"No Sax Please, We're Egyptian"

1st episode, 1st image and we've already got a sex pun!

Season 1 Episode 1 (episode 1 overall)

Original broadcast date: 6th September 1988

Writer: Brian Trueman
Additional voices: Ruffles/Yubi/4th crow
                               bro'/Svaitoslav/Camel:
                               Jimmy Hibbert

                      Burt/Arch Duck Merganser:

                      David Jason 

                      Hoomite: Jack May
                      3rd Crow bro'/Camel in fez/

                      Dmitri: Brian Trueman

Travel location: Egypt

Castle transport visual used.


Count Duckula travels to Egypt, valley of the Kings to search for the  mystic saxophone. The Crow Brothers sneak along by accident and attempt to beat him to the treasure.

This is probably the episode most people are familiar with, even those with only a passing acquaintance with the series. Being the first in line it's the one that will usually crop up on compilation media or tie-in merchandise etc. Storywise, there's a little exposition, though not laid on as thickly as 'Unreal Estate' instead opting to ease readers into the traditional set-up more subtly. There's not a lot of what could qualify 'early instalment weirdness' going on, beyond perhaps Nanny's voice being in it's quavering stage (as it would be for a handful of early episodes) and newcomers could be forgiven for thinking that he Crow Brothers might be the main antagonists of the series. Goosewing will not be properly introduced until episode 2. So basically 'No Sax' is just one of the ones Duckula newbies should probably start off with, what with it being one of the most well-known. This and 'The Vampire Strikes Back.'

'No Sax' is definitely a classic in the run. With many things regarded as a classic, I often; fairly or unfairly; am apt to overlook them. Like classic literature being viewed as books that people own but never read. However, 'No Sax' definitely lives up to the mantle. The writing is as top notch as it could be in the show, with Trueman's adept use for cumulative blackout gags (honed up from Danger Mouse), in-context callbacks that get funnier if you're paying attention, running gags cleverly hidden, only to resurface later when you don't expect them (Nanny's pastry) and one of the best 'who's on first' bits of business in the C-H pantheon of Abbott and Costello-isms.

After a botched afternoon cocoa and chocky bicky break, Igor takes Duckula aside to give him another tour of the portrait gallery while Nanny 'rebuilds the dining room.' Meanwhile Ruffles and his cohorts (in their first appearance) are sizing up the castle for a burglary. Whilst trying to scale the castle walls, they are sent earthwards twice: once by Nanny clearing out her feather duster and once Igor opening a window. This marks a running joke in the episode and the series (Thump, thump, thump....thump). What I like best is that no-one even spots that the crows have been around the whole time until right near the end of the episode. It's like a Pink Panther cartoon.

Duckula's interest in Igor's lecture perks up when he discovers that the Mystic Saxophone his great uncle tried to search for is still waiting to be discovered. Duckula is convinced that it will make him a rich and famous musician, Igor is convinced it will lead him into a live of evil. As it turns out, neither are right, but the sax' IS magic nonetheless.

Thankfully, so is the castle, and off it goes with Duckula behind the wheel, er coffin, to the Valley of the Kings. The crows have come along too, albeit by accident and now decide to rob the pyramid to get the saxophone themselves. They still insist on trying to climb in through a window, but admit defeat and use the door after all.

The next portion of the show is cutting back and forth between Dukcula et al's exploring scenes involving some silly Egyptian puns (hieroglyphics, lower-o-glyphics) and the Crow Brothers attempts to basically kill them. Each attempt backfires painfully of course. One of my favourite jokes involves the Crows getting more and more plastered (literally, in bandages) which results in Burt and Ruffles each talking to mummies believing them to be each other.

Ruffles: 'Ere pay attention!
Burt: Yeah I am payin' attention.
Ruffle: That you idiot is a mummy, I'm over 'ere!
Burt: Oh yeah, sorry guv! 'Ere guv?
Ruffle: What now?
Burt: Why are you talkin' to that mummy?
Ruffles: Because - eh?....Oh Gordon Bennett.

Eventually, Duckula (literally) falls for a real trap and ends up on a sacrificial alter. What follows is probably the most well-known scene in the show's run. I won't reiterate it here, suffice to say that it is very well performed and intricately written. It even works when you slow it down and examine each line, as every one makes sense in context, so they're not just going for rapid-fire befuddlement. When you have a scene with two characters named Hoomite and Yubi coupled with references to the sun god Ra and a pharaoh called Upshe, you're going to end up with some Abbott and Costello-esque sheNANNYgins and sea shanties. Plus Jimmy Hibbert gives us an amusingly incongruous Frank Spencer sort of a voice for Yubi.

Just as Yubi dcides he's getting a bit seasick, Nanny stumbles by (narrowly averting knocking in a door as Yubi opens it first) and immediately gets mistaken for the priests' Pharoh Upshe. By now Duckula has had enough. He runs out carrying Nanny and this time does break the doorway!

Nanny soon breaks something else via Duckula - she drops a vase containing the mystic saxophone! Duckula starts to play and literally wakes the dead. Mummies and hieroglyphs alike jump up and dance and even the priests and the Crow Brothers (and Von Goosewing) get involved in the party.


Of course, being this show we can't end the first outing on a happy note. The castle transports itself back leaving the cast stranded in Egypt.

The disbelieving camels from earlier trundle by, carrying the crows (and a mummy!) while the main 3 try and hitchhike their way back to Transylvania. But hey, at least they found the sax!

A fine intro' to the series. Animation starts off decent and then improves a lot as the episode goes on, culminating in that very peppy dance sequence. There's subtle little bits of business here and there, like Igor's sly chuckle as he seems to pretend not to get Duckula's 'relic/relish' pun. Always fun to spot these things after several viewings. Artwork is suitably yellow sandy colours to go with the Egyptian motif. A few backgrounds get re-worked and/or re-used, mainly inside the pyramid.

Music 
"Finger of Fear" (Frederic Bayco) Opens the first scene of the first episode. You'll be hearing this a lot of times throughout the series!
"Fog Bound" (Ivor Slaney) Crow Brothers spying.
"Saw Theme" (Wiliam Trytel) Arch Duck meets Hoomite and Yubi.
"Big Bad Giant" (Paddy Kingsland) Scaling/searching the pyramid. 
"Creeps No. 1" (H. M. Farrar) Searching the pyramid.
"Vamp Til Ready" (Wally Asp - track 88) Dmitri and Sviatoslav.
"That's Yer Lot" (Wally Asp - trak 87) Short Serket.
"Sinister Street No.1" (Peter Franklyn) Rope and slab trap.
"Games Played In The Dark" (Richard Allen Harvey) Saxophone is found.
"Hide and Seek" (Richard Allen Harvey - track 37) Hitch-hiking home. 

"Hooray and Up She Rises" naturally plays during the priests' scene, but I don't know the exact recording source. I also sadly don't know who does that crazy jayzz tune near the end, but maybe it was Mike Harding himself.

Pans and Backgrounds 

Clicking on these will enlarge them. 

 

Cels from the 'Short Serket' sequence. Photo courtesy of Amber Jones.

Trivia

• The title is a pun on 'No Sex Please - We're British' a farce play written by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriot. David Jason also played the character of Brian Runnciles in some productions. Oddly enough, it stopped running the year this episode was in production. 
• In fact it was the very reason the title was a pun on such a word that led to a hasty republish of the tie-in book by Carnival. It was renamed simply, 'The Mystic Saxophone.' 
•  The US release of this episode on the DVD set has a weird edit on the opening. The narrator says "On jagged finger of rock stands Castle Duckula. Known only in the nearby village as...Castle Duckula." Unedited, the first time he says Castle Duckula he says it more 'evilly' and the second time more calmly. On the US DVD, the second time he says 'Castle Duckula' has been overdubbed onto the first time, so he says it in the same calm way twice, identically, making the joke make a lot less sense. This is not present in the UK release.
• Nanny has apparently (accidentally) killed 3 chambermaids and a footman. She shows no remorse as they were only part-time and didn't do their jobs right. 
• First appearance of the Crow Brothers.
• First time Jimmy Hibbert's character uses binoculars.
• Ruffles and Burt are the first of two recurring baddies in the series voiced by Jimmy and David who wear striped tops. Mr. Mate and Pierre are the other two.
• Oblique reference to Towzer in the guidebook. 
• Ruffles mentions that they have done a successful job on the Tower of London. The two crooks from "All In A Fog" attempt the same thing. Ravens (which are crows) are well known to live in the bloody tower. 
• Count Duckula the Third apparently has a teddy bear. Guess he time travelled too! 
• The Arch Duck Merganser is not portrayed with visible fangs. We can assume that Duckula has some relatives that are not vampires. He even has a distant non-vampiric uncle in 'Who-Dunnit?'. Merganser also gets name-checked in 'All In A Fog' and has apparently passed on, supporting this theory. 
• Merganser wears a monocle on his right eye, just like another couple of BLARGH SMASHING characters David Jason would voice in "Victor & Hugo", Lord Hobbes-Sutcliffe and the ambassador from 'Private Ears' except he wears one on his left eye.
• A Merganser is also a type of duck.
• There are numerous visual gags in the heiroglyphs, including a reference to Pac-Man and a TV set.
• Zooten Simoon the 17th is a pun on American saxophonist Zoot Sims, in keeping with the saxophone motif.
• Duckula makes a joke on Sylvester Stallone looking like the walking dead and having weird hair. 
• Brian Trueman voices the 3rd crow brother. He also, of course, voiced a more well-known crow in 'Danger Mouse' Baron Greenback's henchman Stiletto. He also voiced the underused Leatherhead in the unbroadcast pilot episode for that series.

  

  A signed page from the original script. Wonderfully lo-tech!

• The zooming in to Igor's eyes and then merging to Duckula's eyes and zooming out technique also gets used in 'Amnesiac Duck.' The animation of Duckula falling onto the alter here gets reused in that episode too. See the images on that review.
• The animation of Duckula running into his coffin will get re-used in subsequent episodes for the same purpose.
• The posh camels make references to mirages, in a similar manner that the posh explorers from 'Jungle Duck' will do towards halucinations. They also reference piastres, which are subsiduary units of the Egyptian pound. Both sets of characters reappear in 'Around the World in a Total Daze.'
• Egyptologists will get a few bonus jokes: Duckula's 'short Serket' pun is a reference to the fertility goddess Serket (as well as, possibly, the 1986 film 'Short Circuit') and Nanny mistaking the god of embalming Anubis for 'a nudist' was partly done in the Danger Mouse episode 'Tut Tut, It's Not Pharaoh' (recycling already Brian? Tut Tut indeed!)
• A rare instance of Igor laughing at one of Duckula's jokes (block trap sequence). He didn't like the hieroglyphics joke as much.
• First appearance of the magic coffin and the clock and clock bats. Duckula does not use a rhyme to get the castle going, or at least we do not hear it. The castle return sound effect is also different for this one episode.
• It's easy to miss, but Nanny believes one of the priests is called Henozus (he knows us). 
• A mummy would also appear in 'The Return...'. Perhaps collected by an ancestor.
• One of the dancing hieroglyphs carries a top hat and cane. The one next to it wears a bow-tie.
• Technically, the first appearance of Doctor Von Goosewing. He appears briefly during the dance sequence. It is also one of two episodes where he appears concurrently with the Crow brothers, the other being "A Christmas Quacker."
  
• Hibbert is credited as script editor.
• This episode was the basis of a computer game. It wasn't anything fantastic, but it was leagues better than the follow-up game 'based' on 'The Vampire Strikes Back'. I owned the ZX Spectrum version. There is a hack whereby if you mashed the keys on the title screen, you end up taking control of, not the Count himself, but a giant bottle of banana milkshake! Who could resist that?
  
  
  
  
  

  

  The ZX Spectrum inlay. Below, from the Atari release.

  
  
  

  Yubi and the two camels appear in the joke book by Jonathan Clements.

• This episode was released on VHS in 1988 along with 'The Mutinous Penguins' and 'One Stormy Night.' Oddly, the 2nd episode replaced 'Vampire Vacation' which was the 2nd in broadcast order.
  
  
  
• Hoomite and Yubi appear in the first Count Duckula annual (1988, below). Yubi and the camels appear in the joke book (above).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Goofs and Nitpicks

• A strange shot when the Crows are climbing makes them look awkwardly in front of a balcony they should really be climbing around.
• Duckula's shirt cuffs are coloured as his jacket for a brief shot in the gallery.
• Igor's eyes are miscoloured briefly as Duckula chides him for having no sense of humour.
• What could pass as a layering error when Nanny breaks the left hand wall during the block trap sequence.
• Risibly, Igor's beak doesn't move when he says 'Silence' just before Duckula plays the saxophone. He's right near the extreme edge of the shot, so it's barely noticed.
• Does Igor wear a flesh-coloured watch?
  
  
  Before we go, I'll leave you with a much better cassette that that computer game thing. This recording of Brian Trueman himself reading a story book version of his episode. Other character voices are provided by the other actors respectively. Just click on his photo below. Enjoy!