Two newbies

Finally, two new additions to my little inanimate birdy family have arrived. Unfortunately they didn't come with the tags, as these were second hand, so I still cannot identify the manufacturers. However, both dolls seem to use about the same materials as the other small plush I bought the other month. In fact they are about the same size, I'm guessing that the old one is a prototype of a sort, because there are a load of improvements in the Duckula one below.


The Nanny one, as I said before, I never seen or owned before, but they done her arm the wrong way round, and that's something I can't fix this time. My one is a lot smaller than I thought she was going to be though, loads of sources say she's 13 inches...maybe I ought to measure them up when I can find my inches ruler.


Even though I have them now, and at a good price for the both of them too; I still need some big info about when they were made and who actually made them. If anyone's got these with the tags still there, please read them and then drop me a line with whatever info is on them. It's quite important.

Complete Collection comes out today

Count Duckula: The Complete Collection is out today. And apparently, there's an alternative cover using a screenshot from an early episode [disregard that, it's the inside XD], which holds four limited edition art cards. Sounds really nice, but is it really worth swapping my series sets for this?

Drawn back to life

Ever wished Duckula could be in a proper game?

Well with THQ's Drawn To Life, you can just about draw him in there. I stumbled across this game and the SpongeBob edition very recently, and it's basically a game that lets you create your own characters, weapons and the like, akin to Second Life. Of course, my current one here may need some work, but despite the limited drawing tools and colour selections, it was quite fun. And this certainly beats both Count Duckula and Count Duckula II on the old computer systems, which we all know are very ass.

And what's more, no blood or ketchup required!

A decision

I'm still having serious trouble gaining full access to the FTP of the Duckyboos site. I've tried various ways of viewing the contents of the FTP, and adding and otherwise modifying the files, but I still had the same errors. This has gone too long enough, so we have no choice but to perhaps phone them, and really push it.

However, it hurts me to say, that once the server actually works for me again, I will have to shut down Duckyboos for a while. It was easy to use this at first, but now I think it's about time I broke free from NTLWorld/Virgin's webspace. We'll then have to find somewhere to host it, mostly likely at a [hopefully affordable] price, and then it'll be online again, hopefully without such problems. But then, we also have some financial problems as well [we being my family], in fact, from what I've overheard, my parents had to shut down their bank account. So we're quite fucked at that one.

The Guestbook, Forum and Gallery will still be online though, because they are hosted externally, but the main site will be dormant at that time. I'll be writing up new pages and sprucing up the existing ones as needed.

I'm really dissatisfied with NTL's webspace service as a whole. Never mind the fact that you only get 55MB space for a start, Virgin doesn't provide an online site builder which I pretty would much needed, but they only have that for BlueYonder customers, whereas Virgin customers have to settle with FTP, and we all know now how much they cocked that up. After all, it was originally a mirror for when the original Fateback host somehow started failing to be viewed in certain countries, not that is was any good anyway but still.

Be prepared.

Clumsy's TV Theme Medley

Plugging an epic medley of over 40 kids' TV themes here, which includes a rather funky version of the Count Duckula ending theme.

Clumsy's TV Theme Medley

You can listen to the Duckula one by clicking on the Duckula drawing in the big picture, or you can download the entire thing if you're ever in the mood for some major nostalgia.

Another UK DVD release

A small one that was released a month ago this time, and I'm pretty sure they're designing these for parents with kids under 10.

Count Duckula: The Vampire Strikes Back

By the looks of things, this 66-minute DVD probably has the Vampire Strikes Back as well as a few others around it, but the names of them are not listed anywhere. Is it me though, or are the covers getting really lame? The cover for the old VHS release looks better than this, and this one looks like one of those DVDs that come with collectable weekly magazines.

I'll have to track this down in the shops and pick up the episode titles at least.

Count Duckula: The Complete Collection

Source: Play.com.

So while I looked at Play.com to see if there was any sign of Victor and Hugo coming to DVD yet, I came across this instead.

Count Duckula: The Complete Collection

This may not be like me but I'm actually disappointed to see this, mainly because I had already bought the series sets over the past 2 years, the latter two costing me nearly £20 a pop for the sake of getting them quickly. Availability is a major factor in my town and if only one place has it, you have to pay how much the ticket says. On top of that, the cover design is terrible! Even worse than the previous ones. How lower can they sink by making a shitty trace of the LOGO?

Now for the specs. It's going to be a 7 disc set that's most likely to be Region 2, will cost £34.99 at RRP, and will be out on the 13th October. Neither Play or Amazon say whether or not it'll have special features, and by the looks of things I don't think there will. We'll see.

I'm really not sure if I want to swap the DVDs I already have for this. The only true reason in favour is region compatibility - my first series set is the American one and I can only play it on my laptop or in the DVD player in my parents bedroom or downstairs. Can't play it on my PS2 or anywhere that has a small PAL telly. But it seems pointless really because I had already spent about £55 on my sets in total.

Happy 20th Anniversary, Count Duckula!

Count Duckula celebrates his 20th anniversary today, making it 20 years since the first broadcast on CITV way back in 1988. Cor, time doesn't half go quick, I must have only been a one year old back then!

Unfortunately I still can't modify my own webspace, so a mirror will have to surface some time soon.

Some very bad news :(

As I've already stated in the Duckyboos forums, I've experienced a serious problem updating the main site via FTP, due to an error that is most likely caused by the webspace itself. I can log into the account and see everything just fine, but when I try to upload any file to it, I receive an error saying "550: permission denied", meaning that somehow I don't have permission to do so. The same thing occured on my old computer, and I tried several other FTP programs as well as FireFTP which I use most, so it's most likely Virgin Media's doing, probably since I got this laptop.

Virgin's customer service is terrible. Some time ago we had to phone them to ask why our connection stopped working, and it took my poor mother 11 minutes to get through. I definitely won't try to contact this was, and emailing them is out of the question as well, so my only choice is to snail mail them once I get hold of the account number.

This really pissed me off last night, as I needed to make some updates mainly in celebration of the 20th anniversary Count Duckula's first broadcast.

Someday I'll break away from the iron chain that is NTLworld. :(

16-bit Duck

Ever wondered what the Duckula theme tune would sound like if there was a video game based on the show for the Mega Drive/Genesis?

Now you can. X3

This was made for both fun, and to build up my skills in producing music with a number of applications that make it similar to that on the console, which I love dearly. If only there was a Count Duckula game for such, and the SNES, instead of the ghastly ones on the Commodores and the Speccies.

Movie rumours

We all know full well that Wikipedia can be a pile of old shite when it comes to rumours about future things, but now there are rumours sprouting from there about Count Duckula becoming an animated feature film produced by Dreamworks, set to be released at least in the year 2009. A part of me wants to believe in it, but after the whole thing about the series being shown again on a kids' channel in the UK, another reckons it's completely false.

What if it were true... there would be so many possibilites.

The thought of Dreamworks making it quite bugs me. I honestly never found any of the Shrek movies as funny as claimed, though there are a number of other animated movies I've yet to see, the latest being Kung Fu Panda. One movie I did like by them was Chicken Run, which was co-produced with Aardman, who according to this rumour had been interested in co-producing this.

Then there is this problem. Several cartoon series had been made into poor films within the last few years, such as Garfield. I watched a small bit of the first one some time ago, and not only did Garfield look hideous, it also starred Jennifer Love Hewitt, who is one of many celebs that annoy me; and it tried too hard to be funny. Tee hee guinea pigs that talk like African-Americans, pull the other one.

Then you have Alvin and the Chipmunks, another example of how animated movies have sunk quite low these days. I saw the trailer on the net last year, and I don't think they were even trying to be funny there. Theodore practicing coprophagia - I know it's a natural thing some rodents do, especially rats, but did these writers honestly though it'd be funny to put that in a kids' movie? And don't get me started on Scooby-Doo, which was just fart jokes throughout.

Back to Duckula. If there really was going to be a theatrical movie based on the 80's cartoon series, I can predict fart jokes, overuse of pop culture, a range of sub par video games released a week before, and terrible songs sung by American pop stars for an OST. But most of all, I predict that it'd be in CGI.

Not all CGI films are as bad as traditional animation fans make them out to be, like Pixar's Cars. But with Duckula, I dread to think of what the model for him would look like - it'd be so detailed, with the indication of features, eye colour, fabrics of his clothes...I don't know, I'm so used to a 2D character with very limited detail, the thought of him being in 3D will scare me.

Now here's the one that would make my brain sizzle with anticipation - who would provide the voices? Would David Jason, Brian Truman and Jimmy Hibbert have the time, or would there be replacements? I know that there may well be some very talented voice actors that could imitate anything, but I would not like it if Duckula sounded more American than he did on the show despite his original actor being British. I know that the original show was a British, Spanish AND American co-production, but damn, this will be so American I'd crave some rain, tea and digestive biscuits in no time.

All of that said, I would go and see it.

But for the time being, we'll have to wait and see if this rumour is actually true.

More new plushes

Source: Plush-Toy UK

I honestly don't know where these are coming from, but it seems that there is not only a new Count Duckula soft toy, but also a Nanny one! In fact this is the first time I've ever seen a Nanny toy. I wonder if an Igor or perhaps a Von Goosewing one will show up.

I've seen these pop up on eBay about a week ago, but I won't be able to get them just yet. I've asked the seller who's been putting them up there a question about what sort of company is producing and what year they were made in; no answer yet though. I guess the only way to find out is to buy them myself and look.

This is most exciting, new Duckula plushes for the new generation are being made at bloody long last! And these ones look a little decent this time!

New Duckula plushes?

Look what I got in the mail today.

[Apologies for the crap photography, my camera's not as good now since my sister dropped it.]


I recently picked this up from a UK-only charity listing at eBay, and I can tell you now that I've never seen this plush ever. So I decided to get it, despite the fact that it has a tacky design once again [his cape was the wrong side up!]. In the photo it seemed quite a big one, but it's a lot smaller than I thought. In fact, it's about the size of a plush doll that is typically found in seaside crane machines, so I have a feeling that these are new products, and despite not having any labels on it, I think these are made by something along the lines of PMS, a company that distributes soft toys and the like to crane machines. It's definitely not fan-made, that's for sure.

This plush came from Shoeburyness, which is actually near where my older sister lives. Now and again we go out to Southend, and the last time I went there, some of the crane machines were filled with Dangermouse plushes. I'm sure that there's got to be more than one of the one I got today, so the next time I go to Southend I shall keep a lookout. My sister also booked a holiday to Great Yarmouth next month, so I'll ask her to lookout as well if they're not in Southend.

This has certainly given me hope for perhaps a new set of Duckula merchandise for 2008. In the past few years there have been new Dangermouse products to celebrate the likes of his 20th and 25th anniversaries, while Duckula has a 20th anniversary this year. It'd be totally unfair otherwise.



My bigger plush has a friend of his kind now. He's been surrounded by SpongeBob the whole time.

Let me make it clear...

First off, apologies if this post offends anyone here, but I have to get this off my chest.

Just now, I found a piece of my Duckyboos website being used on a bootleg t-shirt for sale on eBay. eBay is full of people trying to make a quick buck from t-shirts using any old crap on Google, and when you are affected it becomes a very sticky situation.

Now, to anyone who is stupid enough to take any content from my website without permission, I want to make it clear - while I don't claim any copyright to the official images I've used for decoration on the site, just because it shows up on Google, it does NOT mean that you can take it and not let me know what you're going to do with it. Asking for my permission is a simple procedure which you can do so here, and depending on the use, most of the time I probably will give the thumbs up for you to use, because like the Count himself, I won't bite. That way you won't get an email asking to take whatever you took from my site off.

Equally, I don't like seeing my stuff on your Myspace pages or Youtube slideshows either, especially my fanart, so be warned if I have to PM you about it.

And for anyone who is even more stupid enough to try and sell any pictures you pinch from Google, DeviantART and the like, especially fanart you WILL be reported, because that shit is illegal to even try and sell. Website graphics aren't meant to be ironed on t-shirts, so they will end up looking like shit, and buyers, please don't buy them.

That should be it for now, but to the kinds of people I've mentioned, you are warned.

More screenshots

I've decided to take screenshots from random episodes now, and after uploading some for four episodes the past two days, we now have more than 1,500 pictures in the whole Duckyboos gallery! And since I'm planning to concentrate with episode screenshots this week, and the possibility of scanning some comic stories, this number may well grow rapidly. I recently found a nice tool in Livejournal that lets you upload pictures to your Scrapbook straight from Windows Explorer [Windows XP], which is very useful if you're uploading loads of pictures at once.

I'm also working on the Series 3 section of the Episode guide, which will be online within this week, and I will tweak the other series pages just a little bit to suit the new changes.

Stay tuned, and goodnight out there, whatever you are~!

Return of the Downloads & more

Hot damn, I can't believe it's been a full six months since our last update! Where does the time go? Anyway, I'm happy to announce that I have restored the Downloads section that I once cancelled. At the moment I have only made a wallpaper that I had made with one of my own fan-artworks available at the moment, but I'll be adding more, and I will enable the avatars and audio section shortly.

Also to add, from now on all news updates will be mirrored on the Blog in hopes for it to be a bit more interactive, ie. if you have something to say about an update, now you can!

Lastly, I have moved the guestbook to a new service called SmartGB, which is now located here. The old one had a very boring look and I was unable to reply to your wonderful feedback, but now I can. All is not lost though, for I have copied all of the old messages onto there, and I've responded to some of them, so check it out. ;)

Sid Quack

"I'm a-workin' out here on Maggots Farm
I'm workin' out here on Maggots Farm
I wish that I had lots of dough
And a brand new suit of clothes
And the finest food that I could eat
And never have to eat Granny Reekie's soup
I'm a-livin' out here on Maggots Farm
Instead of a mansion on a hill
Oh Maggots Farm is makin' me ill!"

For once, I'd thought I'd have a crack at drawing one of Duckula's two doppelgängers, Sid Quack, from the series 2 episode "The Count and the Pauper." Man, if there could be a Wario in the Count Duckula universe, this guy would be that. Even if they did look exactly the same - I supposed that would be understandable because in real life, all male mallards look the same, what with either green heads and that, there's no way to tell them apart. Still, they could have done with different hairstyles.

Despite the episode being nothing more than a parody of the Prince and the Pauper, I thought it was a great one, because I think the songs the two ducks sing at various points just make it. Mr Jason did a great northern farmer accent for Sid too. What was also funny was that Nanny and Igor had doppelgängers too, really nasty ones on that.

I won't be posting much more Duckula fanart on my DeviantART, unless it's extremely epic and well done. Fanart of anything seems to either like sweets are to kids, or frowned upon by miserable bastards who get too upset that any fanart ends up on the front page there. I've also been in a slump these days, but things seem to be picking up again.

"I'm living out here on Maggots Farm
This country life has lost its charm
I want my castle on the hill
Maggots Farm is a-makin' me ill!
I miss old Nanny and old Igor
Stink and Reekie are becoming a bore
I want some decent food and some decent clothes
And not old Reekie's soup and bones
I'm workin' out here on Maggots Farm
I'm workin' out here on Maggots Farm
I'm workin' out here on Maggots Farm..."

This post is in memory of my little budgie, who died a few hours ago today.
RIP Percy, c.1995-2008.