ZZZapped

The Children's ITV series ZZZap! notched up ten series and 140 episodes in just under nine years, airing between 1993 and 2001. The unusual concept of the series was that it was a comic you could watch (with Christmas editions being styled after annuals and Summer specials after, er, Summer Specials), but if you're not familiar with it, then going and looking up a few episodes on YouTube will probably be more helpful than attempting to describe such an outside-the-box show; primarily aimed at deaf children, it featured no intelligible dialogue and told stories through visuals and text where necessary, with several regular segments that were variously based around slapstick sketches, arts and crafts, puzzle pages, and a section oddly prescient of Taskmaster where children sourced from a local stage school had to attempt challenges ("Tricky Dicky's Mission Impossible" in Series 1, replaced with "Daisy Dares You" from the second series after the original character was deemed to be too frightening -- one of several tweaks apparently made after the mood was judged to have been a bit too surreal in places).

The first series also featured a unique opening sequence not used on the others, where a boy purchases an issue of ZZZap! in a shopping centre, and uses the attached "Free TV Zapper" to cause the comic to grow to 18 feet in size, to the mild shock of the other shoppers. This sequence was filmed in Chequers Shopping Centre in Maidstone (still open today but now known as The Mall Maidstone, and used for several other sequences in this and later series), and the prop comics have been placed alongside other, real comics the shop in question (there's nothing in the sequence to provide confirmation but it looks like it's probably a WHSmith) was selling that day:

The comics visible in shot include Rainbow, Stingray, Garfield (consisting largely of reprints from the daily newspaper strip), Playdays (promoting the opposition, surely?), Buster (the last of Fleetway's humour titles still going) and, yes, the Beano. I think there can be very little argument that these weren't the issues on sale the day the sequence was filmed. (The publication directly beneath the prop issues isn't actually a comic, but rather a Monster in My Pocket sticker album, if you were curious; this further indicates the props were plonked on top of whatever else the shop was selling, since sticker albums tended to be placed at the front of the magazine rack, or at least not mixed in with the comics.)

Stingray had arrived on BBC Two in September 1992 as part of their run of Supermarionation repeats, and the fortnightly comic reprinting the old TV Century 21 strips had launched not long after, so at a glance we know the opening sequence was filmed about three months before broadcast at most. It's tricky to pin down that issue of the Beano, since we don't get a very clear look at it, but if we can we might be able to narrow things down to the exact week...

This is issue #2626, dated November 14th, 1992; what we can see of the front cover (Dennis in the bottom right panel, Walter in the top right, and the top banner) matches up. We can furthermore identify the issue of Stingray as issue #3, dated November 7th to 20th, for further proof. (The issue of Buster is actually the monthly reprint magazine The Best of Buster; the price is in the wrong place for it to be the weekly one. This is probably the sort of thing you only pick up on when you've done five articles identifying the exact issues of comics used in TV shows.) So there you have it: the opening titles for the first series of ZZZap! were filmed two months before the first episode aired on 8 January 1993, which seems actually to be cutting it a little on the close side for what was a fairly ambitious show with 10 episodes in its first series.

From the second series onwards, the title sequence was replaced with a more sitcommy selection of clips from the episodes to fast-paced music (most of ZZZap!'s music was library stuff, and Wikipedia has an impressively thorough list of the tracks it used -- the theme tune was "Keystone Chaos" by Ron Aspery). The replacement of Tricky Dicky meant reshoots probably would've been required even if they wanted to use the old sequence again (although his panel is obscured for a lot of it), the change could've been one of those designed to tone down the surrealism, but the early nineties were a time of great upheaval for childrens' comics: Girl ended in early 1990, Whizzer and Chips was subsumed into Buster later that year, Mandy and Judy merged in early 1991, and between the filming of the first and second series of ZZZap! both Jackie and the combined Beezer and Topper folded, marking the disappearance of three titles that had been around since the fifties and sixties. Any version of that title sequence was one that could have dated very quickly (indeed, the prominently visible Stingray comic finished before the second series of ZZZap! began airing), at very short notice, and I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle of that particular Venn diagram.

Regards to Anonymous X on Bluesky for identifying what was below the prop issues