The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

1

Mr Bunnsy’s adventures are a parody of the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit children’s stories, most of which concern fluffy animals being rather nice to each other.

2

An allusion to Robert Browning’s well known 1842 version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin:

3

I have no idea if this is what Terry had in mind, but in formal logic one of the possible ways to indicate the negation of a proposition ‘p’ (i.e. turn it into the opposite statement "not ‘p’”) is indeed to write ‘p’ with a horizontal bar on top of it.

4

Paraphrases Humphrey Bogart’s famous line from Casablanca: ”Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

5

The Discworld versions of our Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm.

6

A reference to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories.

7

Note that ‘Tomato’ is about as close as you can get to ‘Thomas’ (i.e. the proverbial ‘Doubting Thomas’) when you choose your name from food labels…

8

The Acme company rears its head again. Acme is an often used ‘generic’ company name in American cartoons. Particularly, most of the ingenious technical and military equipment Wile E. Coyote uses in his attempts to capture the Roadrunnner is purchased from Acme.

9

Dick Livingstone is an amalgam of Dick Whittington and Ken Livingstone.

Dick Whittington is a character in British pantomime, loosely based on the real-life Richard Whittington. Dick is a boy from a poor family who sets out for London to make his fortune, accompanied by his cat. At one point he loses heart and turns to go back home, but then he hears the bells of London ringing out, saying: “Turn again, Dick Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London.” The real Richard Whittington was mayor of London under Richard II in the late 14th century.

One of Ken Livingstone’s first acts as new mayor of London after being elected in 2000, was to get rid of the famous pigeons from Trafalgar Square. He did not get his cat to eat them (at least not as far as is known), but he just removed the street-traders who sold bags of bird-feed to tourists there — if pigeons don’t get limitless food, you stop getting huge flocks in one place.

10

Translated back from German to English, ‘Doppelpunkt’ means ‘Colon’ (as in the punctuation, not the digestive tract). Corporal Knopf, who makes his appearance on the next page has a name that translates back to ‘Knob’. So, it appears we are dealing with the Uberwald equivalents of Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs…

11

A singing cadence call-and-response song in the time-honoured military tradition. Also another reference to Browning’s poem (see the annotation {2}).