The Dark Secrets of "The Dark Secrets of The Simpsons"

The year is 1997, and The Simpsons is released on home video in the UK in the form of 'themed' videos, each containing four episodes based around a certain topic. The first of these releases was The Dark Secrets of The Simpsons, which contains four episodes themed around MYSTERY AND INTRIGUE: "Homer Badman", "Homer the Great", "Lisa the Iconoclast" and "The Springfield Files". It is the first of these which causes a bit of a problem, and therein lies the video's own mystery.

Momentum or Maomentum? Hat Edition

Been a while since we've done one of these (you can find the previous editions here and here), but Hatgate has provided me with an opportunity I couldn't resist. The following quotes are all genuinely taken from Twitter; some are the actual thoughts of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, others are satirical pisstakes. Which is which? Answers at the bottom of the post, as ever.

Unlikely People To Appear On Live & Kicking Who Genuinely Did

• Richard Wilson (4 December 1993 and again on 10 December 1994)
• Andrew Neil (22 January 1994)
• David Attenborough (8 April 1995)
• Martin Bell (7 October 1995)
• Jon Bon Jovi (2 March 1996)
• Karren Brady (9 March 1996)
• Patrick Moore (12 October 1996)
• John Cleese (25 January 1997)
• Betty Boothroyd (1 February 1997)
• Sir Ranulph Fiennes (15 February 1997)
• The photographer Terry O'Neill (5 April 1997)
• Coolio (18 October 1997)
• Sylvia Young (7 February 1998)
• The orchestral conductor Andrew Davis (14 February 1998)
• Jonathon Porritt (21 February 1998)
• David Puttnam (28 February 1998)
• David Hempleman-Adams (7 November 1998)
• Natasha Richardson (5 December 1998)
• Will Smith (12 December 1998)
• Mal Young (6 February 1999)
• Aric Sigman (13 March 1999)
• Diana Ross (16 October 1999)
• Peter Salmon (4 December 1999)

The left-field guests seem to stop after Zoe and Jamie leave. Clearly they were the ones everyone wanted to meet.

Accio Radio Times Listings!

Oh good, it's time for the blog's first visit of 2018 to the BBC Genome. This time round, the search phrase was "harry potter", but what I was particularly interested in was the way the launch of each new book was covered.

Postcards from the Edge of Simpsons History

Greetings from the Simpsons is a little book of 32 tear-out postcards (two of each design), and is another interesting curio for any discerning fan. It was released in 1990, near the beginning of the show's second season, making it one of the earliest pieces of merchandise for Our Favourite Family (note that there was another postcard book with the same name but different designs released in 2007).

I still have one each of 15 of the designs; the Principal Skinner one is lost to time (which is a shame, as it was the only one to include a detail explicitly later contradicted by the series, namely that Skinner wears a toupee.) Here are some pictures of the others.

Now, time for a pop quiz. One of these cards is of particular interest to the blog, because it relates to one of the many previous articles I've written about The Simpsons. See if you can guess which one, then join us below the cut to see if you were right.

Broken Gamebooks #8: The Lone Wolf Round-Up

Mydnight's Hero belongs to the Lone Wolf range's "New Order" subseries, where Lone Wolf had already saved the world and you now played one of his disciples in the re-established Kai Order. It also has mistakes in it, and they're two rather interesting mistakes, because - as with Steve Jackson's Sorcery! - they hint at some sort of revision to the text somewhere in the writing process. We'll cover most of the remaining issues with Lone Wolf that are worth talking about in this article, as promised way back in Broken Gamebooks #2, but we'll start with this one.

The Pearl Poll Rankings

Last week Ganymede & Titan published their Pearl Poll, all 73 episodes of Red Dwarf ranked according to the fans. As this is a remarkably easy thing to get an extra blog post out of, here's my own personal order.

A Fiendish Feat

I've recently discovered this page, chronicling the history of Fiendish Feet, a range of yoghurts sold in novelty pots in the late eighties and early-to-late nineties, and I don't have the heart to not include a link to it somewhere on this blog, so in tune with its ethos the page is.

One interesting thing is that there was originally an Egyptian-themed character, Pharoah Nuff (their misspelling of 'pharaoh', not mine) sold in a four-pack. Later on, he was dropped and replaced with Slurpy Bertie. The page posits that this was due to racial problems with the original character (due to the relative lack of imagination shown in his replacement and both being the same flavour, suggesting a quick fix more than anything else). However, Nuff was later reused for a different product in the range ('Monster Mousse'), and merchandise shows both him and his replacement together... so was there more to it than that? Was there some outcry that led to them dropping the character, but they liked him and decided to quietly reinstate him later on? (Note that they still haven't fixed the spelling mistake on the second product!) There could be a more innocent explanation - the mousses were sold individually, not as packs, so maybe they'd rather have had the more interesting Nuff available as a standalone? There's a mystery here - one that could possibly be solved if we knew exactly when the character was first changed.

Whether or not that's a mystery worth solving, of course...