29 on 4 2

So, Channel 4's terrestrial debut of Season 29 of The Simpsons began slightly later than it normally does on the 22nd November, and wrapped up on 17th December. Here, then, are several thousand words examining the various episodes they censored, as well as other notes of interest mostly concerning cases where there are alternate versions of certain episodes, compared to my earlier notes on potentially problematic/interesting-for-other-reasons episodes made before the run started.

Broken Gamebooks #1 ½: Realm of Chaos Redux

Way back in the first ever Broken Gamebooks article, nearly five years ago now, the inaugural adventure gamebook under discussion was the sixth GrailQuest book, Realm of Chaos. I have some startling new revelations to share with you, which were provided by commentator Ed Jolley. (Ed has also left some thoroughly interesting notes on some of my other posts, which you would be well-advised to seek out.)

Five Years

It was exactly five years ago today that the very first post was published to cwickham.blogspot.com. It was, of course, a review of an obscure series of adventure gamebooks from the 1980s.

I'd only started writing that review the day before; as I note in it, I got into a conversation with Andrew Ellard on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd had as a child but was struggling to identify, and at his suggestion I ended up writing a review of the series. And suddenly I needed a place to post it. I'd always meant to start a blog some day, and this was the impetus I needed to finally get around to doing so. I decided to see how long I could keep updating it on a weekly basis, which turned out to be almost exactly three years; for the two years since then, I've had a similarly totally arbitrary target of keeping it updated monthly. And, to my mild surprise, some people have been quite interested in what I've written.

To mark the fifth anniversary, then, I thought I'd look at the ten most-read posts according to Blogger's stats page, and see if I can work out why these pieces are so popular and if I have anything new to say about them. If you've been a regular reader over the last half-decade, why not try to guess which posts they are before reading on?

Yes, obviously I know why not, but play along, OK?

Clash of the Metal Titans

The first four series of the iconic robotic combat gameshow Robot Wars were a straightforward knockout tournament: each episode comprised a single heat, the winner of which would progress to a semi-final, and the winners of those would progress to the Grand Final. Thus, the episode titles for those series followed logically: "Series 2 Heat K" or "Series 3 Semi-Final A" make it clear what you're talking about.

But after the Fourth Wars, the UK championship took a temporary backseat for Robot Wars Extreme, a series featuring a wide range of different mini-tournaments. Each episode of Extreme 1 featured a mix of the different ongoing tournaments, plus the occasional one-off battle. So with the exception of the two Annihilators (which featured six robots who qualified from the earlier "Mayhem" melees fighting together, with one robot being eliminated each round until only one survived), and the Second World Championship, those episodes don't have any easily identifiable moniker.

Except the original Radio Times listings appear to have given each episode a title. One fight in each episode would be branded the "Main Event" of the night, and most of these titles come from those: I don't know if these were official titles given to them by the production team, or if the RT made them up themselves. At any rate, the episodes were titled thusly (read this list alongside the Robot Wars Wiki's episode guide if you like):

1. The Challenge Belt
2. The Ultimate Mayhem
3. The International Inferno
4. The Ultimate Vengeance
5. The Armed Forces Mayhem
6. The Ultimate Vengeance
7. The Annihilator Special
8. The Ultimate All-Star Conflict
9. The House Robot Rebellion
10. The Second World Championship [NOTE: Shown in this position on BBC Two, but had aired as Episode 16 of the earlier BBC Choice run]
11. The Forces Special [NOTE: Shown in this position on BBC Two, but had aired as Episode 17 of the earlier BBC Choice run]
12. The All-Star Quarter-Finals
13. The Flipper Frenzy
14. The All-Star Semi-Finals
15. The Tag Team Terror Final
16. The Annihilator Special
17. The All-Star Grand Final

Given there are two different fights dubbed "The Ultimate Vengeance", the two Annihilators are not differentiated between, and one of the twelve Mayhems has seemingly been arbitrarily given the title "The Ultimate Mayhem" just because it had Hypno-Disc in it, these titles are sadly not terribly helpful. Still, the Radio Times listings are the only place I've ever seen these episodes referred to as anything other than "Episode 1", "Episode 2", etc.

Nog een Artikel met een slecht vertaalde Nederlandse Titel

Last time on the blog, my attempts to track down the obscure 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series brought the attention of Netherlands-based reader David; as the show was a British-Dutch co-production, he was able to provide me with a large number of contemporary pieces about the show's broadcast in the Netherlands from Dutch newspapers. David had a few more notes to give me after reading my resulting piece, which I think deserve a post of their own.

Vraag Gewoon Nog een Keer om Diamant

Last time on my epic quest for the never-repeated, never-released-on-home-video Diamond Brothers TV series from 1991, blog reader Giles Leigh had tracked down a whole bunch of newspaper and magazine clippings pertaining to the series' broadcast in the Netherlands. Bearing in mind I knew the show had been a co-production with a Dutch filming company, allowing for filming on location in Amsterdam, this is possibly something I should have thought to look into before. Ahem.

Anyway, another blog reader, Netherlands-based David, has now been in touch with another selection of clippings from various Dutch newspapers covering the series' broadcast there; I am tremendously grateful to him for sharing this veritable treasure trove, and for helping out with the translations. Pictured above is the first of these, taken from the 8th April 1991 edition of the Leidsche Courant and featuring, unless I'm mistaken, a never-before-seen publicity still of Colin Dale and Dursley McLinden.

Broken Gamebooks #20: Sword of the Samurai

By pleasing coincidence (since I'd originally planned to cover something else entirely, but logistical issues -- namely, that the gamebook series I meant to write about turned out to have a set of reprints by a different publisher a few years later that fixed several of the problems found in the original versions, and it's going to take a while for me to track everything I need down -- mean we're getting this instead), Sword of the Samurai is both the twentieth entry in the original Fighting Fantasy series, and the twentieth entry in our ongoing series examining mistakes in adventure gamebooks. So what's the problem?

Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie & Fred & Wilma & Pebbles

Here is one of the sillier, yet strangely intriguing, mysteries surrounding The Simpsons. "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", as well as being correctly considered one of the greatest episodes the show ever did, was also the 167th episode to be broadcast -- meaning it overtook The Flintstones as the world's longest-running prime-time animation.

Most versions of the episode use the Sgt Pepper's parody couch gag -- this was definitely the version used on the original US broadcast on 9 February 1997, and it is also the version used on the Season 8 DVD. However, an alternative version of the episode exists, which uses the couch gag from the Season 4 episode "Kamp Krusty", where Our Favourite Family run in to find the Flintstones already on the couch -- obviously done in reference to the episode's record-breaking nature. However, this has obviously been hastily done, since the audio from the Sgt Pepper's couch gag is still playing over it. ("Kamp Krusty" also featured a screen in the end credits saying the Flintstones appeared courtesy of Hanna-Barbera, which is presumably not found in the alternate edit.)

There are two known places where this alternate edit is or was seen -- US syndication, and Sky One's original UK broadcast of the episode, which was on 13 April 1997. A theory is that after the original broadcast, people suggested that they should have used the Flintstones gag, and someone went back and made the edit to the network copy so future broadcasts could mark the milestone. (The fact that the alternate version was seen in the UK at all indicates that it was not done specifically for the syndicated version -- copies of episodes for overseas broadcasts tend to be copies of what the network had, not anything that was done for syndication.)

Now, look at this video someone's made of all the Season 8 couch gags. At 47 seconds in appears the alternate Flintstones-visuals-Sgt-Pepper's-audio gag... with the Fox Network logo in the top right corner. Is this from the one and only US network repeat (which was on 25 May 1997)? Because that would seem to go an awfully long way to validating the above theory, although it does raise the question of why the DVD uses the original version when they generally go with revised versions -- perhaps someone on the commentary team noticed the oddity and decided to get the "correct" visuals restored?