Dandy 3000

The publishers at DC Thomson like any excuse for a good old knees-up. Any time one of their comics reached a landmark issue or anniversary, the entire edition would very often be given over to celebrating the milestone, usually in an epic feat involving all the different strips running at the time, and sometimes this would even extend to the anniversaries of specific strips (such as the Beano marking fifty years of Dennis the Menace with one of their occasional special stories that took up the entire issue, or Roger the Dodger's 40th by having him guest star in every single strip in the comic). These special issues would often feature cameo appearances from celebrities ranging from Ken Dodd to Adele down the years, as well as characters and strips from times gone by. The Beano is now the last of their weekly humour titles still going, and it continues this proud tradition to this day, most recently running a special six-part story to mark seventy years of the Bash Street Kids.

In early 1999, the Dandy was rapidly closing in on a perfect excuse for one of these parties in print -- its 3000th issue. But less than eighteen months beforehand, the comic had marked its 60th anniversary with arguably DC Thomson's most elaborate celebration of all; cover star Desperate Dan had gone on a six-week story arc where he struck oil and retired from the comic to enjoy his newfound wealth (and the company of the Spice Girls), only to be persuaded to return when he saw the publishers about to go bust without him. Having generated a massive amount of publicity, the storyline was concluded in the anniversary issue itself, which was twice the usual page count and printed on what was, to my mind, slightly nicer paper than usual.

Not only was that still pretty fresh in the memory, but just a few weeks away was a nonstandard celebration: With its 3007th issue, the Dandy would become the longest-running comic in the world, surpassing the 3006 issues of Comic Cuts that were published between 1890 and 1953. Perhaps because of all this, for the big three-treble-zero the comic decided to go in a very different direction to the traditional star-studded big bash, seeking inspiration from an unlikely but highly topical source: Y2K.

Yes, following a few weeks of foreshadowing on the front cover, when issue 3000 hit the shelves in May the comic was hit by the Dandy Bug, which rampaged through the issue bringing doom and despair to all the regular characters. I have scanned in this entirely unique edition beneath the jump cut (barring a few pages which are just adverts), with sometimes not particularly relevant commentary. (All pages can be clicked on for larger versions.)

Wanted Poster

Looking around a charity shop in Bristol today, I find a cardboard poster tube on which is written the legend 'THUNDERBIRDS POSTER'. It's only £2.99, I'm already buying a book, what the hell, I buy it without looking at it and hope it's not from the 2004 movie.

Upon getting home, I discover it's actually really nice, and after I put it up I notice from the copyright dates at the bottom it was seemingly printed in 2015. I Google 'thunderbirds poster 2015' and... ah.

Well, that's a hell of a find.

A Carolyn Premish Mystery

The second episode of the Comedy Central run of Futurama, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", is credited to a writer called Carolyn Premish -- someone who has no other writing credits, in any medium, before or after this episode, or seemingly any kind of presence anywhere in the world. A further layer of interest is added by the fact that this is one of the three episodes of the show for which Matt Groening receives a writing credit, for coming up with the story with Premish.

Obviously in the years since the episode's broadcast, the phantom nature of the author has led to various theories and mutterings that 'Carolyn Premish' is a pseudonym. That mystery remains unsolved; it appears that late last year a member of the animation crew said on the r/futurama subreddit that 'Premish' was long-serving producer and writer Ken Keeler, but they subsequently retracted their claim and deleted the relevant post, saying they'd got some wires crossed.

The most recent episode of the current Hulu/Disney+ run, though, is "The Futurama Mystery Liberry" -- an anthology episode featuring three shorts done in the style of classic children's mystery literature. The first segment parodies Stratemeyer Syndicate stories such as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. This segment is credited to David X. Cohen -- and Cohen getting a writing credit isn't nearly as unusual as Groening (he generally has one episode per production season to his name), but it's still notable when it does happen. It'd seem reasonable to assume that nostalgia for those stories runs deep at a high level on the show.

The pseudonym 'Carolyn Keene' was, and is, used for ghostwriters on the various Nancy Drew series and other Stratemeyer series. Using a pen name is a Carolyn Keene style premise. Or a Carolyn premise, if you will.

Look, it's just a theory, don't go putting it on Wikipedia or anything. (I'm not even suggesting that Cohen specifically is the real writer.)

32 on 4

In the autumn of 2020, television production crews all over the world were beginning to cope with a new normal. Whilst non-scripted series were starting to return to our screens with socially distanced sets, reality show contestants in social bubbles and Perspex barriers in place, fiction was another matter, and production on prestige series including Better Call Saul, Stranger Things and Succession was only just starting to spin up again.

Animated shows, however, were a third kettle of fish. Many cast members of The Simpsons had already been recording their lines remotely for some time before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and animators were able to continue working on the show from their homes. If anything, production got a little ahead of schedule, and the 22 episodes that made up Our Favourite Family's thirty-second season -- including the landmark 700th episode -- hit US screens as normal between 27 September 2020 and 23 May 2021, with British viewers treated to a similarly familiar schedule by Sky One: the festive episode "A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas" was aired as an, er, Christmas special on 24 December, with the remainder of the run following on a weekly basis from the 15th January.

One major change this season, however, was made in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests: In June 2020, it was announced that white actors would no longer voice non-white characters, with several new recurring voice artists brought in as a result. The most prominent of these is Alex Désert, who has gone on to appear in the majority of episodes since then as Carl Carlson, Lou and other miscellaneous roles, but other new voices in this season include Eric Lopez as Bumblebee Man, Kimberly Brooks as Lewis (and other parts including Janey Powell in later seasons), Tony Rodriguez as Julio and Jenny Yokobori as Kumiko, whilst Kevin Michael Richardson, already a semi-regular, took over as the voice of Dr. Hibbert, and occasional guest star Dawnn Lewis took a more prominent role as his wife Bernice.

At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring these episodes to free-to-air TV: the twenty-first season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the seventeenth consecutive one to do so in the tried-and-true weekday early evening slot. Last year our world was rocked as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks meant The Simpsons moved back half an hour in C4's schedule to 6.30pm, and more recent developments make you wonder how much longer the model to which the show's UK broadcasts have adhered to for so long will last. But for now, it's business as usual, including this, my sixth annual forecast of what might not be seen on C4 when these episodes reach it; as ever, keep an eye on Wesley Mead's scheduling page at the Simpsons Archive to know exactly when that happens.

Nichekeeping

Just a quick housekeeping post to note I have (hopefully) significantly improved the labelling system. A few posts from the ill-defined "miscellaneous" category have been moved into their own thing, including the new "miscellaneous children's tv" label, but the big update is in posts about adventure gamebooks.

Previously there was one tag for the "Broken Gamebooks" series and another for everything else; if this was useful in 2017 when the blog was so much smaller, it certainly isn't now, so the latter has been split up and we now have a dedicated Fighting Fantasy category, a dedicated J.H. Brennan category, and several others you may discover if you go through the blog's archives. Hopefully this makes it much easier to find everything, but please let me know if you have any feedback.

Things We Learnt at Fighting Fantasy Fest 5

On Saturday 7th September, for the fifth time in the last decade, several hundred Fighting Fantasy fans descended on a venue in Ealing for Fighting Fantasy Fest, with much to celebrate: a new book in the series by Ian Livingstone, The Dungeon on Blood Island, the new book celebrating the series' art Magic Realms, and Jonathan Green's new fully updated, revised and now interactive edition of his exceptional history of the series, You Are the Hero. Further excitement was generated by the return of the legendary Iain McCaig in person, after he'd Zoomed into the previous event from his home in Canada. On an entertaining day of talks and queuing for autographs, here are some of the things we leant:

• Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson submitted a proposal for a book where the player character would be a vampire seeking to drink Abraham van Helsing's blood, which they suspect was rejected because of the first sequence, where the player killed a young woman.
• White Dwarf magazine used three or four different pseudonyms to cover up the fact that most of the articles were being written by Dave Morris.
• The fact that in Black Vein Prophecy you have to fail a stat check to get an item you need to win the game was entirely deliberate, and was inspired by authors Paul Mason and Steve Williams' stint as editors of Warlock magazine where much of the reader correspondence was about how the books should be as difficult as possible.
• When Marc Gascoigne took over as editor of the magazine he found boxes containing literally thousands of reader-submitted mini-adventures in the office.
• The magazine was cancelled by Penguin in spite of selling in excess of twenty thousand copies per issue.
• Marc started working at Games Workshop two weeks too late to be there when David Bowie walked into the store to buy a Dungeons & Dragons set as a birthday present for his son, but was there when Dave Lee Travis entered the store to buy the same product a short while later.
• Iain McCaig was once so late with an illustration for Deathtrap Dungeon that he had to complete it in the offices of Penguin Books, and looked up from finishing it to find that everyone had gone home and he was locked in the building.
• Darth Maul's horns are actually meant to be feathers bound to his head, and are the result of someone misinterpreting Iain's concept art.
• Ian Livingstone does not enjoy the music of Cliff Richard.
• In spite of Ian's repeated comments about its quality, he still managed to sell a copy of the Nintendo DS adaptation of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for over £100 at the charity auction. Again.
• One of the other items at the auction was one of the original promotional posters for the series, which inexplicably used a giant photograph of Ian and Steve Jackson up a tree.
• Owing to a hilarious screw-up on my part, I now own a copy of Black Vein Prophecy signed by Paul Mason twice, two years apart.