Tag: CTE

VHS… Quantity!

Well, whaddaya know? Linda finally gets Bull out of the house in today’s strip… and they promptly go in search of a way for Bull to continue to stay inside for days watching videos of himself losing high school football games.

They want DVDs? Crazy can convert things to digital files for storage on a computer and upload to Youtube, you know. He may even throw in some background music and artsy wipes!

Crazy seems a tick disturbed that the Bushkas have barged into his AV lair, demanding that he provide hundreds of dollars worth of services (presumably) gratis. However, when you are known as the guy bakes tapes and buys head cleaner, you are pretty much asking for weirdos to walk in on you with crates full of videocassettes. Not to mention that the outside of his place looks like this:

VHS

Press “Eject”, Linda

Oh, so now Linda wants Bull to do something other than binge videocassettes and relive his days as the best player on a winless high school football team? In today’s strip, she has finally decided to stop enabling him and wants him to do something he has not done since, uh…
– his retirement ceremony in 2016?
– he dropped that glass of water (a glass glass by a water cooler)?
– the tennis match where Les triggered his CTE?
However you want to define it, it has certainly been awhile.

Well, with a broken VCR, maybe Bull and Linda will finally get to doing all of that stuff they planned to do in retirement while Bull “still can”…
Or maybe they’ll go and find a way for Bull to continue watching the ’77 Scapegoats get their teeth kicked in so badly that the Centerville team that starts kneeling the ball in the 2nd quarter.

What do you all think is more likely?

Boresday, February 1

Today’s strip was, again, not available for preview.

So, let’s look back at the 1983 introduction of the goat that so disturbed Buck back in the day, Billy the Scapegoat. Or was his name actually Billy? The answer may surprise you… but probably won’t interest you.

First, the whole thing was Dinkle’s idea, including the name “Billy”.  Unfortunately for the Westview football team, the goat did not possess divine power.

FW9-26-83
FW9-27-83

“Billy” was under the impression that Westview had the only terrible high school football team in existence.  Though this might explain why he ran onto the field hitting players.

FW9-28-83

He also didn’t care for the uninspired name Dinkle gave him, preferring his own uninspired name.  No ever called him Paul, of course, because he couldn’t talk.

FW10-1-83

While called a “scapegoat”, Billy-Paul was more like an oracle, his heavy-lidded ennui a prophesy of things to come for this strip.

The Men Who Swear At Goats

Today’s strip is what passes for levity in Funky Winkerbean these days, I guess. Buck was apparently disturbed by a commonly-milked farm animal when he really should have been disturbed by the complete lack of almost everything at this football game. There appears to be no crowd, no officials, almost no players (look at that empty bench behind Stropp), and apparently no one else but Bull around to wrangle a loose mascot. Was Westview’s football stadium nicknamed “Uncanny Valley”?

Oh, and did you know that the Scapegoat mascot had a name back in Act I? It’s Billy, much to my chagrin… He once appeared on a book cover with Erma Bombeck’s name.

You know you've got trouble when you have an animal sacrifice at every pep rally

Doomsday, January 30

Today’s strip was not available for preview, but it is easy to speculate on what it will involve based on yesterday’s “hat”-focused anti-humor. Bull will be there, Buck will be there, and a retcon may well show up too…

Bull’s football career has been one of the most heavily-retconned aspects of this strip in recent years, with much of this re-written continuity in the service of the super-serious CTE story arc. Bull went from simply being contacted by a St. Louis Football Cardinals scout before he hurt his knee to actually trying out for the team (presumably during the 1982 strike) after suffering a major knee injury in college. The recently and incessantly-discussed goal line officiating screw up game was originally said to have been Coach Stropp’s final game against Big Walnut Tech, not Bull’s. This goal line play situation’s only actual roots in Act I are a 1980 “Casey At The Bat” parody arc called “Westview At The Goal” (much thanks to SOSFer Don for pointing this out a few weeks back) which was nobody’s final game against Big Walnut Tech. Heck, even the backward-facing emu seen on Bull’s college helmet in yesterday’s strip was originally forward-facing.

Frankly, I wouldn’t comment that much on these retcons if they weren’t being used to try to punch up the maudlin nature of a story that doesn’t need any re-written history to be maudlin. Are we supposed to take everything in this strip seriously except its continuity? Please.