Hey there, everyone! This is Arthur Read fan, an admin of Arthur Wiki.
It's hard to believe that it's been three months to the day as of this writing since the first issue of The Arthur Wiki Newsletter was released, but it has been that long! Happy 3-month anniversary to The Arthur Wiki Newsletter!
Also, I'm pleased to announce that we have a new feature in the newsletter starting with this issue and going forward: Scrooge200, one of Arthur Wiki's admins, will be doing a monthly review on various pieces of Arthur media, from books to video games. I hope that you enjoy this new feature!
Now, let's kick off the newsletter with a brief retrospective piece on a past Arthur event.
Remembering the Arthur Summer 2015 Premiere Week
The Arthur Summer 2015 Premiere Week was an Arthur event that took place from June 1-5, 2015 on PBS Kids. In that event, 3 episodes (6 segments in total) were released in the U.S. for the very first time.
What was also a first about this particular event was that in the U.S., it marked the first time that episodes from two different seasons were released in the same week.
The episodes that released during that week were as followed:
- Mon., June 1, 2015: #1807: "Two Minutes"/"Messy Dress Mess"
- Tue., June 2, 2015: #1905: "Buster Isn't Buying It"/"One Ornery Critter"
- Wed., June 3, 2015: #1908: "Francine's Cleats of Strength"/"Little Miss Meanie"
The former two pairs of episodes also encored on the Thursday and Friday of that week, June 4th and 5th, 2015, respectively.
Some PBS stations in some states, however, released "The Pageant Pickle"/"Some Assembly Required" instead of "Two Minutes"/"Messy Dress Mess" on June 1st and 4th, 2015, but "Two Minutes"/"Messy Dress Mess" eventually released on those stations later on, in July 2015.
That concludes this month's retrospective. I hope you enjoyed it!
(Author's note: "Messy Dress Mess" is one of my favorite episodes!)
Some Important Updates
In case if you haven't noticed, two features of this wiki have been recently disabled, one of which is disabled temporarily, and the other permanently.
The feature that has been permanently disabled on Arthur Wiki is Achievements, which include the badges on user profiles and the leaderboard. The admins of this wiki, myself included, agreed to have them disabled.
The point of a wiki (at least, this particular one) isn't about winning cheap png files and being on a leaderboard, but rather, about contributing and adding useful information. While some wiki communities can pull off having Achievements, Arthur Wiki isn't one of them.
The feature that has been temporarily disabled is Article Comments, which appear at the bottom of an article. In the recent past, some users were misusing the privilege of the article comments by posting false information, gibberish, or even spam. After having an initial 30-day experiment to see if disabling article comments would stop these problems, the experiment worked, so they will remain disabled for the time being.
But don't worry, unlike Achievements, the article comments will come back at some point, and the article comments will also still be transferred when Arthur Wiki's transition to the UCP (Unified Community Platform) occurs.
UCP Update
Speaking of UCP, one feature that is not being brought over to the UCP (powered by MediaWiki 1.33) is Shared Help pages.
"What is Shared Help," you may be asking? Shared Help takes Help pages from FANDOM Community Central and transcludes them onto individual wikis. As part of the UCP transition, FANDOM is replacing transcluded local Help pages with redirects to their Community Central sources, allowing users to come to where they can get the best and most up-to-date help, information, and FANDOM staff attention, rather than unintentionally placing the burden on local admins of different wiki communities.
For more information about this, you can read this blog post by MisterWoodhouse from FANDOM staff.
Arthur Funko Pops are now available!
In late June, Funko Pop figurines of Arthur and D.W. were released. If these are your kind of thing, you can get them online or at select retailers that sell Funko Pop figurines.
And now, it's time for...
Scrooge200's Review of "Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day!"
Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is a licensed Arthur game for the Game Boy Color. Arthur has a surprisingly big history of video games, although most of them are Living Books, which are mainly interactive versions of the Arthur books. There's also a good amount of online games made in Flash, Shockwave, and HTML5. However, Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is the only Arthur game to be on a handheld console (unless you count the mobile games, which came much later).
Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is a minigame collection that is certainly not "absolutely fun." The minigames can be downright tedious, like the top-down berry picking game where Arthur moves at a snail's pace. Most minigames are rather unoriginal and generic, like playing air hockey with Buster or kart racing against Brain. Beating a minigame earns you a star, and you need 16 to beat the game. The problem is that there are only 10 minigames, so you will have to play the same ones multiple times. Once I tried every minigame, I just found the one that took the least amount of time and played it repeatedly to earn the rest of the stars.
The game's graphics are simplistic and unimpressive. Due to the game's palettes, most characters look off-color, like Brain appearing a weird shade of brown-green. Arthur's glasses also switch between yellow and white depending on the minigame. Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! doesn't have much music, and most minigames are played in silence, with only a few sound effects. I did enjoy the map screen themes, but the only other music is some strangely ominous, repetitive loop in the treasure diving game.
If you get all 16 stars, which won't take any more than 30 minutes, you get access to Wonderworld. There are five more minigames here, all recreations of classic carnival games like bumper cars. These are endless and you're prompted to stop playing after a while, and you probably will want to, because most of these aren't fun. It's nice that you get something for finishing the game, at least.
On my scale, I'd give Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! a vomitrocious rating. It's a generic game that's boring, very short, and overall not worth your time.
Character of the month
And now, it's time to reveal who the Arthur character of the month is!
The character of the month is completely chosen at random, so you never know who it will be month-to-month!
The character of the month for July 2020 is...
Mrs. MacGrady is not only known for being the school lunch lady at Lakewood Elementary, but she is also known to give good advice to the kids when they need it, and she is also a really good chess player, as revealed in "Brain's Chess Mess."
In the special "Arthur - It's Only Rock 'n' Roll," she played the keyboard for the band U Stink. In "The Great MacGrady," she got cancer, but she eventually recovered enough to go back to her job. Mrs. MacGrady helped everyone relax about the S.W.E.A.T. test in "S.W.E.A.T.," and Arthur helped to stand up for her when he felt she was being treated unfairly in "Arthur Takes a Stand."
Overall, I like Leah MacGrady. But what's your opinion about her?
That's all for this month!
And so, that concludes this month's issue of The Arthur Wiki Newsletter! I hope you enjoyed reading it.
Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful kind of day!
-Arthur Read fan
The Arthur Wiki Newsletter is released once a month, on the second Monday of the month. The next issue will be released on Monday, August 10, 2020.
If you have any questions or comments about The Arthur Wiki Newsletter, be sure to ask Arthur Read fan on his Message Wall, and he will get back to you as soon as possible.