Pop Culture References of Wizard101
Penny Dreadful – penny dreadful
https://101universe.fandom.com/wiki/Penny_Dreadful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful
Young Penny Dreadful of the Marleybone Dreadfuls is a new Death School student. Her parents, Desmond and Deirdre Dreadful, were once students at Ravenwood, and sent Penny to study Necromancy. After helping Penny round up some Pets, she finds that there is a problem with her paperwork, and she asks your wizard to help her with the Registrar, Mr. Lincoln. Penny continues to admire the Death School’s former teacher, as he was considered a family friend.
It has been stated elsewhere that Penny is a reference to the Penny Dreadful series aired on the American cable network Showtime from 2014 – 2016. However, since Penny has been a part of W101 since the beginning (I remember seeing her when I first started playing in late 2009 and she is mentioned in a March 2009 W101 Update Notes). She is in fact named for the same thing the cable series is named for, the penny dreadful.
Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular serial literature produced during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to a story published in weekly parts of 8 to 16 pages, each costing one penny. The subject matter of these stories was typically sensational, focusing on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. First published in the 1830s, penny dreadfuls featured characters such as Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire and Spring-heeled Jack.
The BBC called penny dreadfuls “a 19th-century British publishing phenomenon”. By the 1850s there were up to a hundred publishers of penny-fiction, and in the 1860s and 1870s more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold a week. The Guardian described penny dreadfuls as “Britain’s first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young”, and “the Victorian equivalent of video games.”
I have always loved the pop culture references in Wizard (and Pirate) 101. This series was inspired by a series I did featuring the Heroes of Lemuria and their ties to early 20th Cent. pulp heroes. This is the third article chronicling the #W101PopCulture references starting in Wizard City. The current list of all the (known) Wizard City references can be found here. These articles were originally put together for a Facebook group I belong to. Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references but I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.
Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages
Penny Dreadful image is from Wizard101, and so is copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment.
It is being used in a way that qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
The Black Bess cover is Public Domain and borrowed from the Wikipedia article linked above.
Vulcan Stev's Database 