A Brief Thought About an Obscure Simpsons Clip

On 30 April 1992, the Simpsons episode "Three Men and a Comic Book" was aired for the third time on Fox, up against the last ever episode of The Cosby Show -- and hence, presumably, it might be an overstatement to say that practically no-one watched it (the Cosby finale drawing an audience of 44.4m viewers), but surely it would've attracted a significantly smaller audience than usual, especially since it started halfway into its hour-long opposition. However, the repeat featured a new scene paying tribute to Our Favourite Family's rival (the decision to shift The Simpsons into direct competition with Cosby for its second season in 1990 generating great controversy) at the end (between the executive producer screen and the rest of the credits).

It seemed lucky enough to me that one copy of this scene survived... but it seemed amazing to me to find a second, clearly different off-air of it. As I thought about it, though, it seemed less unlikely -- it's quite possible, if not probable, that the addition of the Cosby tribute would've been trailed in advance. And even back then fans would've known to hold on to something unique like that (even if not every rarity from the show's early years is so fortunate).

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part II

Last time, I set out to write a complete guide to all the monsters and foes you could face in J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo fantasy gamebooks, but it quickly became apparent I would have to split it up into multiple parts; Part I includes a recap of how the combat system worked (as well as, courtesy of Ed Jolley, one of the greatest comments ever left on this blog), and here comes the part of the Bestiary covering adventures four through six, kicking off with Voyage of Terror -- which, owing to Merlin's Net Spell going wrong, sees a sideways move from Camelot to Ancient Greece, a consequence of which is that all your usual magic and equipment (including Excalibur Junior) are not available to you...

A Short Post On the 1990s Dennis the Menace TV Series

In 1996, having been appearing in the Beano since 1951, Dennis the Menace and his faithful Abyssinian wire-haired tripe-hound Gnasher made the transfer to television for a series called Dennis the Menace, which ran on Tuesday and Friday afternoons on CBBC for two series until 1998, then managed to survive in repeats until the start of 2009, when it was supplanted by a rebooted version. And yes, over here it was called Dennis the Menace, at least at first.

There was a version of the show retitled Dennis and Gnasher, but that was solely for the United States, to avoid confusion with their own Dennis (who infamously happened to make his debut on the exact same day as the British Menace). The belief that it was always called Dennis and Gnasher probably arises because later Region 2 DVD releases used the ...and Gnasher versions; perhaps this was so they could also be released in Region 1 with minimum fuss, or perhaps because by this point the 2009 reboot, which was always called Dennis and Gnasher, was a thing and they wanted to be able to advertise both series under one banner (by this point the comic strip itself had also been retitled, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of the word 'Menace').

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part I

Whilst J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo adventure gamebooks were principally meant to be a more comedic take than usual on the idea, he also came up with one of the best combat systems I've ever seen for an RPG -- simple to understand, but allowing for a diverse range of encounters. Unlike other series of the time, in fact, a complete guide to all the monsters and villains you could fight across the series' eight titles would probably make for quite fun reading. So here we go.