I … don’t think he did? But to me and everybody else who reads and remembers stuff from Funky Winkerbean, this Sunday’s strip was weird.
The thing making it weird is that when Coach “Bull” Bushka died, a couple years back, in the comic, he was wearing his old Westview Scapegoats football helmet. This was actually made a point of the plot, for reasons I won’t get into. It’s not something you can just ignore like Phil Holt’s death. But this is why a Sunday strip intended to be a quick smile was instead all flabbergasty.
Anyway, as the Son of Stuck Funky folks noted, it appears Linda gave the helmet that her husband died in to his friend Buck, who I’m almost sure had a last name. It’s plausible that Bushka, who coached Westview football for decades, had a couple extra helmets kicking around. And I’ll suppose this is what Batiuk meant us to see in this strip. Just … wow, did this joke not land anywhere with regular Funky Winkerbean readers.
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
Looking forward to the inevitable post “Funky Giving His Wife Bull’s Deathelmet™ Is Good For My Readership”
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I am curious what it will look like!
Also, Sonarr and the WCotP bunch send their good thoughts and that they miss you.
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Please let them know I miss them too.
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Shall pass the word on, yes.
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Thanks,did anyone build the “Match Game” theatre yet?
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Not yet, but I’m looking hard at the set of Whew! and thinking how nice it would be to lie down in the shag in front of the wall of villains there.
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Indeed.
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Also I keep trying to watch the closing credits extra slowly to see if I can make out the ‘secret buttons’ that the blocker has when the charger calls ‘Long Shot’. I can kind of see where one might be, but not in enough detail to see where a contestant could clearly understand it without further instruction.
Yes, I know it’s just ‘press the button corresponding to the block you want to place’ but if I know anything about instructions it’s that they need to be more clear than that.
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I don’t know if there’s a rule against it, but in your opinion, assuming it’s legal to do so would calling Long shot on the first level and going directly to the 6th level be worth the loss of the money earned going up the board?
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I’ve been giving this a bit of thought, yeah! And it looks like it’s legal to just short-circuit the whole game and call for a Long Shot at the start of a round. (For those who have no idea what we’re on about, it’s the short-lived game show Whew, currently running on Buzzr, the other game show channel.) Certainly I’ve seen players who weren’t able to get past the second level with time running out who called a Long Shot.
But I don’t think it’d be good strategy. When you call a Long Shot you get, effectively, only a one in three chance of winning the round at all. Technically the blockers don’t have to already have a block on the sixth level, but I’ve only seen a handful of blockers not put one up there. You might end up with that anyway, given how easy it is to run out of time and not be up there. But you don’t get anything in the main game for getting through boards quickly. In fact, you want to spend as much time on the boards as possible since money won there adds time to your bonus round; you could get up to 15 seconds for the bonus round, with perfect play, and that would make a huge difference.
I think the thing to do is call for a long shot if you’re under ten seconds, wherever you are. But — especially in Celebrity Whew — I’ve been seeing people getting up to the board with 15 or more seconds on. In fact, last week there was a team that had so much time they got the block on the sixth level and the two bloopers left on that level, and still had time left over. The shock is they got both bloopers wrong, so the game just … petered out. It seems to be happening more that chargers have abundant time to get to the sixth level and I don’t know if that’s just a reflection that game show competitors tend to get better as the show goes on or that the celebrity version of the game somehow has a better flow. Could be that celebrity and real-person trading off answering duties makes for an easier cognitive load on folks.
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