Sunday 17 March 2024

Chaos Theory


In March 1983, the very second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Citadel of Chaos, was published in the UK. Having each written one half of the first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone divided their labours for the next books, and Citadel was Jackson's solo effort; Livingstone's offering, The Forest of Doom, was released the very same day.

The Citadel of Chaos is an unusual gamebook in many ways. There's the original cover art pictured above, for one thing, which was the subject of much criticism for its low quality (it isn't even clear what the monster in the foreground is meant to be, as it doesn't match any of the creatures in the game); it was provided by an artist credited only as 'Emmanuel', who has very few other professional credits to their name and about whom we know practically nothing. It became one of the very few Fighting Fantasy covers to be entirely replaced during the original series' 1982-95 lifespan, with the replacement coming from range stalwart Ian Miller, who also provided the covers for several other entries by Jackson and worked on the range right up until it was cancelled by Puffin Books.

It's also an unusual, possibly unique, book in that even if you roll the lowest possible numbers when calculating your statistics, you still have a very good chance of managing to beat the game, primarily because there is only one mandatory combat in the whole thing, and very few other STAMINA penalties outside of combat or stat checks. It only once uses Jackson's signature tactic of having items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow you to take an option not expressly given by the text, in a relatively simple way; the combination to a lock is written down somewhere and you have to turn to that number section when prompted. That isn't to say it's an easy gamebook to beat by any means -- in particular the Puzzle Boss approach to the final encounter with the master of the Citadel, Balthus Dire is excellently engineered. It's a good challenge that never reaches the hair-tearing levels of frustration some of Jackson's other books could provoke.

Sunday 10 March 2024

No Cigar


In late 1979, the Dandy Book 1980 was published in time for the Christmas market. This was the 42nd straight year such a thing had happened, and I don't have much to say about the event itself. But contained within the book is a Desperate Dan story where, put off at the prospect of paying 50 dollars for a box of six Christmas crackers (where he found a shop in the Wild West selling Christmas crackers is another matter), he decides to make his own super-crackers and, to cut a long story short, the punchline of the whole thing involves him smoking a cigar.



We must now leave 1979 behind for 1990, and the publication of the Desperate Dan Book 1991. Dan was actually relatively recently installed as the Dandy's cover star, taking over from Korky the Cat in November 1984, and this was the first of three 90s annuals he received, following one-offs in the 50s and 70s; Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Beryl the Peril and Bananaman were also on the hallowed list of DC Thomson characters popular enough to receive their own dedicated annual.


With the exception of the Bananaman ones, which were all-new (as they tied into the TV series and not the comic strip, but that's another kettle of fish), these character-specific annuals featured a smattering of new material but were principally made up of reprints from past years and various sources, recoloured and with the speech bubbles redone to bring them up to date but otherwise unaltered. And for the first latter-day Desperate Dan Book, the aforementioned story from the Dandy Book 1980 was recycled.

But here the book runs into a problem. Smoking has seemingly become a bit more of a taboo, at least in children's comics, in the eleven years since then, and the original version of the story isn't going to be acceptable. The offending object only appears in the last page and a half, and it seems a shame for a perfectly good, Christmas-themed story that will take up twelve pages to be rendered completely unusable when you only have to alter a few panels. So the cigar is going to have to be changed to something else. Something that looks like a cigar (since the last panel in particular really boxes you in), and allows you to come up with an alternative punchline. But what?

Thursday 7 March 2024

That Letter, That Letter, and That Letter


In the Red Dwarf episode "Bodyswap", originally broadcast on BBC Two on 5 December 1989, Lister (who has temporarily swapped bodies with Rimmer) and Cat are playing a game of Scrabble:

CAT: Hey-hey-hey! I've got you now, buddy! [He holds up his letter rack.] J-O-Z-X-Y-Q-K.
LISTER: That's not a word!
CAT: It's a Cat word!
LISTER: "Jozxyqk"?
CAT: That's not how you pronounce it!
LISTER: What's it mean?
CAT: It's the sound you make when you get your sexual organs trapped in something. "Jozxyqk!"
LISTER: Is it in the dictionary?
CAT: Well, it could be. If you were reading in the nude and you closed the book too quick. [He mimes this.] "Jozxyqk!"

Sunday 3 March 2024

An Adventure of the Far Future


In September 1983, the fourth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Starship Traveller, hit the shelves of all good booksellers, and quite possibly some of the bad ones too. At this early stage in the franchise's history, creators Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were still the sole writers working on the range (a year later outside writers would be brought in when it became apparent that the series' popularity meant new titles were needed faster than two men alone could possibly write them), and Jackson, having already written or co-written two high fantasy-based books, took an early opportunity to experiment: Starship Traveller is the first of several science fiction FF entries; the influences of Star Trek are most obvious, but references to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, among others, are also present. (Later editions of the book also included a notice on the copyright page stating the book was not in any way related to the American role-playing game Traveller, which had caused some minor controversy when it was first published!)

Sunday 25 February 2024

That 1190s Show


The second episode of the second series of the BBC's notoriously anachronism-prone 2006-09 Robin Hood series, "Booby and the Beast": The plot of breaking into the Sheriff's booby-trapped strongroom bears an uncanny resemblance to the 90s gameshow The Crystal Maze. (It's kind of hard to sum this up in a single screengrab, so you might want to just watch the episode.)


The sixth episode, "For England..!": The setpiece of Robin and traitorous Merry Man Allan-a-Dale being forced to fight each other over a pot of boiling oil bears an uncanny resemblance to the 90s gameshow Gladiators.


The eleventh episode, "Treasure of the Nation": The plot of a treasure hunt around Sherwood with devious cryptic clues bears an uncanny resemblance to Treasure Hunt, which was actually a gameshow from the 80s, but oh well. (It would also seem remiss in all this to not note that Little John is played by the original host of the National Lottery draw, Gordon Kennedy.)

So, clearly someone on the production team, quite probably one of creators Dominic Minghella and Foz Allan, was taking inspiration from somewhere, even if it was kind of an odd place to find inspiration for your Robin Hood series tasked with providing a contemporary feel to the legend.

And would you believe that the thirteenth episode, "We Are Robin Hood!", features an actual Gladiator, Mark "Rhino" Smith?

Sunday 18 February 2024

The Case of the Stand-Up Comic


On 13 February 1989, at least if Amazon is to be believed, The Utterly, Utterly Amusing and Pretty Damn Definitive Comic Relief Revue Book was released into the world, collecting sketches and songs from the last 30 years of comedy. Song lyrics from Spitting Image rub shoulders with transcripts from At Last the 1948 Show and Fry and Laurie's days in the Footlights. Grant Naylor, the Goodies, Bob Newhart, Victoria Wood and Douglas Adams are just some of the names thanked for letting their material be used. But what we're interested in is the contents of page 42.


Following on from our success in working out exactly which issue of the Beezer is visible in One Foot in the Algarve, can we work out which issue of the Beano was used for this photoshoot?

Monday 12 February 2024

The Tintin Table


The above is on display in the Hergé Museum in Belgium, and the photo in question comes from my visit there in November 2019: A table of every character who appeared in more than one Tintin album, and how they looked in it.

I just think it's neat, is all.

Sunday 11 February 2024

Witch Magazine


From 1984 to 1986, the official Fighting Fantasy magazine Warlock published thirteen issues, each containing a miniature adventure gamebook. One of these was a reproduction of the first title in the FF range, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, split over the first two issues, and issues 2 and 3 also featured shorter, 'demo' versions of two books that were about to be published: the ninth book, Caverns of the Snow Witch by Ian Livingstone, and the tenth, House of Hell.

As you can see from the above links, I've already gotten posts out of the magazine versions of Firetop Mountain and House of Hell, but the preview of Caverns that was published in the magazine is much less interesting, because it is literally just the full-length adventure chopped in half (well, 190 sections); the editorial for that issue states that the book effectively contains a second mini-adventure right after the one that was originally in the magazine. Nevertheless, there are one or two things worth noting, so I may as well complete the set.