The Twin Dilemma

Precisely eleven days ago, I took a look at one of the shortest-serving British comics on record, Hoot. Of particular interest was Hoot's cover star, the tyrannical toddler Cuddles; when Hoot was merged into the Dandy after just 53 issues, Cuddles was merged with a very similar strip about a tyrannical toddler called Dimples which was already running in the Dandy.

When the combined Cuddles and Dimples story began, the boys were presented as neighbours after Cuddles moved to Dandytown in the first strip. After some period of time, they were retconned into twin brothers and one set of parents vanished without trace.

The Dandy Summer Special 2022, as pictured above, is principally reprints of old material, profiling eleven different stories from across the comic's archive, with a little introduction to each set of repeats giving information about the character's history. The introduction to the section on Cuddles and Dimples states this:

Cuddles and Dimples are very odd brothers. Yes, we all know that they are super-wild and made of mischief, but they're even odder than you'd think, because they weren't brothers to begin with. Cuddles first appeared in The Nutty and Dimples arrived in The Dandy a little later. Cuddles moved to the short-lived comic, The Hoot, before joining The Dandy when the two comics merged. For two weeks the boys were neighbours and on the third week, they had become brothers and one set of parents had disappeared. The strangest thing is that not a single letter was ever received in the office about it. Nobody noticed.

Between publishing that earlier post on Hoot and now, though, I came into possession of a book I'd been after for some time: The Art and History of the Dandy, published to mark the title's 75th anniversary (and not long before it finished completely as a weekly title). And that publication has this to say:

When he left Hoot to join The Dandy, Morris [Heggie, editor of the Dandy from 1986-2006] took one of his favourite characters with him, a naughty tot called 'Cuddles'. The Dandy already had a mischievous toddler named 'Dimples', so Morris decided to have them join forces as next-door neighbours -- it was going to be double trouble.

In 1987 Morris decided the story would work better if Cuddles and Dimples were twins with the same parents. But he got a shock one Monday morning when Barrie Appleby sent in the first new strip with Cuddles' dad and Dimples' mum as the parents! He had no need to panic though, it was just Barrie playing a prank on Morris and it was quickly changed.

The combined Cuddles and Dimples debuted in the first Dandy branded as Dandy and Hoot: issue #2345, dated the 1st November, 1986. Both of these sources cannot be right. The change happened either almost straight away, or after a few months.

Extreme Deadlines

On 25 October 2001, Robot Wars Extreme: The Official Guide was published, tying in with the broadcast of, not unreasonably, Robot Wars Extreme (the first episode was broadcast on BBC Choice on the 8th, and received a terrestrial outing on BBC Two on the 26th).

Of the three Robot Wars publications aside from the Robot Wars Technical Manual, none are particularly great examples of TV tie-in books, but the one for Extreme is probably the strongest. Most notably, it learns from the similar book published for Series 4 by giving each robot two pages for its statistics, so it doesn't, for example, have to reduce a robot's previous battle history to 'Series 3: Overall winner'.

There is one particularly interesting thing about this book, and the series it accompanied. The bulk of filming for Robot Wars Extreme took place between 27 June and 1 July, 2001 at Earl's Court in London, as part of Tomorrow's World Live. However, filming fell very badly behind schedule, and a significant chunk of bouts had to be filmed alongside Series 5 from 26 August to 3 September at Elstree Studios. The book quite clearly had to be at the printers between these two filming blocks, as it is missing some key information about fights, or even whole events, which hadn't yet been filmed when it went to print. The introduction acknowledges this rather well:

All this incredible action guarantees the most extreme robot battles ever seen. Not all the competitors will live to fight another day. A robot that's scheduled to do battle might be annihilated by its archenemy in an earlier event. This makes for mega-exciting, adrenaline-fuelled viewing - but it also means that some of the listings in this book may differ from what you see on the screen.

Give a Hoot

Hoot was, to date, the final attempt by D. C. Thomson to launch a new weekly humour comic for children, and proved to be the shortest-lived of all their titles: it lasted for exactly one year and a total of 53 weekly issues (the first dated 26/10/85, and the last dated 25/10/86) before it was merged into the Dandy. So short was its run that the tagline "Britain's Bubbling New Comic!" was used for all its life. (A few titles by rival publisher Fleetway can claim an even shorter run; the record may be held by Nipper, which managed just 16 issues.)

Hoot is arguably the most obscure of all D. C.'s titles; not just because of its short run, but very few characters survived the merger and, as we'll see, its best-known star joined the Dandy in a rather unusual way. It was not featured in the publisher's reprint titles such as Classics From the Comics for a long time, although they eventually relented near the end of CFtC's run. (Plug was also excluded, but that at least had its wacky concept to make it memorable.)

Although a few new strips were added in the last few weeks (including one that only appeared in the final issue!), the comic's lineup was pretty static for its all-too-brief life, and you can get a pretty good sense of it just from one edition... so here we go. The issue I've scanned in is number 43, hailing from near the end (there would be just ten more instalments after this one).

Chicanery

In Part Eleven of the Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord, original TX 15/11/1986, the evidence in the Doctor's trial is at odds with his own memory, as the footage has been twisted by the prosecutor, the Valeyard, to show him in a worse light than reality:

THE DOCTOR: I didn't do that!

THE INQUISITOR: Stop the Matrix!

THE VALEYARD: Are we to be subject to more chicanery, Sagacity?

In the fifth episode of the third season of Better Call Saul, "Chicanery", original TX 08/05/2017, Jimmy McGill has just provided the courtroom with proof his brother's electromagnetic hypersensitivity is all in his mind, hoping to provoke him into exactly the unhinged rant he ends up delivering:

CHUCK: No, no, no. No no, it's a trick, it has to --

ALLEY: Enough is enough. I submit that Mr. McGill's mental illness is a non-issue. If he were schizophrenic --

CHUCK: Schizo--!

ALLEY: -- it would not take away from the fact that the defendant --

CHUCK: I am not crazy! I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers, I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta, as if I could ever make such a mistake! Never! Never! I just -- I just couldn't prove it! He -- he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him --

ALLEY: Mr. McGill, please. You don't have to go into --

CHUCK: You think this is something? You think this is bad, this -- this chicanery? He's done worse! That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No, he orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof, and I saved him! And I shouldn't have! I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He'll never change. He'll never change! Ever since he was nine, always the same! Couldn't keep his hands out of the cash drawer! "But not our Jimmy! Couldn't be precious Jimmy!" Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer?! What a sick joke! I should have stopped him when I had the chance! And you, you have to stop him! You --

And that is how Pip and Jane Baker foreshadowed one of the most iconic scenes in one of the most acclaimed dramas of the twenty-first century.

Fun and Games

So, there you have it, should anyone ever ask you then you can answer with confidence from this day on: Garfield's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop today, which is remarkably similar to Ludo but with the added twist of having certain 'safe' squares which you can't be bumped back to the start from.

Curiously, Dennis the Menace's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop a few weeks ago, from the same company, which is also remarkably similar to Ludo but with the different twist of an additional token representing Dennis' Dad, which patrols a section of the board and can also send pieces back to the start.

Funny how that works.

32 on E4

It has been a weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil time to be a British fan of The Simpsons over the last few months, and I want in. The first clue something was up was when we hit mid-November and there was still no sign of Season 32 making its premiere on Channel 4, but nobody could have guessed the multitude of bombshells that would come our way in December. Disney+ would become the exclusive home for new episode premieres in the UK beginning with Season 36. Sky would be cut out of the picture entirely as far as new episodes were concerned, although they retain repeat rights for now. Channel 4 would move their airings of the show to E4 in the New Year, becoming the only place to see new episodes on linear television, beginning with the long-awaited arrival of the 2020-21 season on free-to-air TV.

Any fears that this would be a sideways move or demotion were quelled when we finally got a look at how the show would be scheduled in its new home: episodes were plentiful, with up to seven a day running between 4pm and 9pm, and the newbies were given a prominent slot not dissimilar to how Sky used to schedule them (and, it must be said, a far more convenient one for me): a double-bill every Sunday at 8pm, starting on the 12th January (with 7pm repeats on Thursday and Friday) and running until the Sunday before this post was published. The show also retains a presence on C4 with the daytime repeat block on weekends.

With the new episodes airing later than usual, you might expect them to be more lenient with regards to censorship (Season 31 having already been significantly less cut on C4 compared to the previous few years). Some things I'd warned about in my preview of the season back in September suddenly seemed like they might not be issues at all. (For effect, try reading back the fourth paragraph of that post with "The Eve of the War" playing in the background.) Was that to be the case?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? was the ninth title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, authored by the range's creator Edward Packard and first published in 1981. Its premise is exactly what the title implies: millionaire Harlowe Thrombey (president of Thrombey Plastics Company) is scared that someone is out to murder him and hires you (despite the fact the text heavily implies you're still a teenager), but before he can explain things further, he is fatally poisoned, leaving you to interrogate the four suspects -- his wife Jane, nephew Chartwell, niece Angela, and Angela's fiancé Robert.

Robot Wares

The images in this article are all nicked from eBay listings, I'm afraid to say.

At the height of its powers at the turn of the millennium, Robot Wars was one of the most merchandising-friendly shows on television, and shortly after the third series concluded in early 2000 the BBC duly obliged fans with a set of action figures -- generally referred to as "pullbacks", after the friction motors they used which meant the toys would move forwards on their own when pulled back then released (which would also allow for rotary weapons to really spin as they did so).

These toys came in three distinct waves or phases, but just to be confusing, the first wave was in two halves released over 2000 and 2001. Phase 1A, as we'll refer to it, featured all the House Robots with Hypno-Disc as the sole competitor robot. Each toy came with an accessory, and for these first figures the accessories were based on the popular Pinball trial -- the intention being that when you collected all six toys, you could recreate the entire Pinball arena and have Hypno-Disc run it against all of the House Robots (the accessories were, respectively, a stack of barrels with Dead Metal, a breezeblock wall with Hypno-Disc, the car door with Matilda, tyre targets with Sgt. Bash, the multiball release with Shunt and the see-saw ramp and sphere with Sir Killalot). These figures also featured swappable components not found on the real-life machines -- for example, Killalot's lance could be switched for a hammer. (The spiked back featured on Hypno-Disc from Series 4 onwards was specifically inspired by the interchangeable one included with the toy!)