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.

We now have a DeviantART group!

Popular artsite DeviantART has recently launched a new feature simply known as Groups, and I've taken the opportunity to make a Count Duckula one myself.

CastleDuckula via DAGroups

There, members can suggest favourites as well as submitting their own Count Duckula artwork, either into both the group and their own gallery or as an exclusive to the group. We do have rules that you may want to check out first, just to be on the safe side.

We're still in early days, but check us out sometime!

A pair of Duckula...wait, WHAT?

Yes. Women's briefs. These are real, and trademarked to Fremantle themselves.

My sister got me these as a present, and I was like, "omg best Halloween present ever". Earlier this month our very own Bobbin discovered them on Topshop's online site and you can view the thread on our forums here. Sad to say though, these are strictly for the summer as right now it's too bloody cold to go around in something like that!

But yes, these are available only from Topshop and sell for £4.00 [€6.00 in Ireland] but grab 'em quick, I don't know if they will last that long!

At last!

After over a year and constant bugging to get the people at Virgin to get their arses in gear with my personal webspace, I'm happy to announce that Duckyboos can be updated once again! I will now make some tweaks before I can give you all a big, fat update within the rest of this week.

Weird bumper featuring the Clock Bats

For some time, Count Duckula was airing on Boomerang in certain European countries. What I've just found here is what I think is a channel bumper [used to promote the cartoon I suppose] from Poland which, for some reason, features Dmitri and Sviatoslav, the two mechanical clock bats that popped out once in a while every other episode to share a dangerously cheesy joke between each other.



Going by "Bat Chat", it's awfully weird, especially with Dmitri having a higher voice. But what's even more bizarre is how they are actually "flying" through places around the world...

We're now on Twitter

If even now you don't know what Twitter is, allow me to fill you in.

Twitter is a nifty little social website where you type in a little sentence or two on what's going on with yourself, and you can follow what others are up to as well. I've used the site personally for over a year and I realise now how much better it is to have this than it is to have a Myspace and a Facebook.

And today, I've opened a new Twitter to represent the Duckyboos project, and you're all invited to follow us there!

Building up a comics guide

Hi everyone.

I figured that it's about time I started work on all the Duckula comics, and it's looking good so far. However, I have a request from those that have all of the Marvel comics in particular - can anyone here provide a full list of all of the story titles, and perhaps a brief summary of each one? I only have about three English issues, so I think I'm going to need help with this guide.

It would also be really cool if I could have some help compiling a guide on the stories in the other comics series as well, such as those in the Celebrity comics. I have nearly ten of these, and about 5 SOR comics at the moment. I feel that in the end, this would be as valuable as the episode guide I currently have.

Cheers!

Site update: I'm still getting the 550 permissions error. God what is wrong with Virgin/NTLworld?

Brand new Duckula T-shirts

I'll have to thank my older sister for finding these, as she's a regular visitor of retro clothing site TruffleShuffle. Having faith, she has found three brand new Count Duckula T-shirts on there! Two ladies', ones men's, all in different sizes.. .and while a tad expensive I know, ain't these just so cool? Just look at that Nanny one, isn't it lovely?

Truffle Shuffle aren't like your average eBay bootlegger, they're a well reputed online clothing store that even the celebs favour. I don't know how long these will be available for though, because they're hot items at the moment.

Damn. I want one.

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.