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.