The War Games

A comparison between Crasha Gnasha's computer game and real life versions which does not bode well.

There can have been few things more inevitable at the turn of the century than a computer game based on a hugely popular television programme about members of the public building robots and making them fight each other. In fact, no fewer than five games based on Robot Wars were released, the first popping up just in time for Christmas 2000, and the last in late 2002, shortly before the final BBC series was broadcast.

The first game, Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem, was released for the Game Boy Color. The idea that you could hope to recreate the show with any great degree of accuracy on such a platform could charitably be described as ambitious. But surely what entailed could still have been better than this. I have made several attempts to write this article before now, and each time I have stopped because I find it hard to find anything that sums up Metal Mayhem better than just linking to a YouTube video of someone attempting to play it. But let's have a go anyway.

Dennis the Obscure

The first attempt to bring Dennis the Menace, long-time cover star of the Beano, to the screen, is not one many people remember, mostly because DC Thomson seem to have done their best to erase it from existence. It aired in 1990 and 1991 under the slightly unwieldy title The Beano's Dennis the Menace and Gnasher Show, and rather than animation, it used puppets; many of the puppeteers involved have had quite distinguished careers, with most of them appearing in Jim Henson productions, and other credits including the Star Wars movies, Button Moon and Little Shop of Horrors.

Several episodes still survive, and you can see them here - that video identifies it as airing on the obscure and imaginatively titled cable channel The Children's Channel, which broadcast in the UK between 1984 and 1998, although according to Wikipedia (which does not have a source to back it up) those were repeats, and the show was originally broadcast on CITV (but it does seem worth noting that the operators of The Children's Channel were backed by DC Thomson). Something does seem a little strange about a CITV show having a parody of the BBC's Test Card F in its title sequence, though...