The Phantom of Ghastly Castle and Other Killer Puzzles

The Killer Puzzles series was authored by Kjartan Poskitt, and spanned four titles released in the mid-to-late nineties. They diverged from the Usborne Puzzle Adventures and other series of around the same time in several aspects: apart from a rather twisted sense of humour, they were also extremely difficult, to the point that Poskitt received almost as much correspondence asking for help from adult readers as he did from children - because the series also did not include any answers or solutions.

Killer Puzzles also had one other selling point: if you managed to complete every puzzle in the book, then you could solve its big secret. In three of the four entries (to wit: Decode the Deadliest Joke in the Universe, Titus O'Skinty's Gruesome Gameshow and Attack of the Killer Puzzles), this was a coded message of some kind, although the specifics as to how you decoded it and how the puzzles gave you the key were very different in each book. The other book, Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle, took a totally different approach: for one thing, it wasn't just a puzzle book, it was a sort of adventure gamebook.

And "sort of" has always been good enough for this blog.

The War Games

A comparison between Crasha Gnasha's computer game and real life versions which does not bode well.

There can have been few things more inevitable at the turn of the century than a computer game based on a hugely popular television programme about members of the public building robots and making them fight each other. In fact, no fewer than five games based on Robot Wars were released, the first popping up just in time for Christmas 2000, and the last in late 2002, shortly before the final BBC series was broadcast.

The first game, Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem, was released for the Game Boy Color. The idea that you could hope to recreate the show with any great degree of accuracy on such a platform could charitably be described as ambitious. But surely what entailed could still have been better than this. I have made several attempts to write this article before now, and each time I have stopped because I find it hard to find anything that sums up Metal Mayhem better than just linking to a YouTube video of someone attempting to play it. But let's have a go anyway.

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.)