Trivia / FoxTrot

• Creator Backlash: Bill Amend used to maintain a very elaborate website for FoxTrot, featuring the strip, personal newsletters, merchandise, and even an e-mail portal so fans could have "@foxtrot.com" addresses. He eventually found this overwhelming and expensive and cut his web presence down to the bone so that only the strip would be featured online for a number of years.
• Defictionalization:
  • In 1996, Amend created a Slug-Man video game credited to Jason Fox, and posted it on his website. It was a re-skinned version of Glypha III, a Joust clone for the Apple Macintosh.
  • There was a 2005 strip that had Jason putting a picture of Paige on Wikipedia's warthog page. In Amend's collection, The Best of FoxTrot, he said that someone actually really uploaded a picture of Paige on the warthog page.
  • Another comic has Jason geeking out over "Doomulus Prime", a rare and powerful hammer in World of Warquest. Blizzard responded by putting the weapon (in less broken form) in World of Warcraft.
• Distanced from Current Events: The July 22, 2012 strip (which did make to the FoxTrot website, as you can see) was pulled due to the July 20, 2012 Aurora shooting. The strip involved Jason attempting to shoot Paige with his 'sniper' watergun.
• Edited for Syndication: This strip was edited to avoid mentioning the decade when it was rerun.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The GoComics archive is highly spotty when it comes to any strip published before 1997. It doesn't start including Sundays full-time until August 1996, so the only way to read a number of older comics is to buy the early treasuries, which are becoming harder to find.
• Long Runner: Started in 1988; switched to Sundays only at the end of 2006.
• Meaningful Release Date: On the January 1, 1996 strip, Paige complains, "There's no Calvin in the comics." Calvin and Hobbes had its last strip published the day before.
• Missing Episode: On April Fool's Day 1997, almost every syndicated cartoonist traded places with another. Amend drew that day's Zippy the Pinhead while the Nancy team took that day's FoxTrot. The strip that they drew does not appear in the compilation Welcome to Jasorassic Park, though; in its place are the chewed-up corners of the strip and a flock of "Quincyraptors" (a reference to a Jurassic Park pastiche in that same compilation, wherein each dinosaur resembles Quincy). As far as anyone can tell, this is the only FoxTrot strip that has never been reprinted in the books. However, it is available on GoComics' website for the strip.
• One-Book Author: FoxTrot is, thus far, Bill Amend's only professional cartooning work, though he has collaborated occasionally with Penny Arcade.
• Recycled Script: Very rare occurrences:
  Jason: Mom, this hotel is great!
  Andy: I'm glad you like it.
  Jason: Our room came stocked with all sorts of candy bars and sodas. A very nice touch.
  Andy: Really? Ours didn't.
  Jason: Did you look in that little fridge over there?
  Andy: Jason, that's the minibar!
  Jason: The 20-inch Snickers bars were a tad stale, but otherwise...
  Andy: (with her head in her hands) Let the bankruptcy begin.
  Paige: (with an armload of shopping bags) Guess what? The gift shops let you charge things to your room!
  • A later strip:
    Jason: Mom, this place is great! They give you stuff for free!
    Andy: What are you talking about?!
    Jason: You just tell them your room number and you can have anything you want!
    Andy: Jason, it's not free! They're just putting it on our bill!
    Jason: Oops.
    Andy: (with her head in her hands) Why didn't I pack aspirin?
    Paige: (with an armload of shopping bags) Get some at the gift shop. Everything's free.
  • Recycled scripts, as rare as they are, are pretty blatant at times. For example, there are two strips about Jason doing a card trick with a deck missing a card, which have the same punchline. There are also two strips about Peter telling Paige and Jason at two separate occasions how to channel-surf faster, also both using the same punchline.
  • A weekday strip featuring Paige being late for every class except P.E. was later recycled as a Sunday strip.
  • Within a few months, Amend used the same basic joke twice (Fox family member sees insane news story on TV and has a WTF reaction), only altering the specifics^note In one, Roger hears that the U.S. terror alert was lowered to green for St. Patrick's Day and asks "This is just water I'm drinking, right?"; in the second, Jason sees that Disney is adding digital pirates to the the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and asks "Am I on Candid Camera?".
  • Within close proximity, there were two strips with the exact same gag (the school cafeteria serving "Chef's Surprise", the "surprise" being that it actually looks edible), the only difference being that one strip features Peter and the other Paige.
  • Two different strips have the same joke: Peter trying to get out of raking the leaves by saying he's waiting until they all fall off the trees completely, only for one of his parents to discover he affixed a few to a branch so they would never fall off. In the first, he uses glue and Andy catches him, in the second he uses tape and Roger is the one to call him out.
  • One mid-90s daily features Jason reminding his teacher about collecting the homework she forgot about, only to be pelted with dodgeballs in gym by his classmates later in the day. A late-2000s comic uses the same joke, only this time it's a Sunday strip and it's a pop quiz that was forgotten.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Possibly a reason why Miss Grinchley was written out of the strip.
• Technology Marches On: The earliest strips (before the iFruit) showed the family using early Apple computers and Roger admitting he had absolutely no idea how to use a computer, period, and ignoring it when one was actually added into his office. Nowadays, people will probably view that as Too Dumb to Live, but in the 80s, that's not as stupid as you might think - some middle-aged people in the '80s never actually did use home computers, and not all industries required them at that point. This was before Roger went from Bumbling Dad to flat out Too Dumb to Live.
  • Also played straight in a January 1993 strip where Jason dreams that he found a Macintosh Quadra 950 with 64 megabytes of RAM and 230-megabyte hard drive as a Christmas present he forgot to open.
  • When the family first got internet service, for instance, Jason got in trouble for running up a huge bill because he figured the three hours of free use was per day, not per month. When they switched to a flat fee, Andy couldn't get on for months due server lag and busy signals. And she had no messages at all when she did get on, something she'd likely have wanted years later when flooded with spam.
• What Could Have Been: Amend had a pitch for an animated adaptation at one point, with a treatment for an episode where Peter is mistaken for an evil Identical Stranger and locked in jail.

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