Nobody is listening

Hello again. Sad to say Duckula has had a fruitless year this year; no new merchandise since the knickers we showed last year [at least, not that we know of], no new DVDs or anything, and no sign of those movie rumours ever being true. Let's hope 2011 bears more tomatoes.

But the main thing I want to address, and this is probably the second time I've done, is that I DO NOT TOLERATE PEOPLE STEALING MY FANART! See my leniency is wearing thin. In the past month or so I've seen 5 bootleg items on eBay all using the same picture from the first ever post here, as well as about 4-5 people doing copies of it and claiming as their own, the oldest of such people being 31! Way to make a first impression you guys.

It's getting ridiculous. If people knew just how much this sort of thing actually puts me off drawing full stop, barring what I have to do at work, maybe they would think twice and just be original with the art. It just gets stale copying the same picture over and over, with each of them being less cop each time.

If you are directed to this blog via Google images, read this before you try to impress DeviantART with such plagiarism.

Recent additions to my collection

I've been meaning to make another merchandise post for quite a while, though this time we'll be looking at some stuff that was around since back in the 80s.



First we have a bag I picked up back in February which I think must have been designed for kids to take to school, considering how quite small it is. I could probably only fit A5 sketchbooks in it, I tried bigger things before but thankfully I have other bags for when I'm travelling around Essex. It's still a cute bag though, and funny enough I ended up bidding on two because the seller on eBay had 3 brand new ones, one of which I got outbid on.

A couple of weeks ago I had my 23rd birthday, and I was really surprised to unwrap these beauties, all of which were given to me by my boyfriend!

The talking Duckula plushie! Even though he sounds like he has a sore throat, I've always wanted to see one of those for real.


When I first saw photos of this one years ago I thought it was... well. But only when I actually opened up to it I found something quite interesting about it - this is German! As far as I knew, some Duckula toys were made in Germany by Bullyland, which were also responsible for the little Disney figurines I always used to pick up from the Disney store back in the 90's, so it's good to know that they made plush dolls as well. This even has the Duckula logo on the back of his cape.

Finally we have one of the figurines from the Rainbow toys era [by the way, I recently found that this was a UK division of LJN toys, which I believe used to specialise in character toys, but also got picked on by the Nerd a lot, LOL], this one being the one with the clippy hands at the back. Always wanted one of these.

See ya later, I'm off on another hunt!

Thames TV promotional poster with Duckula

I recently received an email from David Wakefield, who happens to have been a former employee at Thames TV back in the early 1990's, and was kind enough to offer me a photo of this rather interesting piece of media he managed to take out of a media industry magazine. It's a promotional article regarding some children's programmes that were screening or being developed at the time, while having some focus on Duckula as well. I've made sure the text here is still readable but here's the Duckula part anyways:

"He's green. He's a vegetarian vampire. And he's looked after by his nanny. A bizarre combination. Even for a duck. Yet Count Duckula is one of Thames Television's biggest stars and most appealing personalities. We don't accept that animated characters need be one-dimensional. Instead we've treated Duckula just like any other television character with a fully formed personality of his own. When the series was created, the Duckula writers gave each character his or her own personal biography, CV and personality analysis, complete with problems, phobias and foibles. Does all this sound like a lot of trouble to go to for a children's programme? It should do because at Thames we take making programmes for children as seriously as making programmes for adults."

Now that part about the characters having their own profiles like that has really intrigued me. Based on all my gatherings, I've been attempting to make my own biographies of the major characters but that sounds like something much better...

Thanks David for showing me this, not only is the Duckula picture on this beautiful, the writing around will be intriguing for a lot of us.