Trivia / The Beano

• Accent Depundent: Pansy Potter, the Strongman's Daughter. Potter rhymes with Daughter in Scotland, where the Beano's publishers DC Thomson are based, but not in a lot of English accents.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Artist Robert Nixon named Ivy the Terrible as his favourite character that he ever drew for D.C. Thomson.
  • Writer and artist Mike Pearse is most proud of the full-length Bash Street Kids stories he contributed.
• Creator's Pest: Editor Alan Digby wasn't keen on Calamity James, so the strip gradually appeared less frequently, became reprints and was eventually dropped. However, ex-Beano editor Euan Kerr, who had played a significant role in the creation of the character, was editing the monthly Beano Max, which he continued to appear in, although Digby has since become editor of that publication. He has appeared as reprints, both in the weekly Beano and BeanoMax and returns in new strips in the Beano Annuals. Once Digby was gone, James returned, now written and drawn by Leslie Stannage instead of Tom Paterson.
• Died During Production: A common problem, especially during World War II. If an artist died, then obviously a replacement needed to be found, and fast.
  • Several characters had to be reassigned when Dudley Watkins and David Law died in 1969 and 1970 respectively.
  • Big Eggo in 1949 and Dean's Dino in 1999 both ended because their artists (Reg Carter and John Geering, respectively) died.
  • Following the death of original artist Malcolm Judge in 1989, Billy Whizz went through five artists in a little over three years, before finally ending up with Vic Neill as its long-term artist... until Neill himself passed away in 2000.
  • In January 2019, Tommy Donbavand brought back Tim Traveller.^note (Who, coincidentally, had also experienced this trope upon the death of his original artist, the aforementioned Vic Neill. The strip still carried on a few a few more years, with different artists, before being dropped as a regular character in the early 2000s) However, he died in May. There was two more episodes by other writers, and then the strip was axed. This is the first time a strip's demise has been known to be due to a writer death, as until a few years previously, writers were uncredited.
  • David Sutherland first started drawing The Bash Street Kids in 1962, and continued as artist all the way up until his death in 2023. He drew many other characters in the interim, but The Bash Street Kids was the only one he was still drawing at the time he passed away.
• Direct to Video: The Beano Video and its sequel were both Direct to video. These were a number of animated shorts featuring characters from The Beano.
• Inspiration for the Work: The Bash Street Kids was inspired by the view from the D. C. Thomson & Co. office windows, overlooking the High School of Dundee playground. According to Leo Baxendale:
  In fact, the catalyst for my creation of Bash Street was a Giles cartoon of January 1953: kids pouring out of school, heads flying off and sundry mayhems. Straight away, I pencilled a drawing of "The Kids of Bash Street School" and posted it from my home in Preston to R. D. Low, the managing editor of D.C. Thomson's children's publications in Dundee. I received an offhand response, a dampener. It was only after I'd created Little Plum (April 1953) and Minnie the Minx (September 1953) that the Beano editor George Moonie travelled to Preston on 20 October 1953 and asked me to go ahead with Bash Street (he gave it the provisional title of When The Bell Goes; when it appeared in The Beano in February 1954, it was titled 'When The Bell Rings'').
• Milestone Celebration:
  • To celebrate 80 years, the 2018 editions of the comic have three-panel strips of new stories from characters that appeared back in 1938, such as Biffo the Bear and Big Eggo. The issue released on the week of the anniversary assigned David Walliams as chief editor, and included cameos from characters from issue 1 (albeit in flashback): Wee Peem, Pansy Potter, Lord Snooty, Big Fat Joe, and Tin-Can Tommy.
  • Additionally, the 2019 annual (80th year) features a massive poster featuring 255 characters from the comic's history with a challenge for the reader to try and name as many as possible and a special story called "Doctor Whoops!" which features a power-hungry Walter sabotaging a time machine which sends several characters to different times in the comic's history.
  • In the 2024 annual, Bash Street School holds an 85th anniversary celebration, during which Minnie the Minx recruits several characters from the comic's past, including Ivy the Terrible, Smudge, Pansy Potter and Ping the Elastic Man. Apparently, they're old pupils invited to a reunion.
• Old Shame: Some of the old issues include racist stereotypes and reprints have them removed. This includes erasing Peanut from the 1938-1947 logo.
• Recycled Script: A script from a Winker Watson strip in The Dandy Annual 2009 was recycled for The Bash Street Kids in Issue 3610. Even though the scripts were from separate comics and for separate strips. The two comics are from the same publisher though.
• Similarly Named Works: The British Dennis the Menace and the American Dennis the Menace. Same name, different clothes, completely different publisher and strip, independently conceived at the same time to within a week. The two are often confused. The British Dennis is several years older than the American and is more of an intentional mischief maker than his American counterpart. Indeed, the British Dennis is rather more like Bart Simpson than he is like the American Dennis (humorously enough, Matt Groening said that Bart was based on what he wished the American Dennis was like, as he always felt the character was too tame to be truly called a "menace").
• What Could Have Been: Calamity James nearly failed to make it off the drawing board, after the test pages drawn by the originally-assigned artist, Henry Davies, just came across as incredibly dark and depressing rather than being funny. The comic's staff almost gave up on the character, but then let Tom Paterson try his hand at drawing a page. Paterson managed to nail the tone they were going for, salvaging things.
  • A live action Minnie the Minx series titled The Magnificent Misadventures of Minnie was in development in 2018, but then cancelled for unknown reasons.

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