Dennis the Obscure

The first attempt to bring Dennis the Menace, long-time cover star of the Beano, to the screen, is not one many people remember, mostly because DC Thomson seem to have done their best to erase it from existence. It aired in 1990 and 1991 under the slightly unwieldy title The Beano's Dennis the Menace and Gnasher Show, and rather than animation, it used puppets; many of the puppeteers involved have had quite distinguished careers, with most of them appearing in Jim Henson productions, and other credits including the Star Wars movies, Button Moon and Little Shop of Horrors.

Several episodes still survive, and you can see them here - that video identifies it as airing on the obscure and imaginatively titled cable channel The Children's Channel, which broadcast in the UK between 1984 and 1998, although according to Wikipedia (which does not have a source to back it up) those were repeats, and the show was originally broadcast on CITV (but it does seem worth noting that the operators of The Children's Channel were backed by DC Thomson). Something does seem a little strange about a CITV show having a parody of the BBC's Test Card F in its title sequence, though...

The News Quiz That Never Was

Saturday 6 September 1997, 12.25pm. The third episode of the latest series of The News Quiz is scheduled to air on BBC Radio 4 at this date and time. Look, here's the listing in the BBC Genome and everything. According to the listing for the Monday 6.30pm repeat, the panel was scheduled to include Alan Coren and Alan Hamilton (probably a corruption of Andy Hamilton).

Let us move from that listing to the fantastic resource that is Ben Newsam's News Quiz archive. Whilst most of the show's first 13 years are missing, from the early 90s most episodes are present and correct... but the 06/09/97 one is not. It is the only missing episode from its series. In fact, it is the most recent missing episode of the show.

Maybe the British Comedy Guide's episode guide can shed some light on this? No, because "No detail is known for this episode" - again making it the odd man out in its series.

If all this seems rather curious to you, then maybe consider the fact that six days before that episode was due to go out, Diana, Princess of Wales died. Indeed, if you listen to the previous week's (30th August) episode, there is a round about Princess Diana which was apparently excised from the repeat, which would have been the day after Diana's death.

Does it not seem terribly likely that, rather than the episode being missing, the recording for that week was cancelled altogether? There's no mention of it on the 13 September episode (or indeed any mention of Diana at all), but in the circumstances perhaps that's not surprising... although perhaps Jeremy Hardy's comments on the topical nature of the show in the first question aimed at him are a reference to the previous week's cancellation, presuming that is what happened?

Broken Gamebooks #17: Voyage of Terror

We covered the fact that several of the later adventures in the GrailQuest suffered from major playability issues and a serious lack of proofreading in some of the very earliest Broken Gamebooks articles. But let's go back to the fourth book in the series now, to look at an interesting, albeit small, design flaw.

See the Fog Lights

This is largely pointless, but the blog has a long and proud history of reporting on pointless TV edits, especially those concerning The Simpsons, and I'm damned if it's going to stop now.

In "Treehouse of Horror X", there is a running gag about the Super Sugar Crisp jingle. You know the one - Homer sings the jingle, then he sings the line "Guess I forgot to put the fog lights in!" to the same tune. Later on, in a flashback, we hear the "fog lights" line again... only when the episode was first broadcast in 1999, apparently there was some kind of rights issue with using the tune more than twice. When Homer sings the line in the flashback in the original version, the line has been re-recorded and now sounds different. The rights were sorted out at some point - probably but not definitely when Fox repeated the episode - and the flashback line now matched the other two uses.

Although the DVD has the version where the tune matches in all three instances, the alternate line has now resurfaced courtesy of the Internet Archive's VHS Vault, as the episode was released on one of those old 4-episode 'themed' VHS tapes, and the copy used there was the original (in keeping with VHS using the original but the DVD going for the revised version should any change exist). So if you'd like to hear the different tune, go here and skip to 10:55.

Pointless, yet satisfying, isn't it? (There are a couple of other of old Simpsons VHSes - some official releases, some off-airs - on the VHS Vault which may be worth checking out, not least their copy of the 1991 release of "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire", and several Season 1 & 2 off-airs which appear to be the premiere airings.)

Scheduling Twists

Whilst looking through the BBC Genome for potential oddities I could get a post out of, I spotted something interesting about their original broadcasts of the deeply disturbing Australian childrens' series Round the Twist...

...And it turns out there's already a perfectly good article about that elsewhere on the Internet. But I can add a couple of things to said perfectly good article going by the Genome.

You Say Potato, I Say Potatoe

On the 15th June 1992, then-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, on the campaign trail for that year's presidential election, visits Muñoz Rivera Elementary School and commits one of the most famous political gaffes in history when he "corrects" a 12-year-old pupil's spelling of 'potato' to 'potatoe'.

Ten days later, Fox airs a repeat of The Simpsons; appropriately enough, the episode is "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish". The blackboard joke in the opening sequence is usually "I will not xerox my butt", but for this repeat, a new joke is hastily added: "It's 'potato', not 'potatoe'". (On the 18th June there was a repeat of "Bart the Lover", which uses a shortened intro with no blackboard gag; presumably nobody had thought of the joke at that point, it was deemed too much work to completely re-edit the opening, or there wasn't enough time to do so.)

Humongous Replay Value

"Play again and again. New puzzles, new friends and new challenges await each time you play!"

Those words, or something along those lines, appeared on the covers of the large majority of Humongous Entertainment's point-and-click adventure games for children (latterly known as the Junior Adventures range), released between 1992 and 2003. But just how much replay value was there to be had? How many times could you hypothetically play the same game and not get the same set-up twice? How many unique configurations did each game have? Shall we go through each game and find out?

Edit Wars #13

7 - 13 August 2000: The main competition part of the fourth series of Robot Wars is filmed.

14 - 15 August 2000: Various specials and side tournaments for the same series are filmed. This includes the Sumo Basho tournament, which will be broadcast across the first eight heats.

The fact that the non-competition stuff is filmed after all the fighting, but most of it broadcast first, would not be a problem... were it not for this.