Chipmunk Chronological Confusion Corner

 "Theo vs Simon" is a particularly wonderful episode of ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks. But there's something about the sequence of events in it that I find a little strange. Just follow through these scenes from the episode, and see what you think.

Poor little Theodore has come to believe that Simon is better than him at everything, when he discovers that Simon once won a trophy for baking brownies - he makes Simon whip up another batch to see what they're like, and when they turn out to be delicious, Theo runs up to their bedroom, crying.

Just as an aside, reason number 5616581651 why I love this cartoon - the way it depicts crying. Most modern cartoons go with anime-style exaggerated floods of tears, but Chipmunks draws it very realistically, which works much better.

And when they cry is done brilliantly, too, with a consistent and well-thought-out grasp of character. Theo is in tears a lot, because he's the emotional type. Alvin cries much less frequently, and only when the world is genuinely being unfair to him (on those rare occasions when he tells the truth, and finds that people don't believe him!) And Simon only ever cries when both his brothers are already sobbing - which only happens in the subset of episodes when they believe they've lost Dave forever.

But back in "Theo vs Simon", Simon comes up to the room to try to talk to Theodore.

I just want you to know, Theodore, I am so impressed with all that you do!

Oh, shove it! You're just the best! You're the best at everything, okay!

Theodore, look - everybody loves you! You listen to people! And people trust you with their feelings! That's huge!

That doesn't count! That's easy!

I'm sure there's a lot of things that you're better at than me!

Oh yeah? Like what?

Well, you pick! Pick anything!

Okay. Okay, I will!

Theodore stomps out. And the next scene starts with Theo standing by the pool, and Alvin coming out to join him.

How you doing, Theodore?

He's just so good, at so many things!

Why do you keep challenging him, Theodore? Simon's good at a lot of things, but that doesn't mean you're not!

Yeah, but I wanna be better than him at one thing! One important thing! Not just being nice and cuddly!

Oh Theodore, I got it! The drums! It takes years to master!

Did we miss something here? We haven't seen Theodore challenging Simon to things repeatedly yet! Anyway, Alvin arranges a drum-off, and Simon... gets a bit carried away.

At first Simon just tries to concede defeat, but when Theo insists he show what he can do, Simon plays a wonderful drum solo, Theodore screams, kicks his drum kit to pieces and runs back to the bedroom. "Nice going, champ," Brittany tells Simon, who protests "Theodore, that was a fluke! That never happened! Honestly!" and follows him back to the bedroom...

And the dialogue in this scene is another of my all-time favourites.

Theodore, look, let's just do it again. You know, that was a once-in-a lifetime...

Stop! Stop! I... I hate this. And I don't want you to make yourself worse, just so I feel better!

Oh, there, Theodore, you see? You are so emotionally mature! You're the best at that!

Oh, be quiet! They don't give out trophies for that!

Well, yes, but I... (Theodore puts his hand over Simon's mouth) mmpphh mmf...

I, I know it's not emotionally mature, but I need to beat you at something! I'm sorry, it's just really gonna bother me until I do...

And THEN, we cut to the musical number for the episode (a great song, as always) with a montage of Theodore challenging and losing to Simon at running, basketball, Rubik's cube, sandcastle building and finally blowing bubbles by the pool.

It ends with Theo standing by the pool, just where Alvin found him at the start of the earlier scene. The next scene picks up at the start of the next day, as they're going to school, and Simon tells Alvin "It's getting really bad. Last night he challenged me to shove myself into a to-go bag!"

And I just feel like the song montage should have come after the first bedroom scene, not the second! I mean, it does still work in the sequence of events we get here, but it just seems like it makes more sense to put the music before the drum-off. Maybe it's just me. Or maybe the song needed to be placed at a particular time-point in the episode. Or maybe someone just put it after the wrong one of the two very similar Simon/Theo bedroom scenes?

It's probably just that I think too much about these things. But don't worry, there is a happy ending to this episode, and I really recommend that you check it out!

Mar-Might will save the day

 This advert appears in Transformers No.102, dated 28th Feb.87:

Send for your Marmiteers Fun Pack! It seems to be a very short-lived attempt to make children urge their parents to buy lots of Marmite - you had to send away "only 16oz worth of Marmite labels", which is quite a lot. The little jars of Marmite in those days were 4 ounces (the labels said 113g, but they hadn't yet moved to selling them in round numbers of grammes). If the household only bought a little jar at a time, people eager to read the adventures of Jo-Jo, Bruno and Mar-Might must have been really spreading the stuff heavily on their toast!

I don't know of anyone who got the Fun Pack. I must try to find one some day. I don't dislike Marmite, but it just doesn't seem like something you'd try to promote to children in this way, even in the days when the Transformers comic was chock-full of adverts for the Weetabix gang on their latest adventure. I'd still like to know exactly what Marmite-themed fun our heroes had...

Excelsis

 There's a great article here about Diarmuid Early, winner of the Microsoft Excel World Championship and a really nice guy all round!

Can I encourage you to join in next year's competition? I promise you it's a lot of fun! Full details pending, but this is the schedule of days to set aside half an hour for solving puzzles by means of spreadsheet formulas as quickly as possible.

You don't have to be weird to do this, but it helps.

Sic transit gloria mundi

 This meme I saw on the internet is rather sad, really.

I mean, there are a lot of things in here I used every day and to think that they're now museum pieces is downright depressing. I've never had an AOL address, though, so I win there. Mainly because I've had the same yahoo email address for 27 years now, but that doesn't show my age at all, right? And I think I've only ever slept on a waterbed once. And I'm not American, so I've never written in 'cursive' as the writer of this meme understands the word, probably. Does that mean I'm still young? Answers on a postcard.

Ridiculosa!

 The Sparky Book 1978 includes two adventures for "Ma Fia and her Mob". Not a regular strip in the weekly Sparky comic, or as far as I can tell, anywhere else.

I thought they might have been borrowed from somewhere else to fill space in the annual (the Sparky at this time did include The Circus of P. T. Bimbo, imported from America and similarly playing on old American stereotypes), but research on the internet draws a complete blank - a lone website cataloguing the contents of this Sparky Book is all Google turns up. The website in question describes it as "relying on cheap racial stereotyping for humour! Yet another case of scraping the barrels bottom again." - which, yes, is fair, but I always rather liked these two comics and hoped to see more of them!

Is there really no more than this? You could churn out a good few more strips along these lines before you run out of the stock of tired old clichés, and I know I at least would like to see them! Could they have appeared under a different name somewhere? I think Ma is due a revival, anyway.

I did put the second strip into Google's image search to see if anything would turn up, but all I got was Google's AI summarising the story in its own unique style:

No, thank you. Honestly, I can't help thinking they need to work a bit more on the whole AI thing before automatically forcing it on people who use Google to search for things. There are some very stupid people out there, after all, and I worry about what they're going to end up believing. I do like the way it's quite good at interpreting the dialogue, but spectacularly fails to pick up on what's actually happening in the story. It's reassuring to know computers are still so dimwitted, we can thwart their inevitable takeover of the world by asking them to define love.

How old is Johnny?

 A couple of Christmases ago, I went on at great length about the Johnny Ludlow papers written by Mrs Henry Wood, and noted that compiling a definitive chronology of Johnny's life and times is something I'm going to do one of these days. It still is, but it's more a thing to do when I've won the lottery and have nothing better to do with my time for months or years on end.

But as I said in that essay, the lynchpin for establishing Johnny's timeline is the story in which Easter Monday falling on April 24th is an essential part of the plot. Since the whole point of this game is to pretend Johnny is a real person, telling true stories, he can't have been mistaken about the year there, and it must have happened in 1848. Which makes the story "Roger Bevere", featuring a well-established London underground railway, rather problematic. And there's another story which gets anachronistic in the other direction...

"Anne", a three-part story published in the Argosy Magazine from October to December 1876, is a good one for tying all the stories together in one coherent chronology. Johnny tells us it's the year when Jacob Lewis, the old rector of Timberdale, died and was replaced by his stepson Herbert Tanerton (who goes on to appear in many other stories). And Johnny the narrator is even kind enough to remark parenthetically that "This year that I am now telling of was the one that preceded the accident to King Sanker." - so we can set this as early in Johnny's life, and prior to the other stories involving the Sanker family and the people they interact with.

Johnny doesn't tell us how old he is during this story - he's clearly a youngish boy, "years and years" younger than the heroine Anne Lewis, but still able to have mature conversations with her about her problems. Which are, basically, the plot of Cinderella. Mrs Henry Wood loved the Cinderella story and told it over and over in her works, but never more so than in this story. And it's when Anne acquires her wicked stepmother and two ugly sisters that the date of the story comes into question.

"St. Michael's Church stood in a nook under the cathedral walls: it is taken down now. It was there that the wedding took place." says Johnny the narrator. And the unusually-located church was indeed a real place in Worcester. And it was 'taken down' in 1843. A replacement church nearby had been built in 1839, and you wouldn't think the old place was still being used for weddings right up to its demolition. So does this story, and by implication all of Johnny's youthful adventures, take place so far back as 1840 or so?

You wouldn't think it could be. It's ambiguous exactly how old Johnny is here, but we can't really put it five or more years before "Watching on St. Mark's Eve". Let alone twenty years before the London Underground opened, if we're to believe "Roger Bevere".

And speaking of trains, when Anne and her father first come to the (fictional) village of Crabb, they're collected from "the station". All the other stories set in and around North and South Crabb have a very busy train station, Crabb Junction, in South Crabb - it's explained that the little place happens to be on the intersection of multiple train lines, which is reasonable enough, but surely must mean that the station was built during the "railway mania" of the 1840s. Shifting Johnny Ludlow's childhood back early enough to set that wedding in St Michael's throws everything just that little bit askew. It's surprising how "Victorian times" actually encompasses a whole lot of rapid change and development once you start looking at railways.

I think Johnny's getting his churches confused and misremembering. The unfortunate Dr Lewis and the awful Mrs Podd got married in the new church, and all those years later when he comes to write the story for the magazine Johnny thinks it was the old one. This is the kind of thing you have to read into the text if you want to be a chronologist. I'll write that full Johnny Ludlow history one day, and it'll all make sense, you'll see!

Cuphead and his pal Mugman, they like to roll the dice

 Further to my last-but-one blog post, the latest cartoon I've been enjoying is The Cuphead Show. And I'm fascinated to see that seasons 1 and 3 are rated PG, with the warning "Rude humour, threat", while season 2 gets a U certificate but the extended caution "Rude humour, dangerous behaviour, violence, threat". I'm not sure which season is more unsafe to watch, based on this.

It's a good cartoon, though, in an uneven kind of way. But I've only watched the first season so far, and maybe it improves. Anything inspired (via a video game) by Max Fleischer cartoons has to be worth a watch, at least. And the game itself was great-looking and not as great to play as it probably should have been. I'm just too picky, possibly. And rude.