Bing! You're hypnotized!

[Kriton Kyrimis]

WARNING: Contains spoilers for "Forget It"!

I just read the US edition of "Forget It", which for some reason read as quite 
a different story from the Greek edition, which I'd read last month. A quick 
comparison between the two editions showed that the difference was in Magica's 
explanation, in the beginning of the story, of what her spell did. In the 
Greek edition, Magica says something along the lines of the spell being 
summarized by the word "Bing!" and that the victim would hear the word "Bing!" 
and forget the first thing he heard after hearing his name. It would seem that 
the translator didn't get the "Bing! you're hypnotized" reference, and 
rearranged the dialog trying to make sense of it. The result seemed to me so 
silly that I apparently tuned it out and read the story as if that explanation 
had not been given. Believe it or not, this was a great improvement to the 
story, as I had to figure out, along with Donald and Scrooge, what the spell 
was, while the story was unfolding. And when the spell was explained again, 
near the end of the story, I just had to stop and reread the story, to verify 
that it was indeed so. Compared to this misunderstood version, the original 
version seemed to me as a mere series of gags on a common theme. Could it be 
that one could actually *improve* on a story by Don?

	Kriton.
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"Archaeologists should be able to get away with generalizations and guesswork
  without representatives of long-dead civilizations coming along and laughing
  at them."
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