Season 20 of The Simpsons was released on Blu-ray in America shortly after its original broadcast as a vanilla edition with no special features, to capitalise on the fact that it was the first season to contain episodes produced in high definition. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a Region 4 DVD version of the same release in a charity shop in Bristol. Asking Wesley Mead about it revealed that only Australia and Germany got this release -- which seems a very odd thing to happen at all, given the only reason the release happened was because the episodes are in HD. My conclusion was that this set's previous owner had taken the trouble to import this from overseas. But then, if you're donating it because you've just got access to Disney+, then apart from the fact that you'd expect to find other DVDs of The Simpsons or even other Disney+ shows alongside this one (and I didn't) -- wouldn't someone who went to that length to get hold of a copy be a pretty hardcore fan, someone who'd want to hang on to this as an interesting curio? Wouldn't they be aware that just because something's available on streaming now, doesn't mean it always will be?
Anyway, this got me thinking about other similarly inexplicable (to various degrees) things I've seen or even purchased in charity shops over the years. Here's a selection of them. (Not included: a surprisingly large number of adventure gamebooks and Doctor Who novelisations from the 80s and 90s that go for upwards of £70 online and which nobody bothered to do a price check on.)
A collection of disproportionate Simpsons dolls
I just like this picture I took of all of them on a chair, mostly.
Signed copies
Usually, like the above, these look uncannily like one of many that the author has signed in the back room of a bookshop (or, in this case, a Forbidden Planet) in one session.
Something a bit sad when you find dedicated copies, though.
Copies of films intended for Academy Award judges
There was a veritable spate of these a few years ago, from which I can only conclude that a major Hollywood film star had recently moved to the area.
Possibly even odder, though? Copies of screenplays...
The Doctor Who story The Dominators on DVD, never removed from its shrink-wrap
I'm not terribly sure there's anything I can add to this...
Simpson Doku
Surely the most baffling piece of merchandise ever made.
Issues #1-#100 of Doctor Who Magazine
Always awkward when you enter Oxfam and realise a local Doctor Who fan has died.
The Making of Red Dwarf
Okay, so this one isn't weird by itself, but gets its place on this list because of the associated story.
I was on holiday in Wales around August 2017, shortly before Red Dwarf XII was to air, and purchased this in a second-hand bookshop near Hay. The shopkeeper was a fan of the show, and we had a brief chat about it at the till... and it slowly became apparent that he had no idea the show had been revived by Dave in 2009. As far as he was concerned, the show had ended with Series VIII in 1999. He was genuinely gobsmacked when I informed him of the existence of the three series produced and broadcast since then, the fourth soon to be aired, and that I had been in the audience for one of those upcoming episodes. (I should caveat this by pointing out that he was a self-proclaimed Luddite whose TV didn't receive Dave, and he'd have to drive quite a fair distance to the nearest town if he wanted to buy a new DVD. Even so, it's quite remarkable that you can be a fan of a show without knowing that twenty-one episodes of it even exist.)
A T-shirt with a massive picture of Peter Davison on it
A couple of items I don't have pictures for, either because I no longer own them or didn't buy them and didn't think to take a picture of them:
- A Beano annual that was previously owned by someone I was at secondary school with, as evidenced by the "This Book Belongs To" page
- The complete discography of Kylie Minogue, including all greatest hits, live and remix albums
- The DVD boxsets of the uncut versions of Doctor Who Confidential and Totally Doctor Who given to members of the crew
Possibly even sadder than an autographed book with a dedication: a copy of Fighting Fantasy book 58 that I found in a charity shop had writing on the first page, indicating it to have been an engagement gift from the former owner's fiancée.
ReplyDeleteOuch.
DeleteThink I remember seeing Simps-doku in Waterstones when it came out, but none the wiser as to what makes it Simpsony. I assume it's the faces of Homer, Marge, Krusty, Flanders, etc, instead of numbers. Do you have to draw them in?
ReplyDeleteJust dragged it out of storage (the photo here dating from when I first bought it) and it uses counters and a board with a sudoku grid on it - the characters are Our Favourite Family plus Milhouse, Krusty, Burns and Wiggum. There's a massive booklet of ways to set up the board and corresponding solutions. It's actually a fairly nicely produced thing - the counters are double-sided so you know which ones were starting pieces, and come in different colours for a multiplayer game. I still find it a baffling idea but it's clear they put *some* kind of thought into it.
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