardly surprising that there are a fair few where the story just isn't very interesting, or there is little in the way of any real plot. You can't get anything hugely insightful out of many of the individual entries, yet trying to write a history of the entire series is an impossible task. Perhaps the most memorable feature of the books is the surprisingly gruesome and inventive deaths, and plenty of other people have had a go at archiving the best of those.

So for this post I thought I'd highlight a few of the more notable entries in the series - ones I have fond memories of reading as a child, or are notable for unexpected twists or interesting set-ups.

Homer Defiled

Hello there. Could you take a look at this video featuring two clips from The Simpsons episode "Homer Defined", please?

According to legend, that is the originally broadcast version of the episode, although the clip comes from a syndicated airing. When the episode was repeated on Fox, the lines had changed so Burns now planned to "kiss his sorry ass" goodbye, but Bart now said "Bad influence, my butt!" (in response to complaints received over the original version). The changed version used for the repeats is also the one found on the DVD.

Or is it?

Broken Gamebooks #16: Knights of Doom

One of the last entries in the original Fighting Fantasy series, Knights of Doom can change hands for upwards for £60 these days (original RRP £3.99) - its author, Jonathan Green, has been one of the highest-profile components of the 21st century revival, but inexplicably neither Wizard nor Scholastic have reprinted this one yet.

And I'm only going to use my copy to tell you all about a silly proofreading error. Tragic, isn't it?