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.

Cityport Knocking

In 1982, the British games designer Steve Jackson co-writes the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. His masterstroke is a puzzle requiring three numbered keys you have to find to unlock the Warlock's treasure chest; use the wrong keys and unlocking the chest is impossible, or even fatal!

Jackson has an interesting -- not to mention highly ambitious -- tactic of cheat-proofing his gamebooks like this by requiring the player to take options that are not directly given by the text. He went on to use a not dissimilar puzzle, but with intergalactic coordinates, in Starship Traveller. He put a secret room in House of Hell. Appointment with F.E.A.R. has multiple possible solutions depending on which superpower you choose to play with. He throws the literal kitchen sink at Creature of Havoc, with multiple examples of reference modifiers to allow the reader to take a nonstandard action, and even going so far as to make up a cipher which all English language directed at the player is initially given in, which the player can't decode at first.

Without really meaning to, I have written about nearly all these elaborate puzzles Jackson came up with to ensure that only someone playing the book fairly could beat it.

Except for one.

Bright Spark

The above is a typical example of We Are the Sparky People, a strip which appeared in the DC Thomson comic Sparky for around two thirds of its 1965-77 run. Drawn by Jim Petrie (better known as the artist for 2,000 editions of Minnie the Minx in the Beano), WAtSP was a metafictional workplace comedy based around a fictionalised version of the Sparky office staff; other fourth-wall-breaking strips where the characters would interact with the comic's writers and artists would appear before and after this in various DCT comics, but the Sparky People were unique in depicting the ongoing adventures of the people actually putting the comic together.

The Sparky People also appeared, of course, in the annual Sparky Christmas book. The annuals would always be dated with the year ahead, so the Sparky Book 1976, pictured above, was published in mid-to-late 1975. They were also in a near-constant state of production and had extremely long lead times, each book typically being finished a whole year ahead of schedule -- so the 1976 Book would actually have been completed by around summer 1974. This would cause the occasional oddity; it wasn't unusual for a strip which had been dropped from the weekly comic to show up in the annual quite some time later. (I understand that these days, the Beano and Dandy annuals are no longer produced quite so far in advance.)

And this particular book contains, via the Sparky People, perhaps the only joke ever made in one of these annuals about their long lead times.

Coda

This post marks the end of a quite remarkable period of almost seven months where I managed to keep this very stupid blog updated on a weekly basis; I figured I'd leave more in-depth analysis for the end-of-year roundup, but just wanted to note that golden age is now over, especially since this post coinciding with two weeks' holiday and the release of Kingdom Rush 5 means it may be a little while before you hear from me again.

But I think I kept a very high standard, and whether you are just discovering the site for the first time or think you might have missed something, please do go back and see what I've written so far this year. (Whilst I promised just one paragraph ago to go into more detail at the end of the year, I will point you in the direction of the trilogy of articles from the start of the year on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, House of Hell and Caverns of the Snow Witch and their alternative versions published in Warlock magazine, which are quite possibly my favourite things I've ever written.)

I'm sure you'll find something that's worth your time.