Detox

 I've said it before, once or twice over the years, but I really need to break my addiction to cherry coke. The amount of it I'm drinking has steadily increased just lately, so I'm going to go sort of luke-warmish-turkey and reduce my intake to much smaller and healthier levels for a while. We'll see how it goes...

Ahhh! A happy ending!

I'm sure you all remember my post from a week and a half ago about the fascinating adaptation of Planet Terry for the British Transformers comic, and have been eagerly awaiting the sequel ever since.

Well, I've finally acquired a copy of Transformers no. 25, and it's intriguing in many ways!

It came with a free gift of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes model airliner. So every copy of this comic you find in the wild, like this one, has a big rip on the cover and a strip of decaying 36-year-old sellotape. All the airliners no doubt fell apart and were thrown away within a few days of getting them, but at least some of the comics still survive!

Apart from all the intrusive cornflakes, this cover uses the cover of the American Transformers #6, the second half of which is reprinted inside. The speech bubble is a UK original addition, though; there isn't one on the American original. Simon Furman, at a guess, enlivening the cover with his characteristic speech patterns and tying in to the cornflakes airliner theme with the call-sign CF-one. It's those little attentions to detail that made the British Transformers comic so special!

Inside the comic, as it winds down towards the big new weekly full-colour relaunch, we find the penultimate two-page Chromobots episode, the final eleven pages of the American Transformers #6, the final five pages of Machine Man #19, the letters page, Robo-Capers, Matt and the Cat, fact files for exciting new toys Warpath and Ramjet, a mega Kellogg's Corn Flakes competition, and of course the final three pages of Planet Terry! The first year of British Transformers comics were mega!

The British Transformers no. 26 printed the entire American Transformers #7, incidentally - a whole 23 pages of Transformers in the Transformers comic! British readers had never seen the like - and never really would again...

But to return to the final appearance of Planet Terry, he's squeezed into the final three inside pages of this issue, all of them in monochrome. Here's how it starts:

We get an extra title at the top, which weirdly calls this story "The Saga of Princess Ugly, part 6". That was the title of the American Planet Terry issue #2, which was spread over the British Transformers nos. 20-23. The way it was spread over them was also interesting, so if your eye has been drawn to the much more interesting part of the pages above, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs, but...

"The Saga of Princess Ugly" in the American comic was split into three chapters, as per the old American comic tradition, but those chapters were of very irregular length - the kind of thing that's a real inconvenience for British reprint comics. Part 1 was six pages, part 2 was a whole nine, and part 3 was seven. The way they dealt with it is a great indication of how the British Transformers comic worked - for no. 20, they didn't have any American Transformers material available to them, and were printing the British-original "Raiders of the Last Ark". There were six pages of that in the British comic, backed up by the usual filler material including the last part of Machine Man issue #18, and the first part of Planet Terry issue #2.

With no. 21, they had a mere five pages of Transformers content, concluding "Raiders of the Last Ark", and so ample room to print the full nine-page part 2 of Planet Terry, if they dropped Machine Man for one issue, allowing his next story to be spread over nos. 22-25. The other pages of Transformers no. 21 were filled with the usual kind of stuff, including a thrilling four-page historical comic about Erik the Red.

Then for Transformers no. 22, the long-awaited American Transformers #5 was finally available, and the Transformers content could go back up to 11 pages per issue of the British title! The third part of "The Saga of Princess Ugly" could be chopped in half and spread over two issues, with a "part 4" added to the top of the first page of no. 23.

As we saw in the last blog post, the American Planet Terry issue #3 was titled "Secret of the Space Warp", and that was the title shown in the British Transformers no. 24, which printed five pages' worth of material from the first 19 American pages. So why they reverted to "The Saga of Princess Ugly" for the title of these final three pages (in which Princess Ugly neither appears nor is mentioned) is hard to fathom.

But that's just a sideline to the most interesting part of this British printing. Not only is the dialogue rewritten to explain what the Devourer is, the second panel is entirely different! I didn't remember that at all, but it came back to me as soon as I looked at this comic. It's been lifted from the bottom of page 9 of the American comic - part of the large chunk that was chopped out for the British Transformers fans!

A scene that really happened in the American original has been repurposed as a flashback to Terry playing a video game! Now that's some clever editing! Although it does raise the unanswered question of why this Devourer knows who Planet Terry is, and specifically wants to eat him!

Slightly less clever is the way the page number has been very clumsily scribbled out at the bottom right of the British printing, but with that excitement out of the way, there's not much to note about the final two pages...

Ahhh. From the British comic-readers' perspective, Terry has found his long-lost parents at last, and everybody's happy!

From American comic-readers' perspective, next issue they turn out to be statues, and Terry's quest continues for nine more issues. And he never does find his parents; it ends with him still endlessly searching. I prefer the British one!

トロン・ボーン

 "The Misadventures of Tron Bonne" is a PlayStation game from 2000. Someone mentioned the character and the game to me in passing twenty years or so ago and I hadn't thought about it since then, until it popped back into my mind yesterday morning for no reason at all. So I had to look it up and find what it was all about, and it does look like fun. Someone should re-release it on the Switch.

Rhyme chime

Have you ever noticed how many songs use the word 'again' as a handy rhyme for pain, rain and all the other things that song-writers like to agonize about, but the singer invariably pronounces it 'agen' so that it doesn't rhyme at all? Lots of songs that I really like do this, so I probably shouldn't be too horrid about the whole thing, but even a wonderful piece of music like Don McLean's "Castles in the Air" is very slightly marred by a sequence of pain/agen/remain/plain.

But on the other hand, the Victor Meldrew song in "The Beast in the Cage" rhymes 'then' with 'again', but John du Prez pronounces 'again' to rhyme with 'rain'.

Following the herd

It's "trending" on "Twitter" and all kinds of other "new-fangled" and "cool" things, but I have to admit Wordle is a really great game nonetheless. Not only do you only get one puzzle a day, avoiding the likelihood of getting hopelessly addicted to it, but it's a real brain-stretching kind of exercise, searching your vocabulary for a word that can fit the letters you know. Plus I got it in three guesses today, and that's way better than anyone else I know!

Overthinking it

 Okay, the Simpsons episode "I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can" was on TV today, and I've always had a serious problem with it, which I will now discuss at great length, because I've got nothing better to do with my time on a Sunday night.

Lisa Simpson is competing in a spelling bee and the evil organiser wants an adorable little boy to win it for publicity reasons, so offers Lisa a bribe of a college scholarship to throw the contest, and she refuses. And then it goes like this:

Evil organiser: All right, your word is 'whether' [or 'weather']

Other contestant: Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?

Evil organiser: Certainly. "I don't know whether the weather will improve."

Other contestant: Umm... W... E...

Evil organiser gleefully presses the 'wrong answer' button. Adorable little boy comes to the microphone.

Evil organiser: Your word is 'rigged', as in "this contest is rigged!"

Adorable little boy: R-I-G-G-E-D. Wigged.

Evil organiser: Bravo, my pet! You shall be champion! Assuming Lisa misspells this next word... The word is 'intransigence'! As in "the little girl's intransigence cost her the college of her choice!"

Lisa: Attention, everyone! I was asked to take a dive, but I won't do it! I-N-T-R-A-N-S-I-G-A-N-C-E!

Evil organiser: You fool! It's E-N-C-E!

Lisa: Oh my god, you're right!

Evil organiser: And now you lose everything! And I go back to whatever it is I do!

Okay, George Plimpton as the evil organiser is hilarious, and the whole scene is brilliant, but it annoys me. If he could eliminate another competitor with the weather/whether gag, he could have done that to Lisa too! Much better, and funnier, would be to have the first competitor be given the word 'sellout', spell it X-J-Z-Q-T and be cheerfully thrown a huge sack of money with a dollar sign on it, adorable Alex get 'rigged', then have Lisa be given the whether/weather gag and the evil organiser realise that she got it right because he hadn't noticed there are two words that sound the same, adorable Alex get another hilarious word, and then have Lisa get 'intransigence' wrong. That would be much better all round, and not an insult to the viewers' intelligence!

I have made this point before, every time the episode has been on telly. One time, I was in Cambridge the next day for an othello competition, and a very intelligent person, an actual Cambridge University professor and everything, who doesn't normally watch the Simpsons, was still laughing about having seen that episode and saying how brilliant the whole weather/whether bit was. It almost makes me think that the episode wasn't so much an insult to intelligence as to pedantic quibbling, but no. It's the rest of the world that's wrong.