“To those who doubt the power of the magic 8-ball, I say: behold my F!” – Bart Simpson

You may have noticed that since last weekend the “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead” pages have undergone some revisions.  The text of the book here at the site is now completely updated to the official 1.1 version of the text.  In addition to that, the main page has been revised to account for the fact that the book is now completely up at the site and not being parceled out chapter by chapter. 

The Kindle version has similarly been updated.  If you are one of the wonderful human beings who has already purchased it, you should be able to update to the 1.1 version by downloading the book again.  You already own the book, so you won’t be charged again, it’ll just replace the old version with the new one.  Amazon warned me it might take up to 48 hours for the update to fully propagate, but by this weekend it should be there.  If you experience any problems with this, please let me know. 

(For those of you waiting on the ePub and PDF versions, I must ask a little more patience.  It’s a bit of pain to update the text across different formats, so I’d like to give 1.1 a little time to see whether or not any other mistakes shake loose before I put it into two more formats.) 

Most of the revisions in version 1.1 are minor, correcting stray punctuation and the occasional overlooked error like referring to “A Streetcar Named Marge” as “A Streetcar Named Desire”.  However, there are now three additional footnotes, all of which are the direct result of feedback from you guys.  The smallest is a quick aside in Chapter 12, noting that Hank Azaria has not, in fact, been in every episode.  That was just a simple oversight on my part.  I knew that he hadn’t been, it just never occurred to me during all the times I looked at Chapter 12.  The other two are a bit more substantial, and I want to credit the three people who made them possible. 

The first comes at the beginning of Chapter 2, where I finally acknowledged the existence of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, a syndicated Hanna-Barbera sitcom that ran in the early 1970s.  This one is wholly due to generalsherman67’s comment on the original book post.  There are quite a few episodes up on YouTube, and it’s about as forgettable as you’d expect.  It’s a standard mom-dad-kids setup, there’s lots of canned laughter, and the animation is much less detailed than The Flintstones or The Jetsons.  But it does exist, and now the book reflects that. 

The second is in Chapter 4.  On the original, Residents Fan mentioned that The Simpsons had been a big part of Sky One becoming a mainstream channel in the UK.  No sooner had I made a note to look into that than Wesley Mead came through with his remarkable guest post about the whole history.  Since that’s a vastly better job than I would have even considered doing, it’s now referenced directly in a footnote. 

My thanks to everyone who spotted something, and everyone who linked to the book.  We got a lot of traffic not only from blogs and the like, but just from people mentioning it on message boards and other places where people talk about pop culture.  Every link is appreciated. 

Finally, I can’t help but post this, which I grabbed a few days ago when I was first getting ready to write this post:

Yup, that’s “Zombie Simpsons” wedged between the guy who played Screech and the woman whose formulaic show gave the world the “moment of shit”.  I’m not sure how to feel about that, but it’s too odd not to mention.