big bad bri wrote:think there is an element of there was only ever like 12 episodes of Bagpuss,mr benn only a few eps etc but because it was on every week for years we actually thought there was more more than the actual number produced.
It reminds me of an episode of Angry Beavers that was in production where the titular characters realised that their show was about to get cancelled, and desperately try to save it only for them to die and go to cartoon heaven. Apparently Nickelodeon scrapped the episode because they wanted kids to continue watching the repeats in the hope that new episodes would follow!
Like Dishes, my main beef with reprints is when the stories are clumsily modernised. The hiccup/hiccough thing would have worked better had the text been rewritten entirely. There's also the Les Pretend "Redskins" incident and Roger's "Retro Beano collection" that I'm sure some people on this forum will remember! But aside from modernisation, another beef I have with the reprints is that they sometimes make a comic seem dated. As opposed to looking towards the future, reprints often make the comic seem stuck in the past. There's also the fact that it means less work for artists.
I remember back in early/mid 2007, being shocked at the amount of reprint The Beano and The Dandy had at the time (I'd not known either comic to have reprints before, though I later found out that reprints in The Dandy had been fairly commonplace until the 80's.) and felt that it was pointless because Classics from the Comics was reprinting old material as well. (It wasn't until later when I found out that reprints are largely a budgetary decision and that most if not all editors would want their comics to be all-new if they had the choice)
Another pet hate is when people refer to annuals as if they were published in the year of their cover date. This misconception was particularly rife in the Golden Years book "Fifty Years of Annuals", saying things like "In 1958, not only did Dennis appear in the pages of The Beano annual, but had his own annual to himself!". Dennis annuals were published in odd-numbered years at the time, so not only were they supposed to be referring to the annual published in 1957 (if it came out in 1958, it would be the 1959 annual!) but there was no Dennis annual released in 1958. Since the book was made by DC Thomson themselves, you'd expect them to know when the books were published! It's trivial but it does get a bit annoying.
Another example is the Word Distributors' Jackpot annuals. They had copyright dates but no cover dates. Hence, you often see people refer to the "Jackpot Annual 1965" even though the first one was the 1966 edition.
(incidentally, I seem to remember some of the mid-90's Dandy annuals having a copyright date reflecting their cover date, despite being released the year before)
