Edit Wars #9

Whilst getting the links for the old Robot Wars Club membership pack videos off of YouTube, I have made several remarkable discoveries readers of the blog might like.

Robot Wars Revealed, the Series 2 spin-off show that has languished in obscurity since its original broadcast due to airing on a newly launched channel, previously only had one known surviving episode. But now a second one's only gone and bloody turned up!

The next discovery is even better, though. Seven whole minutes of footage from the pits, shot via hand-held camcorder by one of the 13 Black team (for the curious, this footage can be dated to exactly 26 August 2001 by the team's own website). The same account also gives us five minutes of test footage from when the robot was first built, and footage of their Series 2 entry Limpet dating from August 1998.

And, for good measure, an appearance from Mike Lambert of the Dantomkia team on Harry Hill's TV Burp.

Thrave Review

It's the late eighties and early-to-mid nineties, and adventure gamebooks are huge in the United Kingdom, with the popularity of Fighting Fantasy having prompted every other publisher going to jump on the bandwagon. One of the more prolific gamebook authors who never wrote for FF is one Stephen Thraves, and I am truly grateful for his name providing the pun in the title of this article. But what about his gamebooks?

Brittassing In Action

The Brittas Empire ran for seven series on BBC One between 1991 and 1997, all of which were later released on DVD, alongside a limited amount of bonus content. And what they chose, and didn't choose, to include as special features is a bit odd.

The BBC Does Not Have Adverts But Some Programmes It Airs Originally Did: A Case Study

The BBC occasionally buys programming from other countries. And those programmes were probably originally made for channels with commercial breaks... which the BBC, as established in the rather eccentric title of this post, don't have. The solution was generally to edit out the fades or cuts to black where the adverts would originally go. But sometimes things would be a bit more complicated than that. What if the programme had something designed to lead in to an advert break - such as a cliffhanger, or a bit of leaning on the fourth wall acknowledging the gap? The Simpsons, which the BBC aired the first 11 seasons of between 1996 and 2004, is a good test subject for this, so let's take a look at what got cut.

Hypno-Digital-Versatile-Disc

A few months ago, in Edit Wars #5, I postulated that the original series of Robot Wars would be an excellent show to release on DVD because of all the lovely potential bonus content. So why not imagine what such content could look like with a series of fantasy DVD listings?

Broken Gamebooks #11: Midnight Rogue

Midnight Rogue, the twenty-ninth entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, is an entertaining change from the norm: you play an apprentice in the Thieves' Guild of Port Blacksand, and to be granted full membership of the guild, you must locate and steal a priceless gem known as the Eye of the Basilisk. It's a fun, punchy adventure with a unique plot, and also tries a few gameplay innovations not often seen in FF books; nothing groundbreaking, but I'm certainly glad it exists.

Right, that's that out of the way, let's errata the hell out of this thing. MASSIVE SPOILERS below the jump break, for the wary.

One Foot in the Genome

You know the drill by now, it's an article culled entirely from old Radio Times listings back in the day where producers got the chance to write their own, as found on the BBC Genome. The show under discussion is One Foot in the Grave.

Cliffhangerama

In 2007, Futurama returned four years after being cancelled by Fox, in the form of four direct-to-DVD movies. As part of a deal struck with Comedy Central, these movies would then be chopped up into four episodes each, creating a 16-episode season. There were a couple of differences between the movies and the individual episodes (which have never been released commercially), the biggest of which were the creation of twelve cliffhangers obviously not seen on DVD. Let's find out what they were, along with some assorted other trivia...