Comic Cuts

In the Mr. Bean episode "Hair by Mr. Bean of London", initially released exclusively on VHS in November 1995, whilst Mr. Bean is at the barber's, he picks up a copy of the Dandy and reads it while he's waiting.

You know what's coming. Which issue of the Dandy exactly?

"The Government Urges the Court to Allow Mr. Goodman to Continue!"

The final production draft of the script for the sixty-third and final episode of Better Call Saul, "Saul Gone", is available to read here, one of ten standout scripts that year submitted by their writers for the Emmys published on Deadline. There are a number of small tweaks and differences between the script and what ultimately ended up on screen. The opening flashback to "Bad Choice Road" opens a bit sooner, with dialogue from Kim over the phone that isn't in the broadcast version. There's a small addition to Gene's attempt to escape Omaha where he has an altercation with a homeowner, which was filmed and can be seen on the deleted scenes on the DVD. When Saul hires Bill Oakley as his advisory counsel, in the script we don't hear the start of their conversation, we only see Oakley's reaction. When the plane arrives in Albuquerque there was originally meant to be a shot of the remains of Jimmy's Suzuki Esteem in the desert, providing a link back to the "Bad Choice Road" flashback (a remnant of this idea still appears in the trailer for the episode). Various other odd lines and moments are different. There are other little touches that seem to have been thought of later on -- if you compare the establishing shots of desert scenery in the pre-titles sequence with those in the pilot of Breaking Bad you'll see how similarly they're framed, building on the final episodes' theme of things coming full-circle.

But perhaps the most important change -- at least to me -- is during the climactic scene where Saul Goodman confesses all his crimes on the stand:

Top Dad Homer

On 19 November 1999, it is announced that Tony Blair is to be a father again. Amongst the coverage of this on BBC News is this piece, which links it to recent comments from Charlie Lewis, a professor of psychology at Lancaster University, on how Homer Simpson is one of the best examples of modern fatherhood. One quote leapt out at me: "He has recently started going to parenting classes, so at least Homer is trying to be a good parent in his old age." Which recent event, precisely, did Professor Lewis have in mind when he made these comments?

Whilst the BBC News piece doesn't state the origin of the comments, a quick Google of "charlie lewis lancaster university homer simpson" brings up this Guardian piece, indicating they were made the previous day at the first national conference on fatherhood. At this time, the most recent episode was "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder", which had aired in the US four days earlier, on 14 November. And that episode does indeed have a plot where Homer tries to bond with Maggie, and in its final minutes he goes to a daddy-daughter swimming class with her. This episode would not air in the UK until the following month, but it's the only recent episode that seems to fit the bill. Even if Professor Lewis had been watching at BBC Two pace (and it seems more likely he would have looked up the most recent episodes for any developments he could cite), they were showing seasons five and six at the time, and there's nothing there that would seem to be an example unless you really stretch the definition.

Every Thursday I'm in Love

In October 1986, the fifth annual Smash Hits yearbook was published. A slight departure from the sort of thing this blog usually covers, you might think.

But on page 49 there's a photo of The Cure's Robert Smith, as part of a feature entitled Books, Batteries and the Beano. Now things might fall into place. That particular feature has been scanned in here, so you don't have to suffer with my low-quality photography for a change, but amongst Robert's possessions is an issue of the Beano:

We worked out which issue of the Beezer is in One Foot in the Algarve. We worked out which issue of the Beano is in The Comic Relief Revue Book. Can we work out which issue of the Beano this is?

Curse of the Numbers

I have found myself writing quite a lot about Fighting Fantasy of late, and one recurring element has come up: The use of items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow the reader to take a nonstandard action not expressly given by the text. So, for example, in House of Hell you can find a key with the number '27' inscribed on it; when you find a door you want to try and unlock with it, you should take the number of the section you are on at the time, deduct the key's number and turn to that numbered reference. All of the recent examples I've written about come from early entries of the series, so I thought I'd look at the fifty-ninth and final entry of the original Puffin series, Curse of the Mummy, where author Jonathan Green perhaps takes the idea to its logical extreme.

From the Topper

This is the cover of the 1968 edition of The Topper Book, the annual super-sized hardback edition of the weekly British humour comic. As is frequently the case for comics annuals, it depicts several of the weekly Topper characters together -- the different strips rarely crossed over, and getting to see all the comic's characters in the same scene was very much the Infinity War of its day -- but one of those characters is not like the others.

That's because one of them is Nancy, whose syndicated daily comic strip has appeared in American newspapers since the 30th October, 1938, initially written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller (with the authorship changing hands a number of times since Bushmiller's death in 1982), and which also appeared in the Topper by way of reprints of those strips from its first issue in 1953 up until the late 1970s.

As far as I can tell, Nancy was one of only two cases of an American newspaper daily being transplanted into a British humour comic in this way, and was presumably chosen because she didn't clash with the other strips in the Topper; Mutt and Jeff ran in the Topper's sister publication the Beezer in 1962, but this does not appear to have been a great success, as it was phased out after about a year. (Nancy started out as a "topper", which in American newspaper comics is a second comic integrated into the larger Sunday strip, but that just seems to be an amusing coincidence.) The cover of the 1968 Topper Book was the only time Nancy was featured in a cover illustration alongside other, original characters from the comic, and looks like it may have been done by a DC Thomson artist directly tracing over some original Bushmiller art; it's interesting to note that she made it onto the cover of the book with the comic's most popular and recognisable characters, ahead of Topper originals such as Nick Kelly.

Chaos Theory

In March 1983, the very second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Citadel of Chaos, was published in the UK. Having each written one half of the first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone divided their labours for the next books, and Citadel was Jackson's solo effort; Livingstone's offering, The Forest of Doom, was released the very same day.

The Citadel of Chaos is an unusual gamebook in many ways. There's the original cover art pictured above, for one thing, which was the subject of much criticism for its low quality (it isn't even clear what the monster in the foreground is meant to be, as it doesn't match any of the creatures in the game); it was provided by an artist credited only as 'Emmanuel', who has very few other professional credits to their name and about whom we know practically nothing. It became one of the very few Fighting Fantasy covers to be entirely replaced during the original series' 1982-95 lifespan, with the replacement coming from range stalwart Ian Miller, who also provided the covers for several other entries by Jackson and worked on the range right up until it was cancelled by Puffin Books.

It's also an unusual, possibly unique, book in that even if you roll the lowest possible numbers when calculating your statistics, you still have a very good chance of managing to beat the game, primarily because there is only one mandatory combat in the whole thing, and very few other STAMINA penalties outside of combat or stat checks. It only once uses Jackson's signature tactic of having items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow you to take an option not expressly given by the text, in a relatively simple way; the combination to a lock is written down somewhere and you have to turn to that number section when prompted. That isn't to say it's an easy gamebook to beat by any means -- in particular the Puzzle Boss approach to the final encounter with the master of the Citadel, Balthus Dire is excellently engineered. It's a good challenge that never reaches the hair-tearing levels of frustration some of Jackson's other books could provoke.

No Cigar

In late 1979, the Dandy Book 1980 was published in time for the Christmas market. This was the 42nd straight year such a thing had happened, and I don't have much to say about the event itself. But contained within the book is a Desperate Dan story where, put off at the prospect of paying 50 dollars for a box of six Christmas crackers (where he found a shop in the Wild West selling Christmas crackers is another matter), he decides to make his own super-crackers and, to cut a long story short, the punchline of the whole thing involves him smoking a cigar.

We must now leave 1979 behind for 1990, and the publication of the Desperate Dan Book 1991. Dan was actually relatively recently installed as the Dandy's cover star, taking over from Korky the Cat in November 1984, and this was the first of three 90s annuals he received, following one-offs in the 50s and 70s; Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Beryl the Peril and Bananaman were also on the hallowed list of DC Thomson characters popular enough to receive their own dedicated annual.

With the exception of the Bananaman ones, which were all-new (as they tied into the TV series and not the comic strip, but that's another kettle of fish), these character-specific annuals featured a smattering of new material but were principally made up of reprints from past years and various sources, recoloured and with the speech bubbles redone to bring them up to date but otherwise unaltered. And for the first latter-day Desperate Dan Book, the aforementioned story from the Dandy Book 1980 was recycled.

But here the book runs into a problem. Smoking has seemingly become a bit more of a taboo, at least in children's comics, in the eleven years since then, and the original version of the story isn't going to be acceptable. The offending object only appears in the last page and a half, and it seems a shame for a perfectly good, Christmas-themed story that will take up twelve pages to be rendered completely unusable when you only have to alter a few panels. So the cigar is going to have to be changed to something else. Something that looks like a cigar (since the last panel in particular really boxes you in), and allows you to come up with an alternative punchline. But what?

That Letter, That Letter, and That Letter

In the Red Dwarf episode "Bodyswap", originally broadcast on BBC Two on 5 December 1989, Lister (who has temporarily swapped bodies with Rimmer) and Cat are playing a game of Scrabble:

CAT: Hey-hey-hey! I've got you now, buddy! [He holds up his letter rack.] J-O-Z-X-Y-Q-K.

LISTER: That's not a word!

CAT: It's a Cat word!

LISTER: "Jozxyqk"?

CAT: That's not how you pronounce it!

LISTER: What's it mean?

CAT: It's the sound you make when you get your sexual organs trapped in something. "Jozxyqk!"

LISTER: Is it in the dictionary?

CAT: Well, it could be. If you were reading in the nude and you closed the book too quick. [He mimes this.] "Jozxyqk!"

An Adventure of the Far Future

In September 1983, the fourth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Starship Traveller, hit the shelves of all good booksellers, and quite possibly some of the bad ones too. At this early stage in the franchise's history, creators Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were still the sole writers working on the range (a year later outside writers would be brought in when it became apparent that the series' popularity meant new titles were needed faster than two men alone could possibly write them), and Jackson, having already written or co-written two high fantasy-based books, took an early opportunity to experiment: Starship Traveller is the first of several science fiction FF entries; the influences of Star Trek are most obvious, but references to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, among others, are also present. (Later editions of the book also included a notice on the copyright page stating the book was not in any way related to the American role-playing game Traveller, which had caused some minor controversy when it was first published!)

That 1190s Show

The second episode of the second series of the BBC's notoriously anachronism-prone 2006-09 Robin Hood series, "Booby and the Beast": The plot of breaking into the Sheriff's booby-trapped strongroom bears an uncanny resemblance to the 90s gameshow The Crystal Maze. (It's kind of hard to sum this up in a single screengrab, so you might want to just watch the episode.)

The sixth episode, "For England..!": The setpiece of Robin and traitorous Merry Man Allan-a-Dale being forced to fight each other over a pot of boiling oil bears an uncanny resemblance to the 90s gameshow Gladiators.

The eleventh episode, "Treasure of the Nation": The plot of a treasure hunt around Sherwood with devious cryptic clues bears an uncanny resemblance to Treasure Hunt, which was actually a gameshow from the 80s, but oh well. (It would also seem remiss in all this to not note that Little John is played by the original host of the National Lottery draw, Gordon Kennedy.)

So, clearly someone on the production team, quite probably one of creators Dominic Minghella and Foz Allan, was taking inspiration from somewhere, even if it was kind of an odd place to find inspiration for your Robin Hood series tasked with providing a contemporary feel to the legend.

And would you believe that the thirteenth episode, "We Are Robin Hood!", features an actual Gladiator, Mark "Rhino" Smith?

The Case of the Stand-Up Comic

On 13 February 1989, at least if Amazon is to be believed, The Utterly, Utterly Amusing and Pretty Damn Definitive Comic Relief Revue Book was released into the world, collecting sketches and songs from the last 30 years of comedy. Song lyrics from Spitting Image rub shoulders with transcripts from At Last the 1948 Show and Fry and Laurie's days in the Footlights. Grant Naylor, the Goodies, Bob Newhart, Victoria Wood and Douglas Adams are just some of the names thanked for letting their material be used. But what we're interested in is the contents of page 42.

Following on from our success in working out exactly which issue of the Beezer is visible in One Foot in the Algarve, can we work out which issue of the Beano was used for this photoshoot?

The Tintin Table

The above is on display in the Hergé Museum in Belgium, and the photo in question comes from my visit there in November 2019: A table of every character who appeared in more than one Tintin album, and how they looked in it.

I just think it's neat, is all.

Witch Magazine

From 1984 to 1986, the official Fighting Fantasy magazine Warlock published thirteen issues, each containing a miniature adventure gamebook. One of these was a reproduction of the first title in the FF range, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, split over the first two issues, and issues 2 and 3 also featured shorter, 'demo' versions of two books that were about to be published: the ninth book, Caverns of the Snow Witch by Ian Livingstone, and the tenth, House of Hell.

As you can see from the above links, I've already gotten posts out of the magazine versions of Firetop Mountain and House of Hell, but the preview of Caverns that was published in the magazine is much less interesting, because it is literally just the full-length adventure chopped in half (well, 190 sections); the editorial for that issue states that the book effectively contains a second mini-adventure right after the one that was originally in the magazine. Nevertheless, there are one or two things worth noting, so I may as well complete the set.

R.I.P. J.H.

As a small tribute to J. H. Brennan, who I was very sorry to belatedly learn went to 14 last month, I would like to share with you section 123 from the third GrailQuest gamebook, Gateway of Doom, which I read not long after discovering the concept of adventure gamebooks when I found a boxset of the first three books in a second-hand bookshop, and is one of the funniest things I have ever read.

There's a man eating plant in here.

The plant he's eating is a carrot and it's screaming for help. This Ghastly Kingdom gets more like a loonybin every step you take.

'Help!' screams the carrot.

'Ignore it,' remarks the man, with a friendly nod in your direction. 'This is one of the most appallingly evil carrots ever to pollute the face of the globe. I shall die instantly when I finish eating it, but I willingly sacrifice myself for the good of humanity which will be all the better for the demise of this evil carrot.'

'I'm not evil! I'm not evil!' shouts the carrot. 'I am a beautiful young princess bewitched by an Invisible Wizard who haunts this Ghastly Kingdom. Please rescue me!'

'You will be making a terrible mistake if you try to rescue this carrot,' says the man mildly. 'It's a vampire carrot.'

'He's lying,' shrieks the carrot desperately.

But is he? Or is it? Or are they both? Desperately you look around for some clue to help you make your decision. Your eye catches a prominent notice on the southern wall. It says:

RESCUE THE CARROT!

You reach for EJ, but then you catch sight of a second notice on the western wall. It says:

DON'T RESCUE THE CARROT!

You allow your hand to fall away in confusion. You glance upwards. A huge poster painted on the ceiling says:

PLAY YOUR XYLOPHONE!

Which seems as sensible a course as any in this lunatic situation, provided, of course, you brought an xylophone.

So what will you do?

If you decide to rescue the carrot, go to 112.

If you decide to ignore the whole affair and try to find a saner room, go to 143.

If you happen to have an xylophone with you and feel like playing it, go to 149.

The Best Thing Ever to Appear in Doctor Who Magazine

Schedule of Horror

In November 1996, the BBC took ownership of the first four seasons of The Simpsons, including the first three Treehouses of Horror. Even back in the 90s, broadcasters didn't always make a special effort for Halloween... but now the Beeb have three Halloween specials it would take minimal effort to schedule around that time of the year, didn't they? Well, the show started its terrestrial airings too late for Halloween 1996, so what do we find if we jump forward to 1997?

Let's Go to Hell

In November 1984, the tenth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Steve Jackson's House of Hell, was unleashed upon the world, and marked many significant divergences from the established format. Until now, the series had been very much swords-and-sorcery, with a single excursion into science-fiction for the fourth book, Starship Traveller, also by Jackson; House of Hell was the first book to feature a contemporary setting, and the only one released in the original series' lifetime (it would take until 2012 for the 21st century relaunch to give us a second, Ian Livingstone's Blood of the Zombies), as the player character's car breaks down and leaves them with no choice but to seek refuge in the House of Drumer, which contains just about every horror movie encounter known to man, brought to life by Tim Sell's impressively macabre illustrations. It's also an exceptionally difficult puzzle-box of a book, requiring a strict sequence of moves to be done in an exact order, and featuring many tricks and traps including extended dead-ends where all the paths ultimately lead to death and secret sections not directly accessible from other ones.

In the same month as the book was released, though, a preview version (known as The House of Hell, with the definitive article) was published in the third issue of the official Fighting Fantasy magazine, Warlock. That version runs to 185 sections (compared to the full-length version's 400), but it isn't simply the book chopped in half -- it's a truncated version, with many of the rooms shuffled around and bits missing, but it is a complete adventure in its own right which keeps recognisably the same basic story. As the editorial in that issue puts it: "Steve's House of Hell is the one in this issue of Warlock, but turned inside out. The rooms have been jumbled, there are some cunning secret passages to find and the important clues are in totally different places. Getting through the mini-adventure will not help you at all!"

So what exactly is different?

The Aura of Acorah

Every day, the official Would I Lie to You? YouTube account uploads a new clip from an episode. The above story, in which Henning Wehn relates an incident where he sensed the aura of Derek Acorah in a theatre dressing room, was uploaded today. I immediately realised one very strange thing: This isn't a story that has ever been broadcast before, even in an outtakes show. This upload is the first time it's been seen by anyone outside of the studio audience for that episode.

My first thought was that the channel had started uploading previously unseen footage, which would be very cool indeed. But then my second thought -- after realising that would be a slightly odd thing to do without any sort of fanfare -- was to look up Derek Acorah's Wikipedia page. And that, I think, solved the mystery. The particular episode of WILTY? this clip comes from was recorded on 3 June 2019. It was broadcast on 31 January 2020. Inbetween those two dates, Derek Acorah died on 4 January 2020. This story was therefore probably in some earlier edit of the episode, got hastily switched out when Acorah died, and was still hanging around somewhere and duly got selected for uploading to the YouTube channel. (Had that series not been interrupted partway through for coverage of the 2019 election, it might never have been affected!)

Poorenheimer

I went to a small independent cinema last Sunday and in the lobby they had a box of used/surplus posters from recent films you could take in return for a small donation to charity.

So that was neat and my staircase now looks much classier. (If there were any Barbie ones they were long gone before I got there, sadly.)

Warlock and Keys

In early 1982, authors Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone are putting the finishing touches to the first book in a new series; having been asked by Puffin Books to write something introducing readers to this new-fangled "role-playing game" concept, they've come up with a very different book in a very special series. It's The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, which will be an instant best-seller and popularise the genre in the United Kingdom.

Livingstone wrote the first half of the adventure, and Jackson wrote the second, later doing some tweaks to bring Livingstone's side a little closer in style to his own. Whilst those final passes are being done, Jackson notices that, quite by chance, there are 399 numbered sections in the book in total. A number which is just begging to be rounded up to a nice, whole 400. Jackson quickly adds an extra section that's there solely to even the numbers out, and 400 references goes on to become the standard for nearly all of the series' titles (some of the more ambitious books come in at slightly or considerably more, and one or two are a bit short but still end in a multiple of 10).

I know what you're thinking and, yes, we do know exactly which section Jackson inserted to round things up; it's a dummy section which isn't reachable from any of the other references, and you don't even have to reverse-engineer too much of the book to work out which one it is. If you happen to have a copy to hand right now, then it's section 192, and if you turn to it you'll see how clever Jackson was; he didn't just make a filler section, he took the opportunity to throw in a very sneaky red herring. But we're going to put all this to one side for the moment, and jump forward in time two years.

Rupert Allason Socks

On 29 December 1992, the original BBC Radio 4 version of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge broadcasts its fifth episode, in which Alan interviews actor Conrad Knight and his wife Sally:

ALAN: There was a particularly bad one in Spy Magazine, which simply changed one of the words of the title in your book, they changed the first two letters of the word 'gent' and left the last two... So it was something in L.A.

KNIGHT: And I immediately sued Spy Magazine.

SALLY: Sadly, he lost the case.

ALAN: In fact, you set a legal precedent, because you're one of the few people who can now be referred to in print as that thing, without fear of litigation.

KNIGHT: That's absolutely right, Alan. But no other medium, just print.

ALAN: Right. So I couldn't call you that...

KNIGHT: No. But you could fax me it.

ALAN: Or, indeed, scribble it down on a piece of paper and hold it up to your face.

KNIGHT: That would be perfectly legal, yes. And people do do that.

Just Ask for Forbes Collins

Exhibit A: Forbes Collins as Henry von Falkenberg in the 1988 film Just Ask for Diamond, a spoof of the hard-boiled detective genre for children adapted from the 1986 novel The Falcon's Malteser, often specifically spoofing The Maltese Falcon.

Exhibit B: Forbes Collins as King John in the 1989-94 CBBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, a spoof of the Robin Hood legends for children, often specifically spoofing the 1984-86 series Robin of Sherwood.

Famous 5 Adventure Games Review (attempted)

 

A short while ago, I took a look at The Famous Five and You -- a not very good series of adventure gamebooks from the 1980s based on Blyton's books which I'd mentioned before, but wanted to go into more depth on. But would you believe Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy spawned a second series of also not very good adventure gamebooks, published around the same time? (I hope so, it's not exactly a very difficult thing to believe.) I've also mentioned these before and, well, we may as well try and look at them in more detail, in spite of the obstacle we'll run into almost immediately.