Urble-durbly burble-urble!

 35 years ago today, the Thundercats episode "Berbils" had its first showing on British TV. It's the third in the series (or the second if you run the first two together into one big episode, like the BBC did), and it continues the gradual introduction of the characters and concepts - they build the Thundertank, meet some of the inhabitants of Third Earth, tangle with Mumm-Ra for the second time, and start to build the Cats' Lair.

The episode is cut down dramatically on the video version of "Exodus" that I blogged about before. The opening scenes are restructured - the previous episode "The Unholy Alliance" ends with a Mumm-Ra scene and "Berbils" starts with one, so when they're run together into one full-length animated film it starts with the scene of Lion-O and Snarf exploring the forest, then jumps back to Mumm-Ra and his attack on the Thundercats and their newly-constructed tank, then goes on to Lion-O meeting the Berbils for the first time. But then the video chops out a very large chunk of the episode, in which Lion-O defends the Berbils from Trollogs and Giantors, going straight to Mumm-Ra launching a final attack on Lion-O as a swarm of insects. Then it inserts a bit of the earlier Berbils scene from immediately before the Trollog attack, and then shows Mumm-Ra arriving and continues to the end of the original episode.

It's a strange decision to remove that plot entirely - it's a sequence that perhaps doesn't work quite right, since it basically involves Lion-O messing up the balance of co-existence among the races of Third Earth and not entirely learning the lesson that one shouldn't do that, but it's not a particularly bad part of the episode at all. You can chop it out without harming the narrative, but why did they need to?

I'm feeling productive

 I've successfully had a brief conversation with someone today in which I said I'd do something, which definitely counts as a successful accomplishment in itself (but I won't tell you exactly what I said I'd do just yet, in case I don't do it and end up looking stupid), and I also remembered I'd decided to resume learning Japanese on Memrise, and firmly resolved to do it tomorrow. So that's two significant achievements in one day!

Census Day again

The 1921 census has officially been released! So, even though accessing the records is an expensive business that will no doubt become cheaper at a later date, I've just had to budget for a certain amount of splurging on it, since my blogging about the 1911 census proved so popular with friends and previously unknown relatives alike!

Census Day in 1921 ended up being June 19th, when the people of Britain filled in their forms that had been printed with the date 24th April on them. But the particularly fun thing about 1921 is that all four of my grandparents were already alive at that time! So here's a brief overview of the census data, starting as seems only right with a little baby girl in Wakefield...

My sainted grandma, who sadly died nearly four years ago now, was Dorothy Ada Bancroft, aged 1 year and 2 months at census time in 1921. She's living at 24 Cross Lane, Dewsbury Road, with her parents Herbert and Ada, Auntie Edith and Uncle George. Her dad is a motor mechanic, which was a very cool thing to be in 1921. Grandma was fond of telling people that her parents were going to emigrate to Australia until they found they were expecting a baby and so had to stay in Wakefield. Which is a little unfortunate, but I think it worked out for the best in the end.

Also available on the internet, less expensively, is the 1939 register - showing what people were up to in September 1939 and not protected by the rules requiring censuses to be kept secret for 100 years. Although it does black out anyone born under a hundred years ago who hasn't been officially ticked off as having died - here are the Bancrofts in 1939:

Grandma's still at home (now 18 Albion Street) with her younger brothers Leslie, Donald and blacked-out Kenneth and another Batty relative. Any thoughts of emigration are well and truly over by this point, but as the corrections to women's surnames made in later years show, Dorothy Bancroft / Ball / Robotham is about to go on some travels...

Bernard William Ball, aged five years and five months and probably already finding that with a name like that you're inevitably going to end up being called Bill Ball like your father, is at 223 Scotland Green Road, Ponders End, Enfield. He's the secret southern part of my heritage, and Grandma (who exclusively referred to him as "Aileen's father" in contradistinction to her second husband) would have lived her life down in London if he hadn't died tragically young, forcing her to move back up to Wakefield. I can't find him on the 1939 register (already in the army, maybe? Or just a transcription mistake meaning he's harder to search for?), but his parents and younger sister are at 16 Hyde Way, Edmonton, with grandma Emily and auntie Elsie...

And it would be rude to exclude Granddad, even if he wasn't technically my biological grandfather...

Lawrence Simpson Robotham, a two-year-old with two surnames for his given names, is at Hillside, Bradford Road, Wakefield. By 1939, at 41 Cliff Park Avenue, he's twenty years old, still with his parents and blacked-out younger brother John, and working as an order & shipping clerk. That's where my accountant genes come from, you know - it runs in the step-family.

Moving over to my dad's side of the family (who, since he was a very late baby, are all much older than my mother's side), we find my other grandma, who died long before I was born.

Catherine Violet Millership, of 248 Penistone Road, Sheffield, is 21 years old and taking care of her widowed father, four brothers and one sister. And I have to say, whoever filled this census form in has absolutely beautiful handwriting! If only they were all as clear and legible as this one!

She's probably already seeing Sid Pridmore, who lives nearby...

He's at 34 Hunt Street, chronicled in detail on my 1911 blog post, and now just occupied by his widowed father and stay-at-home older brother Oswald. Sid and Cath got married in April 1922, and had their first baby, Uncle Bill, in September that year, so it was obviously a bit of a hasty marriage - they and their rapidly-growing family lived at Penistone Road for a couple of years before getting a place of their own, where we find them in the 1939 register.

72 Robey Street isn't a particularly big house, but the Pridmores certainly managed to fill it up. Uncles Bill, Ted, Syd, Mick and Bernie are blacked-out, and this blog entry is dedicated to the memory of Mick, who sadly died this very morning aged 92, just as I was getting all excited about writing up the family history. Uncle Robert was four months away from being born at the time the register was taken, and my dad, who took everyone by surprise in 1946, wasn't even dreamt of.

And to catch up on the Pridmores of that 1911 summary, or their survivors...

Ernest Pridmore is still living at 4 court, 1 Shepherd Street - those back-to-back houses in the courts were tiny, but Ernest and Elizabeth still manage to raise their six children and find space for Elizabeth's brother Herbert!

By 1939, the widowed Ernest has left the court at last and moved in with daughter Nellie at 164 Southey Green Road.

Albert Pridmore was killed in 1917, and his widow Margaret is now living with her five children at 71 Hollis Croft. The census form doesn't give any indication as to how she's supporting the big family. She died in 1931.

John Thomas Pridmore was the first of the family to be killed in the war. His widow Harriet and their three children are living at 2/3 Ellison Street. In 1939, she's still living in the back-to-back houses, 5 court 1 Granville Street, but she's got the place to herself.

I draw a blank searching for Arthur Edward Pridmore's widow Annie in 1921 - she'll have to be the subject of further research in the future.

The families of Pridmore daughters Florence and Lilian are living in the same address, 10 Brough Street, and John May doesn't consider himself the head of the household, but for some reason they did two separate census returns. Florence had died of pneumonia the previous year, but her husband James William Palmer and their three children form one half of the household, with John Charles May, Lilian May May and their daughter being the other half.

By 1939, the merged family had moved into Hunt Street with brother Oswald.

Wilfred Pridmore had died in March 1921, not long before the census. His widow Chloris lives at 15 Silver Street, and has a visitor on census day, at least. Chloris died in 1933.

George Harry Pridmore, the second lieutenant, died in 1918, and his widow May had by 1921 opened a boarding house at 129 Whitehouse Lane.  In the 1939 register, she is remarried and living at 555 Herries Road with a Harry Foster (that was May's maiden name) and a Barbara Pridmore who subsequently married a John Foster in 1943. 

And I will need to research Barbara some more. She was born in 1922, her mother's maiden name was also Pridmore (presumably unmarried, but let's not cast any aspersions until we're sure), she wasn't the cousin Barbara who you can see in the comments of my post from ten years ago, but I have no idea where she fits into the family tree.

Which is just typical, isn't it? I'd firmly resolved that I can't spend any more time or money on family tree research in the immediate future, and I'd just limit myself to a carefully considered list of relatives to chronicle, and the very last name on the list gives me a tantalising mystery to solve! Genealogy - it's a terminally addictive thing...

Secret of the Space Warp

 For Christmas, I bought my brother a really cool comic book - Planet Terry, the complete collection! To understand just why that's so cool, you need to cast your mind back to 1985, when the coolest thing in the world (to eight-year-olds, at least) was Transformers.

The Transformers comic produced by Marvel Comics' UK offices had a bit of a problem in the early days. It started out in late 1984 as a fortnightly comic - some pages in monochrome and others in colour, as was the norm for this kind of thing - with the idea being that each issue would reprint half of an issue of the American Transformers comic, and the rest of the pages being filled up with any other comics that came to hand. And when the children of Britain inevitably moved onto the next big thing in a few months' time, Marvel UK would move on with them.

Thing is, Transformers turned out to be much bigger than anyone had expected - the American four-issue bi-monthly series was turned into an ongoing monthly title, but there was a three-month lag before it started, and the UK comic had caught up with it. They had to start creating their own Transformers stories, until American stuff was available to them! By amazing good fortune, Simon Furman soon got the job of writing these stories, and produced real works of literary quality where absolutely any dross would have sufficed, and the greatest era of British comic history had begun!

But there was still a definite shortage of material to fill a fortnightly British comic. By number 16 (20th Apr - 3rd May 1985), they only had six pages of Transformers comic to put in it, and so needed another backup strip to pad out the comic along with Machine Man. The qualifying criteria for Transformers backup strips was that there had to be a robot in it, and so the first thing the Marvel UK editor found was Planet Terry, a new American series. Terry wasn't a robot, but his sidekick Robota fitted the bill.

Planet Terry was part of Marvel USA's Star Comics brand - mainly designed for comic adaptations of children's cartoons (Ewoks, Get Along Gang, Muppet Babies, all that kind of thing) but also containing several titles in the style of Harvey Comics with adventures aimed at younger children than the usual Marvel titles were.

Everyone hated Planet Terry - or claimed to, at least. Personally, I always loved it, but when you're eight years old (nearly nine), you have to be careful about admitting to liking the part of a comic that's conspicuously written for younger readers than the rest of it. I'm sure a lot of other readers felt the same, because Planet Terry is really, really good! It didn't last long in the Transformers comic, ending in number 25, after which UK Transformers (having become stupendously, unbelievably popular with UK kids!) went weekly, full colour, and containing at least 11 pages of actual Transformers comic content in every single issue!

Reading the complete collection of the American Planet Terry series, most of which I'd never seen before, I was familiar with some parts, but had no recollection of others. My brother - who, as I've lamented many times before, has a much better memory than me - looked at it and said "Oh, that's interesting - to get to a suitable ending point in the British comic, they cut from the first tier of page 4 of the American issue #3 to the second tier of page 18! They must have changed the dialogue a little to make it work, but I don't remember quite how..." I personally don't think anyone should be able to remember in such detail a comic they read at the age of seven, but since our copy of the key issue number 24 of the British comic was lost many decades ago, we had no way to check exactly what it did.

Until.. today! Because I've bought on eBay a copy of that treasure, and can show the world how fascinatingly complex the adaptation of Planet Terry really was!

Wow, that's a great cover. Is it any wonder we loved this comic so much? The UK comic used the covers to the American one when they were available, but most of the time they had to create their own, and the UK originals looked so much better! And then, Shockwave was always super-cool, because he was one of the many American toys that weren't available in this country, so had that unattainable air of mystery about him! 

But anyway, the Planet Terry backup strip starts out with a straight reprinting of the first few pages of the American Planet Terry #3. American version from the collected edition on the left, British version from the Transformers comic on the right. And note how good the editor of the UK Transformers comic was - the credit for 'colorist' has been anglicised to 'colours' in the small print at the bottom of the page. It's all the stranger, since there's no colouring on most of the Planet Terry story in this issue - it's confined mostly to the monochrome pages!

But what's that at the bottom of page 3? The British comic has removed the bottom tier and replaced it with the first tier of page 4! This is how the American comic continued from that point...

And then Terry is abducted and forced to take part in a series of space arcade games! It's not until page 18 that he manages to get back to his spaceship and get back on track to finding his parents...

While the version of the story in the UK Transformers comic starts with the second tier of page 4, then leaps to the bottom three tiers of page 18!

That's a fascinating edit. If they'd left the original bottom tier of page 3 in place, it would have fitted more smoothly - I guess the editor (I'm assuming Ian Rimmer, though I wouldn't be astonished to find it was Simon Furman, who was very good at this kind of thing) thought it was necessary to retain the pathos of Terry's "picture of his parents" (an empty frame that he himself has signed "To Terry, love Mom & Dad" because he's sure that's something they would have said). It's been seen before in the series, but it's referenced a few pages later in the American comic, reprinted in the next British issue.

This means that the dialogue in the second panel of the top tier (a feed-line for a silly joke in the removed part of the American issue) has to be rewritten, as do Terry's and Robota's lines in the second tier. It's done very well, too! The British Transformers comic later developed a reputation for really obvious rewriting of the American material in clumsy and ugly handwriting, but these changes are almost unnoticeable!

Then the two versions of the story synch up for the final page of the British printing - which gets to appear in full colour, unlike the rest of the story!

There are only three remaining pages of the American comic, which seem to conclude with Terry finding his parents at last. The first page starts with Terry identifying the monster as "the Devourer who escaped game one!", so that must have been changed in the British printing of Transformers number 25. Don't worry, I've got one of those on order too, so I'll make sure the world knows exactly what those last three pages looked like to UK readers in 1985 as soon as it arrives!

I really did love Planet Terry. They don't make comics like they used to!

Leagues and leagues

How long is a league, anyway? Apparently it's "any of several European units of measurement ranging from 2.4 to 4.6 statute miles (3.9 to 7.4 km). In English-speaking countries the land league is generally accepted as 3 statute miles (4.83 km), although varying lengths from 7,500 feet to 15,000 feet (2.29 to 4.57 km) were sometimes employed. An ancient unit derived from the Gauls and introduced into England by the Normans, the league was estimated by the Romans to be equal to 1,500 paces—a pace, or passus, in Roman measure being nearly 5 feet (1.5 metres). Land leagues of about 2.63 miles (4.23 km) were used by the Spanish in early surveys of parts of the American Southwest. At one time the term was also used as a unit of area measurement. Old California surveys show square leagues equal to 4,439 acres (1,796 hectares). In the late 18th century the league also came to refer to the distance a cannon shot could be fired at menacing ships offshore. This resulted in the 3-mile offshore territorial limit." Which is a really useful thing to know, isn't it? How long is a league? Well, it could be just about anything, really.

One thing with better-defined rules is the Memory League, which is holding its first World Championship at the end of the month. I haven't qualified for it, which is the kind of thing that makes me resolve to do more training - really, if I can't be one of the top sixteen memory athletes in the world who have the time to qualify for and compete in a friendly online tournament, what kind of Memory Man am I? So I am officially going to devote myself to getting back up to speed and beyond on quickfire memory challenges! I can still memorise a pack of cards in under 30 seconds, after all, and that used to be a really big deal, so I'm sure I can catch up with the best (or nearly best) in the other disciplines too! I'll keep my devoted readers informed about my progress!

Mission Accomplished!

 I tend to get unreasonably stressed about things like getting a new washing machine delivered, so I'm pleased to report that the whole operation today went just swimmingly. And not in a literal sense, though I always expect disastrous floods of water to accompany this kind of thing. So now, having stood and watched while the very helpful man connected the new machine up and took the old one away, I feel like a real expert plumber and can successfully tick today off my 'do something constructive every day' list. What will tomorrow's great achievement be?

The Nose Knows

Now this is a blast from the past. When I was very young, I really loved a series of books about the McGurk Mysteries - about a gang of kids who solved, if not crimes as such, then definitely mysterious puzzles. They were really great, and it was a source of great annoyance to me that the library at Horncastle didn't have two of the books listed on the back. I was missing some mysteries! These are the editions I knew, but it seems there were plenty of different versions with different illustrations...

And it turns out I was missing more than I thought I was! Everyone needs to check out these YouTube videos by Sean, who shares my love of Chromobots and was decent enough to remind me of the wonders of McGurk! And there were way more than the eight books I was aware of in my younger days! I need to track them all down now and read them again!

I still only remember a few bits of the stories - now I've seen those videos, I'm fairly sure the ones the library was missing were The Nervous Newsboy and The Rabbit Rip-Off, and I read the rest of the first eight. I only remember a few particularly clever bits - Willie's flamboyant hand-kissing as an excuse to sniff people's hands, Brains claiming to be able to analyse handwriting but actually guessing who wrote what by what they wrote instead of how they wrote it, the invisible dog, and other little parts, but I'd love to refresh my memories and see what happened to the gang in later years!

Fascinatingly, it seems the author, E.W. Hildick, was British, writing about America. It's interesting, because as far as I can remember the stories were distinctly American in tone, but not so foreign as to be confusing or off-putting to an English reader who knew next to nothing about the USA (or, for that matter, anywhere much more than ten miles from his home). But maybe it'll feel different if I read them again, because I know I was surprised by another book I liked when I was young...

The Dragon Circle, by Stephen Krensky. I read it when I was very small, and I'm not sure if this copy that still lives on my bookshelves is the same one I had when I was young or one I found at a later date - you'd think I WOULD remember that, but you know what my memory's like. In any case, I liked it when I was tiny, either hung on to it or bought a new one when I found it in a charity shop, and read it again as an adult. And this book is VERY American! It's explicitly set in America, even though it's all about dragons and magic, and makes the point repeatedly that the dragons have relocated to America for the purposes of this book. I didn't remember anything about that at all! I remembered it as being a fun story about a magical family and the dragons they encounter, and as being the kind of thing that might well have happened right on my doorstep. To read it again and find it's chock-full of Americanisms (the very first page says it happens in Westbridge, Massachusetts and talks about the Salem Witch Trials, for crying out loud!) was a real shock to the system. Had I just blanked that whole aspect of it out of my memory?

So maybe I'll be equally shocked by the McGurk books if I rediscover them and read them again? I need to track them down, anyway!