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Asterix in Britain

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Comic Book

  • Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Worldwide it's one of the better-selling Asterix stories, but in the UK it's by far and away the most successful story in the series, despite the creators once claiming that Britons might take offence to its content. In fact, the creators remarked that it is the one book where they received no complaints whatsoever from the nation being sent up. It helps that most of what the story parodies (the tea obsession, politeness, rugby) are things Brits themselves like to make fun of. When it comes to how bad British food is, they and the French have been insulting each other about it for half a millennium so nobody minded over much.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: While most of the British stereotypes still hold up today, there are some exceptions:
    • The caricature of The Beatles is a very obvious sign the album was written in the 1960s.
    • There is a gag about bowler hats, which went out of fashion in The '70s.
    • In the English version, the dated term "old fruit" is used.
    • One joke satirizes the imperial system. While the imperial system was invented in Britain, metric is used just as often now. The joke comes across as even more unusual to modern-day audiences since imperial units are associated most often with the United States, not the United Kingdom.
    • Another joke has Anticlimax explain Britain's "awfully simple" currency system in a clear Take That! to the pounds, shillings and pence system. The British Pound was decimalized in 1971.
    • Anticlimax says they started to dig a tunnel under the Channel, but it'll take a while until it's finished. When the album was written, it was doubtful that the Chunnel would ever be finished.
  • Woolseyism: Part of the humour in the French version of the book comes from how Briton characters speak "Blind Idiot" Translation into French of English expressions. Since this was obviously impossible to translate into English, Briton characters instead speak an antiquated form of English you would expect in a P. G. Wodehouse book.

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