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.

Weekly Ending / Best of 2019

It was always my intention to start writing a blog some day. Several of the pieces I have written over the last few years have existed as ideas in my head for anything up to a decade before I finally got around to them here; it was not until I answered a question Andrew Ellard had about an adventure gamebook on Twitter that I found I needed a space to write something, and once I had the space I decided to set myself the totally arbitrary target of seeing how long I could keep it updated at least once a week for.

To my surprise, that has turned out to be very slightly more than exactly three years and (including this one) exactly 200 posts, and the magic of pre-scheduled posts has finally run out; going forward, the blog will not be updated weekly, but whenever I happen to have a new thing to talk about, or I can finally afford to shell out for the eighties obscurity I want to discuss, or when the BBC finally start answering my e-mails about releasing all two thousand hours of Robot Wars rushes.

Until then: Much thanks to, apart from Mr Ellard for providing the impetus to start the thing in the first place, John Hoare, Wesley Mead, Steve Williams, Ian Symes, Darrell Maclaine-Jones, Tim Byrne, Jonathan Green, Rebecca Fisher and everyone else who has ever left a nice comment on an article, linked to something I've written on somewhere far more widely-read, checked a specific copy of an adventure gamebook to see if it still has a mistake the earlier printings did or given me some interesting information about late changes to a TV schedule. You've all been very kind, and I doubt the blog would have kept going for so long without you. Beneath the cut, you will find a selection of my favourite pieces from the last year; hopefully, there'll be something new along soon.

The Chronicles of the Chronicles of Narnia on the BBC

The very first adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was broadcast on the BBC Home Service in September 1959, as part of their Children's Hour strand. It lasted for 6 40-minute episodes, adapted by pioneering radio producer and writer Lance Sieveking, and as you might expect, nothing is known to survive of it today. (Sieveking's Wikipedia article states that the adaptation he did was of The Magician's Nephew, but this appears to be an error based on a 2005 Guardian article about the forthcoming film.)