title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: For the first time in the show's history, the finale and reunion shows were pre-taped, rather than aired live. The show went "live-to-tape" four hours earlier than usual to screen for potentially sensitive material relating to the allegations against Spilo and his subsequent ejection. Dan Spilo was uninvited from the reunion following his ejection. Elizabeth Beisel and Jack Nichting also did not show up to the finale. The reunion included a one-on-one interview between Probst and Kim to address the allegations and the way they were handled, and resulted in Probst apologizing to Kim on behalf of the production team.


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: CBS and "Survivor" issued a second statement on December 18, 2019, prior to the finale to readdress the protocol for future seasons. Due to these events, castaways in (which was filmed immediately after this season was) were given additional pre-production guidelines on "personal space, inappropriate behavior, and how to report these issues". Future seasons will see this orientation expanded to include the means to which castaways can report their concerns of other players in a confidential manner to production, and production will improve their staff's training to watch for these issues ahead of time, and to add a support system for affected castaways as part of their available on-island and post-elimination mental health support. Further, new rules will disallow "unwelcome physical contact, sexual harassment and impermissible biases" to be brought into the game, or they may led to a castaway's dismissal from the game. Additionally, during the reunion, Probst apologized directly to Kim on behalf of the show and CBS for mistakes that were made, and then gave Kim several minutes to express her concerns and additional thoughts from the incident. Kim stated that the hardest part of the situation was not what Spilo did, but that she felt that she was "not supported or believed" by production, which Probst said was a misstep on their part. In response to these announced changes, Kim said "This has been a hard season, but I’m proud that the change I fought for is happening. I’ve been inspired & overwhelmed by the people who have reached out to support me & share their stories."


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: Spilo spoke to "People" after the conclusion of the season, saying "I am deeply sorry for how my actions affected Kellee during the taping of this season of Survivor...After apologizing at the Tribal Council when I first learned that Kellee still felt uncomfortable, I want to make sure I do so again, clearly and unambiguously."


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: "Survivor: Island of the Idols" was initially praised for the diverse cast and its gameplay prior to the merge episode. However, the controversy regarding Dan Spilo was met with universal disdain and intense criticism, resulting in the season receiving extremely negative reviews from critics. Additional criticism was pointed at the following post-merge episodes, the edit portraying a very predictable winner, as well as the idol nullifier twist (obtained via a random coin flip) controversially ousting crowd-favorite Janet Carbin.


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: Andy Dehnart of "Reality Blurred" labeled the season as the worst ever while pointing out several systemic problems with the show as a whole. He noted that the past five seasons were all won by men, while the past four seasons had featured only one female finalist who did not receive a single vote at the Final Tribal Council. He stated, "in the last five seasons, there have been fifty-two jury votes cast, and fifty of those have gone to men." He also lambasted the show for not having a proper protocol in dealing with sexual harassment until the "inappropriate touching" controversy essentially forced CBS to develop a formal one.


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: Daniel Fienberg of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote that the inaction from producers had not only ruined the season but tainted the legacy and future of "Survivor". He stated, "Somewhere, somebody needs to feel shame — not embarrassment, but shame — at what happened this season and owing to potential legal ramifications, I doubt we'll see any regret or remorse at all. I'm not accusing anybody of a crime. All I'm saying is: Kellee deserved better. The women of "Survivor" deserved better. The fans of "Survivor" deserved better. I don't know how anybody is supposed to trust the show to do right by its contestants again. You broke it, "Survivor" gang. I don't know how you're going to fix it."


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: Caroline Framke of "Variety" stated that the way that CBS handled the controversy was "irresponsible and infuriating." Specifically, she talked about the merge episode, which highlighted the Dan Spilo controversy, and the ninth episode, which aired one week after the merge episode and did not discuss the controversy at all. She stated, "It's downright insulting, and a baffling display of the show's inability to grasp the gravity of what happened on its watch."


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: James Poniewozik of "The New York Times" talked about the ending to the twelfth episode when Dan was ejected from the game. He stated, "Wednesday's episode abruptly ended with the cryptic announcement that a contestant, Dan Spilo, had been ejected from the show after an 'incident.' But regular viewers knew that this was just another twist in a story that had tarnished the season." He goes on to explain how CBS "failed its #MeToo test," accusing the network of not listening to Kellee Kim's complaints and concerns the first time she spoke about them.


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: Dalton Ross of "Entertainment Weekly", ranking the "Survivor" seasons through the 40th installment, placed "Island of the Idols" at the bottom of the list. He called the season "impossible to enjoy" due to Spilo's actions, and stated that "even though there were several things and people worth celebrating at various points in the show's 39th installment, the end result is that this felt like the least entertaining outing in the franchise’s history."


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: "Survivor" fan site "The Purple Rock Podcast" ranked "Island of the Idols" 39th out of 40 seasons in 2020, stating that the "pre-merge portion of the game is enjoyable" but the season's "potential is completely squandered by the actions (and inaction) of the show's production team."


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: "Inside Survivor" ranked this season 38th out of 40 saying that the bright spots are few and far between after the events of the merge and that the rewatch value is extremely low.


title: Survivor: Island of the Idols

text: "Rob Has a Podcast" ranked "Island of the Idols" 40th during their "Survivor All-Time Top 40 Rankings" podcast.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: Rajendra Sadashiv Nikalje (born 13 January 1959), popularly known by his moniker Chhota Rajan, is an Indian gangster who served as the boss of a major crime syndicate based in Mumbai.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: While living in Tilak Nagar, a big colony for the low-income group near Chembur, Mumbai, Rajan started as a petty black marketeer of cinema tickets at Sahakar Cinema. He was imprisoned for assaulting police constables. After being released from jail, he joined the Bada Rajan gang in 1982. After Bada Rajan was shot dead, Chhota Rajan took over the gang and worked for Dawood Ibrahim who had fled to Dubai.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: During the Arun Gawli – Dawood gang war in the late eighties, Rajan escaped to Dubai in 1989 and eventually rose to be the right hand of Dawood Ibrahim before splitting with him in 1993 and forming an independent gang that frequently clashed with Dawood's D-Company. He is wanted for many criminal cases that include extortion, murder, smuggling and drug trafficking. He is also wanted in 70 murder cases and several more attempted murders. It is said that Rajan finances a social organization called "Sahyadri Krida Mandal" that organizes the Ganesh Utsav in Tilaknagar, which has been Rajan's home base. Rajan's wife and two daughters continue to live in Tilaknagar.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: Rajan was extradited from Bali to India on 6 November 2015 after 27 years on the run and is currently awaiting trials for ongoing cases in custody. On 2 May 2018 he was convicted of murder of a journalist and handed life imprisonment.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: Chhota Rajan was born in a Dalit family in the Tilaknagar area of Chembur, Bombay. He worked as a cinema ticket seller in his early days. He started his criminal career by committing petty crimes in Chembur. His mentor Bada Rajan introduced him to black marketing of cinema tickets at Sahakar cinema Ashok Theatre in the 1980s.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: His mentors were Bada Rajan and Yadagiri of Hyderabad under whom he learned the tricks of the trade. Once Bada Rajan was killed, Nikalje received the throne and the title—Chhota Rajan. For a short period, Dawood Ibrahim, Rajan and Arun Gawli worked together. Then, Gawli's elder brother Papa Gawli was assassinated over a drug deal and a rift formed. Rajan went to Dubai — his family is still here, apart from his wife in 1989 to attend the wedding of Noora, Ibrahim's brother. He never returned. After the 1993 Bombay bombings, Ibrahim and Rajan fell out. There were even reports that he tipped off the Research and Analysis Wing about Ibrahim's network. The Ibrahim-Rajan party was over, the messy end coming in September 2000, with Chhota Shakeel's attack on Rajan in his Bangkok hotel room.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: On 26 October 2015, Rajan was arrested in Bali. Acting on a tip-off from Australian police, Indonesian authorities detained Rajan on Sunday as he arrived in Bali from Sydney.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: CBI director Anil Sinha confirmed the arrest saying, "Bali Police arrested Chhota Rajan yesterday at CBI’s request made through Interpol."


title: Chhota Rajan

text: After the split, he formed his own gang. Reports of bloody shootouts between Rajan and Dawood's hoodlums have been common since the split. In 1994, Rajan lured one of Dawood's favourite "narco-terrorist" Phillu Khan alias Bakhtiyar Ahmed Khan to a hotel room in Bangkok, where he was tortured to death, having been betrayed by his closest aide and sidekick Mangesh "Mangya" Pawar.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: Both Phillu and Mangya were involved in the 1993 blasts as police had filed cases on 15 March 1993 alleging their involvement in the blasts. Till now Rajan gunmen have gunned down 10 people accused in the blast.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: In September 2000, Dawood tracked down Rajan in Bangkok. Sharad, used his links with Mumbai-based hotelier Vinod and A. Mishra to track down Rajan in Bangkok, Dawood's aide Chhota Shakeel then led the hit. Posing as a pizza delivery man they gunned down the trusted Rajan hitman Rohit Varma and his wife. However their aim of killing Rajan failed, with Rajan escaping through the hotel's roof and fire-escape. He then recovered in a hospital and slipped away to evade capture.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: Dawood Ibrahim confirmed the attack on the telephone to Rediff.com, saying Rajan tried to escape by jumping out of the window of the first-floor room where he was attacked. He, however, broke his back in the fall and was taken to hospital.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: This failed assassination attempt proved costly for Dawood. Rajan's associates tracked down and shot dead Vinod in 2001 in Mumbai, as well as Sunil Soans – another Dawood associate. Both Vinod and Sunil had provided information to Dawood's associates of Rajan's whereabouts.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: While the killings of Vinod and Sunil Soans did not significantly disrupt D-Company, on 19 January 2003, Rajan's associates then gunned down Sharad – Dawood's chief finance manager and money-laundering agent – at the India Club in Dubai. This brazen killing was emblematic of the shift of power between Dawood and Rajan. Not only was the execution in a very public setting, but it was also at a location that Dawood considered his operational backyard. Intelligence reports have suggested that Sharad's death was a crippling blow to D-Company since much financial and monetary information of the crime syndicate operations managed by Sharad was never fully recovered by Dawood.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: Rajan is married to Sujata Nikalje. The couple has three daughters; Ankita Nikalje, Nikita Nikalje and Khushi Nikalje. His younger brother Deepak Nikalje is associated with Republican Party of India of MP Ramdas Athawale.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: The 2002 Bollywood film, "Company" had a character "Chandu", essayed by actor Vivek Oberoi, having some resemblances of Chhota Rajan with real-life Dawood Ibrahim gang. Also, the 1999 film :, starring Sanjay Dutt was loosely based on Rajan's life.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: On 25 October 2015, Rajan was captured in Bali, Indonesia where Indian authorities contacted Interpol for deporting him back to India. The capture took place due to a tip-off by Australian police stating that Rajan had travelled to Bali with an Indian passport by the name Mohan Kumar. According to CBI sources, the underworld don was standing in a queue at the airport when the immigration authorities asked him to step aside and reveal his name. To this, the gangster first gave his original name Rajendra Sadashiv Nikalje, and then immediately corrected himself to say, Mohan Kumar, the name mentioned on his passport. This alerted the authorities, and they started questioning him. The authorities then started the identification process with the help of fingerprint tests. 11 out of 18 points of fingerprint samples given in the Red Corner notice matched with his samples, confirming that he was Rajendra Sadashiv Nikalje. Rajan was extradited to India on 6 November 2016 and is currently in Tihar Jail, awaiting trial in almost 70 cases.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: A special CBI Court in New Delhi on 25 April 2017 awarded seven years rigorous imprisonment to Rajan and three other accused in the fake passport case.


title: Chhota Rajan

text: The Maharashtra MCOCA court found Chhota Rajan guilty of the murder of journalist J. Dey on 2 May 2018 and handed him life imprisonment.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander I (, ) ( – 9 October 1934), also known as Alexander the Unifier, was the prince regent of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1914 and later the King of Yugoslavia from 1921 to 1934 (prior to 1929 the state was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). He was assassinated by the Bulgarian Vlado Chernozemski of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, during a 1934 state visit to France. Having sat on the throne for 13 years, he is the longest-reigning monarch of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander Karađorđević was born on 16 December 1888 in the Principality of Montenegro as the fourth child (second son) of Peter Karađorđević (son of Prince Alexander of Serbia who thirty years earlier in 1858 was forced to abdicate and surrender power in Serbia to the rival House of Obrenović) and Princess Zorka of Montenegro (eldest daughter of Prince Nicholas of Montenegro). Despite enjoying support from the Russian Empire, at the time of Alexander's birth and early childhood, the House of Karađorđević was in political exile, with family members scattered all over Europe, unable to return to Serbia.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Serbia had recently been transformed from a principality into a kingdom under the Obrenovićs, who ruled with strong support from Austria-Hungary. The antagonism between the two rival royal houses was such, that, after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenović in 1868 (an event Karađorđevićs were suspected of taking part in), the Obrenovićs resorted to making constitutional changes, specifically proclaiming the Karađorđevićs banned from entering Serbia and stripping them of their civic rights.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander was two when his mother, Princess Zorka, died in 1890 from complications while giving birth to his younger brother, Andrew, who died 23 days later.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander spent his childhood in Montenegro. In 1894, his widower father took the four children, including Alexander, to Geneva where the young man completed his elementary education. Alongside his older brother George, he continued his schooling at the imperial Page Corps in St Petersburg, Russian Empire. The British historian Robert Seton-Watson described Alexander as becoming a Russophile during his time in St. Petersburg, feeling much gratitude for the willingness of the Emperor Nicholas II to give him a refuge, where he was treated with much honor and respect.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: As a page, Alexander was described as hard-working and determined while also being a "loner" who kept to himself and rarely showed his feelings. Being a Karađorđević led to Alexander being invited by Nicholas II to dinner at the Winter Palace, where he was the guest of honor at meals hosted by the Russian imperial family, which was a great honor for a prince from Serbia's deposed princely family.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: During his time in St. Petersburg, Alexander visited the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where the abbot gave Alexander an icon of Prince Alexander Nevsky and guided him to the grave of Marshal Alexander Suvorov. After his visit to the monastery, Alexander expressed the wish to be a great general like Marshal Suvorov or Prince Alexander Nevsky, saying he wanted to be commanding either a great army or a great armada when he was a man.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In 1903, while young George and Alexander were in school, a slew of conspirators pulled off a bloody coup d'état in the Kingdom of Serbia known as the May Overthrow in which King Alexander and Queen Draga were murdered and dismembered. The House of Karađorđević thus retook the Serbian throne after forty-five years and Alexander's 58-year-old father became king of Serbia, prompting George's and Alexander's return to Serbia to continue their studies. After Alexander's 15th birthday, King Peter had Alexander enlisted into the Royal Serbian Army as a private with instructions to his officers to only promote his son if he proved worthy. On 25 March 1909, Alexander was suddenly recalled to Belgrade by his father with no explanation offered other than that he had an important announcement for his son.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: A key event for Prince Alexander occurred on 27 March 1909 when his older brother, Crown Prince George, publicly renounced his claim to the throne after strong pressure from political circles in Serbia. Many in Serbia, including powerful political and military figures such as Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, as well as high-ranking officers Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević and Petar Živković, who did not appreciate the young man's impulsive nature and unstable, incident-prone personality, had long regarded George as unfit to rule. They believed that Prince Alexander had the makings of a fine sovereign. Prince Alexander donated a large sum of money to the Black Hand-oriented journal "Pijemont" ("Piedmont") (founded in August 1911).


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: George killed his servant Kolaković by kicking him in the stomach, which served as the final straw. The death caused a huge scandal amongst the Serbian public as well as in the Austro-Hungarian press, which reported extensively on it, and 21-year-old Prince George was forced into renouncing his claim to the throne.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In 1910, Crown Prince Alexander nearly died from stomach typhus and was left with stomach problems for the rest of his life. In the run-up to the First Balkan War of 1912–1913, Alexander played the role of a diplomat, visiting Sofia to meet Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria for secret talks for a Balkan League, which was intended to drive the Ottomans out of the Balkans. Both Bulgaria and Serbia had rival claims to the Ottoman region of Macedonia, and the talks with Ferdinand were difficult. Together with Tsar Ferdinand's son, Crown Prince Boris (the future Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria), Alexander traveled to Saint Petersburg to see the Russian Emperor Nicholas II to ask for Russian mediation on certain points that were dividing the Serbs and Bulgarians. In March 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance that was later (May 1912) joined by Greece.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In March 1912, Alexander had a meeting with ten senior military commanders. They all agreed to end all internal conflicts in the army and fully commit to realizing national goals, which allowed space for consolidation before the two successive Balkan wars.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In the First Balkan War in 1912, as commander of the First Army, Crown Prince Alexander fought victorious battles in Kumanovo and Bitola. One of Alexander's most cherished moments came when he drove the Ottomans out of Kosovo and on 28 October 1912 led the Serb Army on a review on the Field of Blackbirds. The Field of Blackbirds was where the Serbs under Prince Lazar had been defeated in a legendary battle by the Ottoman Sultan Murad I on 28 June 1389 and is regarded by the Serbs as holy ground. It was a great honor for him to pay his respects to the Serbs who had fallen in that earlier battle. In the aftermath of the First Balkan War, disputes emerged among the victors over control of Macedonia, and Serbia and Greece signed an alliance against Bulgaria. Later in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Alexander commanded the Serb Army at the Battle of Bregalnica against the Bulgarians.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: After the Ottoman withdrawal from Skopje (most of whom had left after the Albanian revolt of 1912), Prince Alexander was met with flowers by the local people. He stopped and asked a seven-year-old girl, Vaska Zoicheva, "What are you?" (Pa shta si ti?) When she replied "Bulgarian!" ("Bugarka!"), the prince slapped her. This news of the event spread quickly around Bulgaria. In 1920 and 1921, Serbian authorities searched for the girl's father, Danail Zoichev, and offered him money to renounce the event as fictional, but he refused.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In the aftermath of the Second Balkan War, Prince Alexander took sides in the complicated power struggle over how Macedonia should be administered. In this, Alexander bested Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević "Apis" and in the wake of this, Alexander's father, King Peter, agreed to hand over royal powers to his son. Though Colonel Dimitrijević was the mastermind of the 1903 coup that had restored the House of Karađorđević to the Serbian throne, Alexander distrusted him, regarding his attempts to set himself up as a "kingmaker" and to have the Serbian Army be a "state within the state" existing outside of civilian control as a major threat.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Additionally, Alexander saw Dimitrijević as an irresponsible intriguer who having betrayed one king might always betray another. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić sent a letter to the Emperor Nicholas II in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the daughters of Nicholas. Nicholas in his reply stated that his daughters would not be forced into arranged marriages, but noted Alexander on his most recent trips to St. Petersburg had during dinners at the Winter Palace kept giving loving looks at the Grand Duchess Tatiana, leading him to guess that it was her whom Alexander wanted to marry. On 24 June 1914, Alexander became regent of Serbia.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: On 24 July 1914, Alexander was one of the first Serbian officials to see the Austrian ultimatum containing terms deliberately written to inspire rejection. Turning to Russia for help, Alexander was advised to help the ultimatum as much as he could. Alexander was late to say he "went as far as an independent could" to accept the ultimatum, as Serbia accepted all of the terms except for the one demanding that Austrian police officers investigating the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand could operate on Serbian soil with the powers of arrest, which would have been the effective end of Serbia as an independent state. As expected, the Austrians declared war on Serbia, and Alexander threw himself into preparing his nation's defense. In a letter to King Nicholas of Montenegro, Alexander wrote: "God has willed yet again that the Serbian people should give their lives for Serbs everywhere ... I pray for the support of my dear and wise forefathers".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: At the outbreak of World War I he was the nominal supreme commander of the Serbian army; true command was in the hands of the Chief of Staff of Supreme Headquarters, a position held by Stepa Stepanović (during the mobilisation), Radomir Putnik (1914–1915), Petar Bojović (1916–1917) and Živojin Mišić (1918). The Serbian army distinguished itself in the battles at Cer and at the Drina (the Battle of Kolubara) in 1914, scoring victories against the invading Austro-Hungarian forces and evicting them from the country.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The British historian Max Hastings described the Royal Serbian Army in 1914 as the toughest army in Europe and also the most egalitarian with none of the distinctions of rank that characterized the other European armies, exemplified by how the Serb Army was the only army in Europe where officers would shake hands with the other ranks. However, the Serbian Army suffered major shortages of equipment with a third of the men called up in August 1914 having no rifles or ammunition and new recruits being advised to bring their own boots and clothing as there were no uniforms for them. Alexander ordered the Serbian police to conduct searches of houses all over Serbia to see if there were any rifles and ammunition to be seized for the army.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In 1915, the Serbian army was attacked on several fronts by the allied forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary, suffering heavy losses. On 7 October 1915 an Austro-German army group under the command of Field Marshal August von Mackensen invaded Serbia and after encountering fierce resistance took Belgrade on 9 October. On 14 October 1915, Bulgaria invaded Serbia and on 16 October the Bulgarians took Niš, severing the railroad that linked Serbia to Salonika in Greece. Being attacked from the north by the Austrians and the Germans and from the south by the Bulgarians, the Serbs by 25 November 1915 had been forced into the Kosovo region.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The massacres committed by the Austrians in 1914 when they invaded Serbia twice caused enormous panic and hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled their homes to escape the Austrians, which greatly delayed the movement of the Serb Army. Field Marshal Radomir Putnik persuaded Crown Prince Alexander and King Peter that it was better to keep the Serb Army intact to one day liberate Serbia rather to stand and fight in Kosovo as many Serb officers wanted.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The Serbian Army withdrew through the gorges of Montenegro and northern Albania to the Greek island of Corfu, where it was reorganized. The march across the Prokletije ("accursed") mountains was a harrowing one as the Serb Army together with a mass of refugees had to cross mountains that rose to 3,000 feet high in the middle of winter with the average daily temperature being −20° while battling the hostile Albanian tribes with the armies of Austria, Germany and Bulgaria in pursuit. Many Serbs died along the way as one Serb soldier wrote in his diary how the refugees rested by the side of the road were: "Immobilized by the snow their heads rest to their breasts. The white snowflakes dance around them while the alpine winds whistle their songs of death. The heads of horses and oxen which have fallen protrude from the snow".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: As the Serbs braved the icy winds and snowdrifts, the only consolation for Alexander was that the winter weather was also delaying the German, Austrian and Bulgarian armies under the command of von Mackensen that were pursuing his army. Alexander repeatedly exposed himself to danger during the march to the sea while his health declined. Upon reaching the sea, the surviving Serbs who numbered about 140,000 were rescued by British and French ships, which took them to Corfu.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In September 1915, the Royal Serbian Army was estimated to have the strength of about 420,000 men, of whom 94,000 had been killed or wounded while another 174,000 had been captured or were missing during the fall campaign in 1915 and the subsequent retreat to the sea. The losses taken by Serb civilians during the autumn campaign in 1915 together with the retreat to the sea have never been calculated, but are estimated to be massive. Serb losses as a percentage of the population were the greatest of any belligerent in the war.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The surviving Serb soldiers were ultimately taken to Thessaloniki to join the "Armées alliées en Orient". In the fall of 1916, Alexander's long-standing dispute with the Black Hand group came to a head, when Colonel Dimitrijević began to criticize his leadership. Suspecting a threat to the throne, Alexander promptly had officers who were members of the Black Hand arrested in December 1916 and tried for insubordination; after their convictions, Dimitrijević and several other Black Hand leaders were executed by firing squad on 23 June 1917.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: At the same time, the Serbian government-in-exile led by Prime Minister Nikola Pašić was in contact with the Yugoslav Committee, a group of anti-Habsburg Croats and Slovenes led by Ante Trumbić who talked about creating a new nation to be called Yugoslavia which would unite all of the South Slav peoples into one state. In June 1917, the Corfu Declaration was signed by Pašić and Trumbić promising Yugoslavia after the war.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander seems to have been dubious about the plans for Yugoslavia, as throughout the war, he spoke in terms of liberating Serbia. The introduction of the 14 Points by the American President Woodrow Wilson in January 1918 increased Alexander's doubts about Yugoslavia as Point 10 spoke of "substantial autonomy" in the Austrian Empire after the war, not breaking it up. Not willing to antagonise Wilson, Alexander favored a "greater Serbia" that saw the Serbs annex certain provinces of the Austrian Empire. Though the Crown Prince declared in a speech during a visit to Britain that he was "fighting for Yugoslav unity in a Yugoslav state", when he addressed his own soldiers he stated he was fighting for "the reestablishment of Serbia, our dear homeland".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In a sign of the trouble to come, Trumbić demanded to have the right to speak for the South Slavs living under Austrian rule, a demand that Alexander rejected under the grounds that the Serb government represented the South Slavs. After the army was regrouped and reinforced, it achieved a decisive victory on the Macedonian Front, at Kajmakcalan. The Serbian army carried out a major part in the final Allied breakthrough on the Macedonian Front in the autumn of 1918. The debate whatever the Serbian Army was fighting for Yugoslavia or Serbia resolved itself in October–November 1918 as the Austrian Empire collapsed, leaving the Royal Serbian Army to move into the vacuum.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The Italians had ambitions to annex Dalmatia, Istria and much of Slovenia, leading the Croats and the Slovenes to prefer living with their fellow Slavs. On 1 December 1918, the National Council asked Alexander to declare Serbia united with the former Austrian provinces of Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia on the basis of the Corfu declaration. Serbia had been devastated by the war, and 1 out of every 5 Serbs who were alive in 1914 were dead by 1918. Much of Alexander's time in the immediate post-war years was to be taken up with reconstruction.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: On 1 December 1918, in a prearranged set piece, Alexander, as Prince Regent, received a delegation of the People's Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, an address was read out by one of the delegation, and Alexander made an address in acceptance. This was considered to be the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. One of Alexander's first acts as Prince Regent of the new kingdom was to declare his support for the widespread demand for land reform, stating: "In our free state there can and will be only free landowners".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: On 25 February 1919, Alexander signed a land reform decree breaking up all feudal estates over the size of 100 cadastral "yokes" with compensation to be paid for the former landowners except for those who belonged to the House of Habsburg and the other ruling families of enemy states in the Great War. Under the land reform decree some two million hectares of land was handed over to a half million peasant households, though the implementation was very slow, taking 15 years before land reform was complete.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In both Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the majority of the landlords who lost land were Muslims while the majority of their former tenants who received the land were Christians, and in both places land reform was seen as an attack on the political and economic power of the Muslim gentry. In Croatia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina, the majority of the landlords who lost their land were Austrian or Hungarian nobility who usually did not reside in those places, meaning that however much they might have resented the loss of their land it did not have the sort of political repercussions it did in Macedonia and in Bosnia where the Albanian and Bosnian Muslim landlords lived.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: On August 16, 1921, upon the death of his father, Alexander ascended to the throne of the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes", which from its inception was colloquially known both in the Kingdom and the rest of Europe alike as "Yugoslavia". The historian Brigit Farley described Alexander as something of a cipher to historians as he was a taciturn and reserved man who loathed to express his feelings either in person or in writing. As Alexander kept no diary or wrote no memoirs, Farley wrote that any biography of Alexander could easily be titled "In search of King Alexander" as he remains an elusive and enigmatic figure.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The British historian R.W. Seton-Watson, who knew Alexander well, called him a soldiery man most comfortable in a military milieu who was very quiet and surprisingly modest for a king. Seton-Watson described Alexander as having an "autocratic" personality, a man who was first and foremost a soldier who spent "six of his formative years" in the Serbian Army, which left him with a "military outlook which unfitted him to deal with the delicate problems of constitutional government and which made compromise hard for him".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Seton-Watson wrote that Alexander "...was very courageous, though not ever a man of strong physique or robust health. He had a strong fixity of purpose, great devotion to duty, powers of sustained work. He had great charm and simplicity of manner. He was accessible and very open to opinions-though he rarely acted on them, and though occasionally he reacted with positive violence, as in the case of the Slovene Zerjav who fainted in his presence."


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: One of the things that historians can be certain about Alexander was his belief in keeping Yugoslavia as a unitary state and his consistent opposition to federalism, which he believed would lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia and perhaps his own assassination. In turn, Alexander's opposition to federalism related to his belief that in a federalised Yugoslavia, the "prečani" Serbs would be discriminated against by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, once telling a Serb Orthodox priest that federalism would be "stabbing the Serbs in the back".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: As a Karađorđević, Alexander was very conscious of the long blood-feud between the Houses of Obrenović and Karađorđević that had disfigured Serb politics in the 19th century and that the 1903 coup d'état that finally brought down the Obrenovićs and led to the Karađorđevićs regaining the throne had happened because the last Obrenović king, Alexander, was widely viewed as too subservient to Austria-Hungary and as having betrayed Serb interests. Because of the frequent changes in loyalty in the Royal Serbian Army in the 19th century between the feuding royal families, Alexander was never entirely convinced that the Serb-dominated officer corps of the Royal Yugoslav Army were completely loyal to him, and always had the fear if he was seen to be betraying Serbdom as the last Obrenović king was, he too might be overthrown and killed.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: On 8 June 1922, he married Princess Maria of Romania, who was a daughter of Ferdinand I of Romania. They had three sons: Crown Prince Peter, and Princes Tomislav and Andrej. He was said to have wished to marry Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia, a cousin of his wife and the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, and was distraught by her untimely death in the Russian Civil War. The Russophile Alexander was horrified by the murders of the House of Romanov-including the Grand Duchess Tatiana-and during his reign was very hostile towards the Soviet Union, welcoming Russian emigres to Belgrade.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The lavish royal wedding to Princess Maria of Romania was intended to cement the alliance with Romania, a fellow "victor nation" in World War I which like Yugoslavia had territorial disputes with the defeated nations like Hungary and Bulgaria. For Alexander, the royal wedding was especially satisfactory as most of the royal families of Europe attended, which showed that the House of Karađorđević, a family of peasant origins who were disliked for slaughtering the rival House of Obrenović in 1903, were finally accepted by the rest of European royalty.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In foreign policy, Alexander favored maintaining the international system created in 1918–19, and in 1921 Yugoslavia joined the Little Entente with Czechoslovakia and Romania to guard against Hungary. Hungary refused to accept the Treaty of Trianon and made territorial claims against all three states of the Little Entente.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In 1921, a war veteran and communist Spasoje Stejić Baćo attempted to assassinate king Alexander by throwing a bomb at his carriage. The bomb was thrown from a balcony and it got stuck in the telephone wires and it ended up wounding several bystanders.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The principal enemy of Yugoslavia in the 1920s was Fascist Italy, which wanted much of what is now modern Slovenia and Croatia. The origins of the Italo-Yugoslav dispute concerned the Italian contention that they had been "cheated" out of what they had been promised in the secret Treaty of London in 1915 at the Paris peace conference in 1919. It was largely out of the fear of Italy that Alexander in 1927 signed a treaty of alliance with France, which therefore became Yugoslavia's principal ally. In fact, Alexander I and Benito Mussolini were arch-rivals.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Starting in 1926, an alliance of the Serb Democrats led by Svetozar Pribićević and the Croat Peasant Party led by Stjepan Radić had systematically obstructed the "skupština" to press for federalism for Yugoslavia, filibustering and filing nonsensical motions to prevent the government from passing any bills. In response to obstructionism from the opposition parties, in June 1928, one frustrated deputy from Montenegro took out his handgun and shot Radić on the floor of the "skupština". The charismatic Radić, the "uncrowned king of Croatia", had inspired intense devotion in Croatia and his assassination was seen as a sort of Serb declaration of war. The assassination pushed Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war and led Alexander to consider the "amputation" of Croatia as preferable to federalism.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander mused to Pribićević that: "We cannot stay together with the Croats. Since we cannot, it would be better to separate. The best way to be to effect a peaceful separation like Sweden and Norway did". When Pribićević protested that this would be an act of "treason", Alexander told him he would think some more about what to do. Alexander appointed the Slovene Catholic priest, Father Anton Korošec prime minister with one mandate, namely to stop the slide towards civil war. On 1 December 1928, the lavish celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the triune Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that the government organized led to rioting that left 10 dead in Zagreb.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In response to the political crisis triggered by the assassination of Stjepan Radić, King Alexander abolished the Constitution on 6 January 1929, prorogued the Parliament and introduced a personal dictatorship (the so-called "January 6th Dictatorship", "Šestojanuarska diktatura"). One of the first acts of the new regime was to carry out a purge of the civil service with one-third of the civil service being fired by May 1929 in an attempt to address popular complaints about rampant corruption in the bureaucracy. He also changed the name of the country to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and changed the internal divisions from the 33 oblasts to nine new "banovinas" on 3 October. Of the "banovinas", only one had a Slovene majority, two had Croat majorities and the rest had Serb majorities, which especially angered the Bosnian Muslims who were in a minority in every "banovine".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The way in which the "banovinas" were based on new borders that did not correspond to the historical regional borders led to much resentment, especially in Bosnia and Croatia. The "banovinas" were named after the topography of Yugoslavia rather than the historical names in a bid to weaken regional loyalties, being governed by "bans" appointed by the King. In the same month, he tried to banish by decree the use of Serbian Cyrillic to promote the exclusive use of the Latin alphabet in Yugoslavia.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander replaced the three regional flags for the triune Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with a single flag for the entire country, brought in a single legal code for his realm, imposed a single fiscal code so all of his subjects would pay the same tax rate, and a Yugoslav Agrarian Bank was created by merging all of the regional agrarian banks into one. Alexander tried to promote a sense of Yugoslav identity by always taking his vacations in Slovenia, naming his second son after a Croat king, and being a godfather to a Bosnian Muslim child. Alexander had once fraternised frequently with ordinary people, being known for his habit of making unannounced visits to various villages all over Yugoslavia to chat with ordinary people but after the proclamation of the royal dictatorship, his social circle consisted of a few generals and courtiers, causing the King to lose touch with his subjects.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Within Serbia, the royal dictatorship for the first time made Alexander into an unpopular figure. The British historian Richard Crampton wrote many Serbs "...were alienated by the attempt, albeit unsuccessful, to lessen the Serbian domination on which, to add insult to injury, many of the faults of the previous system were blamed. Alexander had implicitly made the Serbs, the most reliable proponents of centralism, the villains of the Vidovdan piece". The royal dictatorship was seen in Croatia as merely a form of Serbian domination, and one result was a marked upswing in support for fascistic "Ustashe", which advocated winning Croat independence via violence.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: By 1931, the "Ustashe" was waging a terrorist campaign of bombings, assassinations and sabotage, which at least in part explained Alexander's reluctance to engage with ordinary people as he done in the past out of the fear of assassination. On 14 February 1931, Alexander visited Zagreb, and the men of the Turnopolje district, who for centuries always provided a mounted honour guard for any royal visitor to Zagreb, failed to show up, a snub that shown how unpopular Alexander had become in Croatia. On 19 February 1931, the Croat historian Milan Šufflay was murdered by police agents, becoming an international "cause célèbre" with Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann leading a campaign to pressure Alexander to prosecute Šufflay's killers.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The Great Depression was especially severe in predominantly rural Yugoslavia as it caused deflation leading to a collapse in price of agricultural products. The Croat politician Ante Trumbić summed up the feelings of many when he gave a speech in early 1931 stating: "We are in a crisis, an economic, financial and moral crisis. There is no material or moral credit in the country. Nobody believes anything anymore!" However, Alexander remain unperturbed, stating in an interview with the press: "Yugoslav politics will never again be driven by narrow religious, regional or national interests". In response to pressure from Yugoslavia's allies, especially France and Czechoslovakia, led Alexander to decide to lessen the royal dictatorship by bringing in a new constitution which allowed the "skupština" to meet again.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In 1931, Alexander decreed a new Constitution which transferred executive power to the King. Elections were to be by universal male suffrage. The provision for a secret ballot was dropped and pressure on public employees to vote for the governing party was to be a feature of all elections held under Alexander's constitution. Furthermore, the King would appoint half of the upper house directly, and legislation could become law with the approval of one of the houses alone if it were also approved by the King. The 1931 constitution kept Yugoslavia as a unitary state, which enraged the non-Serbian peoples who demanded a federation and saw Alexander's royal dictatorship as thinly disguised Serbian domination. In the elections for the "skupština" in December 1931 – January 1932, the call of the opposition parties to boycott the vote were widely heeded, a sign of popular dissatisfaction with the new constitution.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In response to the impoverishment of the countryside caused by the Great Depression, Alexander reaffirmed in a speech the right of every peasant family to a minimum amount of land that could not be seized by a bank in the event of a debt default. In 1932 he issued a decree suspending all debt payments by farmers to the banks for six months and forbade any more foreclosures by the banks against farmers. Alexander's measures preventing the banks to foreclose on farmers who were unable to pay their loans saved many peasants from being ruined and prevented economic distress in the countryside from turning political, but in the long run, his policies did not solve the economic problems of the rural areas.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The losses taken by the banks and their inability to foreclose on farmers who had delinquent loans made the banks unwilling to make new loans to the farmers. As Yugoslav agriculture, especially in the southern parts of the country was backward, the farmers needed loans to modernise their farms, but the unwillingness of the banks to lend to the farmers made modernisation of the farms impossible in the 1930s.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In September 1932, Alexander's friend, the Croat politician Ante Trumbić gave an interview with "The Manchester Guardian" newspaper, where he stated that life for ordinary Croats was better when they were part of the Austrian empire and stated that perhaps the Croats would be better off if they broke away from Yugoslavia to form their own state. For Alexander, who always respected and liked Trumbić to see his former friend come very close to embracing Croat separatism was a painful blow. On 7 November 1932, Trumbić and Vladko Maček of the Croat Peasant Party issued the so-called Zagreb Points, which demanded a new constitution which would turn Yugoslavia into a federation, and stated that the Croats would otherwise demand independence.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Alexander had Maček imprisoned without charges, but the issuing of the Zagreb Points inspired the other peoples to issue similar declarations with the Slovenes issuing the Ljubljana Points, the Bosnian Muslims issuing the Sarajevo Points and the Magyars issuing the Novi Sad points. The emergence of a multi-ethnic opposition movement embracing the non-Serb peoples threatened to break the country apart and forced Alexander to ease the level of repression as his ministers warned him that he could not imprison the entire country.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: In Macedonia, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation was continuing its long-running guerrilla struggle while in Croatia the security situation had further deteriorated by 1932. By the end of 1932, the "Ustashe" had blown up hundreds of trains and assassinated hundreds of government officials. The often violent response of the mainly-Serb gendarmes to "Ustashe" terrorism fuelled more support for the "Ustashe". To many, it appeared that Yugoslavia was sliding into the civil war that Alexander's "self-coup" of January 1929 was supposed to prevent.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Starting in 1933, Alexander had become worried about Nazi Germany. In March 1933, the French minister in Belgrade, Paul-Émile Naggiar, told Alexander that France was seriously worried about the stability of Yugoslavia and warned that the King could not continue to rule in face of opposition from the majority of his subjects and that Paris viewed that Alexander was starting to become a liability for France. Naggiar predicted the new regime in Germany was going to challenge the international order created by the Treaty of Versailles sooner or later and that France needed Yugoslavia to be stable and strong, which led Naggiar to advise the King to adopt federalism for his realm.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: However, one point of agreement of Alexander with Mussolini was his fear of "Anschluss" which would make Germany a direct neighbour of Yugoslavia. Alexander had no desire to have Germany as a neighbour, which led him to support the continuation of Austrian independence. Despite his distaste for communism, the King gave support, albeit in a very cautious and hesitant way, to the plans of French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou to bring the Soviet Union into a front meant to contain Germany. In 1933–34, Alexander become the proponent of a Balkan Pact, which would unite Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and Turkey.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Although the Balkan Pact was directed primarily against Italy and its allies (Hungary, Albania and Bulgaria), Alexander hoped the pact might provide some protection against Germany. After the coup d'état in May 1934 in Sofia, King Alexander also hoped that Bulgaria would join the Balkan Entente. The new Bulgarian government had started repression against IMRO. In September 1934, Alexander visited Sofia to improve relations with Bulgaria. A Bulgarian military organisation, Zveno, supported the unification of Bulgaria and Albania into Yugoslavia, which agreed with Alexander's policy, "Balkans for the Balkan peoples".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: After the Ustaše's Velebit uprising in November 1932, Alexander said through an intermediary to the Italian government, "If you want to have serious riots in Yugoslavia or cause a regime change, you need to kill me. Shoot at me and be sure you have finished me off, because that's the only way to make changes in Yugoslavia."


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou had attempted in 1934 to build an alliance meant to contain Germany, consisting of France's allies in Eastern Europe like Yugoslavia, together with Italy and the Soviet Union. The long-standing rivalry between Benito Mussolini and King Alexander had complicated Barthou's work as Alexander complained about Italian claims against his country together with Italian support for Hungarian revisionism and the Croat "Ustaše".


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: As long as the French ally Yugoslavia continued to have disputes with Italy, Barthou's plans for an Italo-French rapprochement would be stillborn. During a visit to Belgrade in June 1934, Barthou promised the King that France would pressure Mussolini into signing a treaty under which he would renounce his claims against Yugoslavia. Alexander was sceptical of Barthou's plan, noting that there were hundreds of "Ustašhi" being sheltered in Italy and it was rumoured that Mussolini had financed an unsuccessful attempt by the "Ustaše" to assassinate him in December 1933.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Mussolini had come to believe that it was only the personality of Alexander that was holding Yugoslavia together and that if the King were assassinated, Yugoslavia would descend into civil war, which would allow Italy to annex certain regions of Yugoslavia without the fear of France. However, France was Yugoslavia's closest ally, and Barthou invited Alexander for a visit to France to sign a Franco-Yugoslav agreement that would allow Barthou to "go to Rome with the certainty of success". As a result of the previous deaths of three family members on Tuesdays, Alexander refused to undertake any public functions on that day of the week. On Tuesday, 9 October 1934, however, he had no choice, as he was arriving in Marseille to start a state visit to France to strengthen both countries' alliance in the Little Entente.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: While Alexander was being slowly driven in a car through the streets along with French Foreign Minister Barthou, a gunman, the Bulgarian Vlado Chernozemski, stepped from the street and shot the King twice and the chauffeur with a Mauser C96 semiautomatic pistol. Alexander died in the car and was slumped backwards in the seat with his eyes open. Barthou was also killed by a stray bullet fired by French police during the scuffle following the attack.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: It was one of the first assassinations to be captured on film; the shooting occurred in front of the newsreel cameraman, who was only metres away at the time. While the exact moment of shooting was not captured on film, the events leading to the assassination and the immediate aftermath were. The body of the chauffeur, who had been wounded, slumped and jammed against the brakes of the car, which allowed the cameraman to continue filming from within inches of the King for a number of minutes afterwards.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The assassin was a member of the pro-Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO or VMRO) and an experienced marksman. Immediately after assassinating King Alexander, Chernozemski was cut down by the sword of a mounted French policeman, and then beaten by the crowd. By the time that he was removed from the scene, the King was already dead. The IMRO was a political organization that fought for the liberation of the occupied region of Macedonia and its independence, initially as some form of second Bulgarian state, followed by a later unification with the Kingdom of Bulgaria.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The IMRO worked in alliance with the Croatian Ustaše group, led by Ante Pavelić. Chernozemski and three Croatian accomplices had travelled to France from Hungary via Switzerland. After the assassination, Chernozemski's accomplices were arrested by French police. A prominent diplomat with the Palazzo Chigi, Baron Pompeo Aloisi, expressed fears that the "Ustashi" based in Italy had killed the King and sought reassurances from another diplomat, Paolo Cortese, that Italy had not been involved. Aloisi was not reassured when Cortese told him that with Alexander being dead, Yugoslavia was about to break up.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Public opinion and press in Yugoslavia held that Italy had been crucial in the planning and directing of the assassination. Demonstrators outside of the Italian embassy in Belgrade and the Italian consulates in Zagreb and Ljubljana blamed Mussolini for Alexander's assassination. An investigation by the French police quickly established that the assassins had been trained and armed in Hungary; had travelled to France on forged Czechoslovak passports; and frequently telephoned "Ustaše" leader Ante Pavelić, who was living in Italy.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The incident was later used by Yugoslavia as an argument to counter the Croatian attempts of secession and Italian and Hungarian revisionism. The participants in the assassination were Ivan Rajić, Mijo Kralj, Zvonimir Pospišil and Antun Godina. They were sentenced to life in prison although the Yugoslav authorities had expected that they would be sentenced to death. In 1940, after the fall of France, they were released from prison by Germany.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: Pierre Laval, who succeeded Barthou as foreign minister, wished to continue the rapprochement with Rome and saw the assassinations in Marseille as an inconvenience that was best forgotten. Both London and Paris made it clear that they regarded Mussolini as a responsible European statesman and in private told Belgrade that under no circumstances would they allow "Il Duce" to be blamed. In a speech in Northampton, England, on 19 October 1934, British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon expressed his sympathy to the people of Yugoslavia over the king's assassination and stated that he was convinced by Mussolini's speech in Milan that denied being involvement in the assassination.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: When Yugoslavia made an extradition request to Italy for Pavelić on charges of regicide, the Quai d'Orsay expressed concern that if Pavelić were extradited, he might incriminate Mussolini and were greatly reassured when its counterparts at the Palazzo Chigi stated there was no possibility of Pavelić being extradited. Laval cynically told a French journalist off the record that the French press should stop going on about the assassinations in Marseille because France would never go to war to defend the honour of a weak country like Yugoslavia.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The film record of Alexander I's assassination remains one of the most notable pieces of newsreel in existence, alongside the film of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia's coronation, the funerals of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (see state funeral of Queen Victoria) and Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A 20th Century Fox newsreel presented by Graham McNamee was manipulated to give the audience the impression that the assassination had been captured on film. Three identical gunshot sounds were added to the film afterwards, but in reality, Chernozemski fired his handgun over ten times and killed or wounded a total of 15 people. A straw hat is shown on the ground, as if it had belonged to the assassin, unlike in reality. A Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol with a 10-round magazine is shown as the assassination weapon, but the actual one had a 20-round magazine. The exact moment of assassination was never filmed. Just hours later, Chernozemski died in police custody.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: The following day, the body of King Alexander I was transported back to the port of Split in Yugoslavia by the destroyer JRM "Dubrovnik". After a huge funeral in Belgrade that was attended by about 500,000 people and many leading European statesmen, Alexander was interred in the Oplenac Church in Topola, which had been built by his father. The Holy See gave special permission to bishops Aloysius Stepinac, Antun Akšamović, Dionisije Njaradi, and Gregorij Rožman to attend the funeral in an Orthodox church. As his son King Peter II was still a minor, Alexander's first cousin Prince Paul took the regency of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: A ballistic report on the bullets found in the car was made in 1935, but its results were not made available to the public until 1974. It revealed that Barthou was hit by an 8 mm Modèle 1892 revolver round commonly used in weapons, carried by French police.


title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia

text: After the assassination, relations between Yugoslavia and France became colder and never returned to the previous level. Also, the Little Entente and the Balkan Pact lost their importance. The Yugoslav public considered it shocking that the assassination had happened on French soil. In the coming years, Prince Paul (as regent) attempted to keep a neutral balance between London and Berlin until 1941, when he yielded to heavy pressure to join the Tripartite Pact.


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话：悟空) is an upcoming action role-playing game by Chinese indie developer Game Science, based on the classical 16th-century Chinese novel "Journey to the West".


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: The game has been described as Souls-like. The player controls a monkey based on Sun Wukong, referred to in the game as "the Destined One" (天命人), to fight through an assortment of enemies. The player also has the ability to transform into a flying insect or a giant monster.


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: The game has been authorized by CCTV to use its theme song from the 1986 TV series "Journey to the West".


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: On August 20, 2020, the developer uploaded a 13-minute pre-alpha gameplay video. Within one day, the video had nearly 2 million views on YouTube and 10 million views on bilibili. On February 8, 2021, in celebration of the year of the Ox, Game Science released a 3-minute gameplay trailer, which showed the game's enemies, bosses, areas, and spells.


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: On August 19, 2021, Game Science released a 12 minute gameplay trailer, which revealed that the game was moved to Unreal Engine 5.


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: In a 2020 interview with IGN China, Game Science said they plan to release "Black Myth: Wukong" by 2023. The developer aims to release the game for PC as well as mainstream consoles. The game will be sold as a one-time purchase with possible DLCs.


title: Black Myth: Wukong

text: In China, controversy emerged surrounding the game and Game Science itself after studio head and CEO Feng Ji made several sexually charged comments on the video sharing website Weibo, where he ridiculed the presence of women in the games industry and made comments considered fatphobic and queerphobic. Following the remarks it was discovered that Game Science had cultivated what some could describe as a toxic workplace environment hostile to women, with sexually explicit and misogynistic advertisements used for recruiting and Feng Ji making remarks that the game was only made for men. As a result various online communities called for boycotting "Black Myth: Wukong".


title: DS Automobiles

text: DS Automobiles is a French luxury vehicle marque which was introduced in 2009. Formerly part of Citroën, DS has been a standalone brand since 2015 (2012 in China).


title: DS Automobiles

text: DS can be an abbreviation of Different Spirit or Distinctive Series, although it is also considered a nod to the classic executive car Citroën DS. The name is also a play on words, as in French it is pronounced like the word "", meaning "goddess".


title: DS Automobiles

text: The PSA Group originally consisted of three automobile brands, Peugeot, Citroën and the soon dropped Talbot, but none was considered a "premium" brand. Since 1976, PSA has experimented with differentiating the brands by price level, similar to Chevrolet/Buick or Volkswagen/Audi, but neither brand had the strength to justify premium pricing. By launching the DS line, Groupe PSA decided to build on the design heritage of the original Citroën DS (1955–1975) designed by Flaminio Bertoni and André Lefèbvre.


title: DS Automobiles

text: The DS line started with the Citroën DS3 in the beginning of 2010, a small car based on the floorpan of the new C3. The DS3 is based on the concept of the Citroën C3 Pluriel model and the Citroën DS Inside concept car, and customisable with various roof colours that can contrast with the body panels. It was named 2010 Car of the Year by "Top Gear Magazine", awarded first supermini four times in a row by the J.D. Power Satisfaction Survey UK, and the second most efficient supermini (Citroën DS3 1.6 eHDi 115 Airdream: True MPG 63.0mpg) by "What Car?" behind the Citroën C3.


title: DS Automobiles

text: In 2013, the Citroën DS3 was again the best-selling premium subcompact car with 40% of the market share in Europe. The DS series is deeply connected to Citroën, as the DS4, launched in 2010, is based on the 2008 Citroën Hypnos concept car and the DS5, following in 2011, is based on the concept car of 2005, the Citroën C-SportLounge.


title: DS Automobiles

text: According to PSA CEO Carlos Tavares, DS would keep using the same platforms and dealerships as other PSA models, but would distinguish itself from Citroën cars by using "separate manufacturing and engineering standards".


title: DS Automobiles

text: The DS Automobiles rear badge is a new logo rather than the Citroën double chevron, and all have different styling compared to their equivalent Citroën car. This logo has been designed by Korean designer Jin Joo. Citroën produced several concept sports cars, with the fully working Citroën Survolt being badged as a DS. A 2014 concept car, the DS Divine, develops the Survolt prototype as the future sport coupé of the DS range.


title: DS Automobiles

text: In China, DS vehicles have been sold in separate dealerships since 2014. DS models for sale in China were produced by the Changan PSA joint venture based in Shenzhen until May 2020, when the factory was acquired by the Baoneng Group. The DS 5LS and DS 6WR are only sold in China. With the facelift of the DS5 in 2015, the DS brand was also separated from the Citroën brand in Europe, and standalone DS dealerships are planned worldwide.


title: DS Automobiles

text: The DS Store is the dealership network of DS Automobiles. It was introduced in China in 2014, and in Europe in 2015.


title: DS Automobiles

text: DS partnered with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Racing team for the second season of the FIA Formula E Championship. The team competed under the title of DS Virgin Racing, and finished in third place in the 2015/16 season, and fourth in the 2016/17 season.


title: DS Automobiles

text: For the 2018–19 Formula E Championship, DS moved to partner with Techeetah, ending its relationship with Virgin. The newly renamed DS Techeetah, using the DS E-Tense FE 19 powertrain, won both the drivers and teams championships with Jean-Eric Vergne becoming Formula E's first two time drivers champion.


title: DS Automobiles

text: This feat was repeated in the following season with António Félix da Costa becoming driver's champion and DS Techeetah winning the teams title for 2019–20.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: Pirates (also known as Pirates XXX) is a 2005 American pornographic action-adventure film written, produced, and directed by Joone, and produced by Digital Playground and Adam & Eve. The film, starring Jesse Jane, Carmen Luvana, Janine Lindemulder, Devon, Jenaveve Jolie, Teagan Presley, and Evan Stone, features many references to the mainstream Hollywood film "".


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: Producer Samantha Lewis stated in an interview that "Pirates" was the most expensive pornographic film made to date, with a reported budget of well over $1 million.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: A sequel, "", was made on an even bigger budget of $8 million, and it is considered the most expensive porn film ever produced.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: In 1763, Captain Edward Reynolds is hunting pirates, or at least trying to do so. He does not consider himself a great commander, and neither does most of his crew. Only his first officer Jules believes in him. When they save a young woman named Isabella from drowning, she tells them that her husband's ship has been destroyed by the feared Captain Victor Stagnetti and his crew of cutthroat pirates.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: Reynolds and his crew go hunting for Stagnetti, who tries to find a map that leads to a powerful secret on an island somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. Stagnetti finds the secret "staff" unlocked by Isabella's husband Manuel.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: After the crew escapes the spawn of darkness summoned by Stagnetti, their ship engages Stagnetti's in battle, ending Stagnetti's reign as a pirate.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: The production was shot using high-definition digital video cameras and featured over 300 special effects shots. It also included an original music score, later released on a separate soundtrack CD, and was mastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Several scenes were shot on board the "Bounty II", a replica of "HMS Bounty", in St. Petersburg, Florida. The owners of the ship were not aware of the true nature of the film, as they were advised that the film being made was a "Disney-type pirate film for families", a mistaken notion that would continue in video stores after its release.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: The film was initially released as a three-disc DVD set (the movie on a standard video DVD, the movie again in a high definition (720P) Windows Media format, and a special features disc priced as high as $70. An edited R-rated version of the film was released on DVD on July 11, 2006. Digital Playground also released an Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD, a rarity among adult video releases.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: The film was also released on Blu-ray Disc (containing only the X-rated version) and HD DVD as one of the first high-definition adult releases on an optical disc format.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: Evan Stone reported on the extra DVD that there was going to be a sequel. In January 2007, it was reported that a sequel would be produced, directed by Joone and entitled "". A first teaser trailer was presented during the 2007 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: In March 2008, Digital Playground announced that the sequel would star Belladonna along with Jesse Jane, Evan Stone and many other performers from the first movie, and that it would be released in September 2008.


title: Pirates (2005 film)

text: "The New York Times" described the film as "a relatively high-budget story of a group of ragtag sailors who go searching for a crew of evil pirates who have a plan for world domination. Also, many of the characters in the movie have sex with one another."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: MTV Unplugged in New York is a live album by American rock band Nirvana, released on November 1, 1994, by DGC Records. It features an acoustic performance recorded at Sony Music Studios in New York City on November 18, 1993, for the television series "MTV Unplugged".


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The show was directed by Beth McCarthy and aired on the cable television network MTV on December 16, 1993. In a break with "MTV Unplugged" tradition, Nirvana played mainly lesser-known material and covers of songs by the Vaselines, David Bowie, Lead Belly and Meat Puppets. Unlike prior "MTV Unplugged" performances, which were entirely acoustic, Nirvana used electric amplification and guitar effects during the set. They were joined by rhythm guitarist Pat Smear and cellist Lori Goldston, plus members of Meat Puppets for some songs.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: "MTV Unplugged" was released after plans to release the performance as part of a live double-album compilation titled "Verse Chorus Verse", were abandoned. It was the first Nirvana release after the death of singer Kurt Cobain seven months prior. It debuted at number one on the US "Billboard" 200 and was certified eight-times multiplatinum by the RIAA in 2020. It won the Best Alternative Music Performance at the 1996 Grammy Awards, Nirvana's only Grammy Award win, and has since been ranked one of the greatest live albums of all time. The performance was released as a DVD in 2007.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: "MTV Unplugged" began airing on MTV in 1989, with artists performing their hits on acoustic instruments in intimate settings. Nirvana had been in negotiations to appear for some time; Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain finally accepted while touring with the Meat Puppets. Nirvana wanted to do something different from a typical "MTV Unplugged" performance; according to drummer Dave Grohl, "We'd seen the other "Unpluggeds" and didn't like many of them, because most bands would treat them like rock shows—play their hits like it was Madison Square Garden, except with acoustic guitars."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The group looked at Mark Lanegan's 1990 album "The Winding Sheet" for inspiration. Among the ideas the band members came up with included covering David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" and inviting members of the Meat Puppets to join them on stage. Still, the prospect of an entirely acoustic show reportedly made Cobain nervous.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: Nirvana rehearsed for two days, at SST Rehearsal Facility, in Weehawken, New Jersey. The rehearsals were tense and difficult, with the band running into problems performing various songs. During the sessions, Cobain disagreed with MTV about the performance. Producer Alex Coletti recalled that the network was unhappy with the lack of hit Nirvana songs, and with the choice of the Meat Puppets as guests, saying: "They wanted to hear the 'right' names - Eddie Vedder or Tori Amos or God knows who."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The day before filming, Cobain refused to play, but he appeared at the studio the following afternoon. Cobain was suffering from drug withdrawal and nervousness at the time; one observer said, "There was no joking, no smiles, no fun coming from him ... everyone was more than a little worried about his performance."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: Nirvana taped their performance on November 18, 1993, at Sony Studios in New York City. Cobain suggested the stage be decorated with stargazer lilies, black candles, and a crystal chandelier. Producer Alex Coletti asked, "You mean like a funeral?" Cobain replied, "Exactly. Like a funeral."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: Nirvana was joined by guitarist Pat Smear and cellist Lori Goldston, who had been touring with them. Despite the show's acoustic premise, Cobain insisted on running his acoustic guitar through his amplifier and effects pedals. Coletti built a fake box in front of the amplifier to disguise it as a monitor wedge. Coletti said, "It was Kurt's security blanket. He was used to hearing this guitar through his Fender. He wanted those effects. You can hear it on 'The Man Who Sold the World'. It's an acoustic guitar, but he's obviously going through an amp."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: Unlike many artists who appeared on the show, Nirvana filmed the entire performance of 14 songs in a single take. It included one song from their debut "Bleach" (1989), four from their second album "Nevermind" (1991), three from the recently released "In Utero", and six covers. As "In Utero's" "All Apologies" had not yet been released as a single, the only contemporary hit the band performed was the "Nevermind" single "Come as You Are".


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: Cris and Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets joined to perform three of their songs with Nirvana. "Kurt purposely wanted the Meat Puppets songs to be a struggle for him vocally," remarked Coletti. "So instead of finding a key he could sing them in comfortably, he chose to strain."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The set ended with a performance of the traditional "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", following the arrangement of blues musician Lead Belly, whom Cobain described before the song as "his favorite performer ever". After the band finished, Cobain argued with the show's producers, who wanted an encore. Cobain refused because he felt he could not top the performance of that song.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The Nirvana episode of "MTV Unplugged" was first broadcast in December 1993. It was 45 minutes long and omitted the songs "Something in the Way" and "Oh Me". After Cobain was found dead in April 1994, MTV aired the episode repeatedly. To meet demand for new Nirvana material and to counter bootlegging, in August 1994, DGC announced a double album, "Verse Chorus Verse", comprising live performances including the entire "MTV Unplugged" performance. However, the task of compiling the album was too emotionally difficult for Novoselic and Grohl, so the project was cancelled a week after the announcement; the group opted to release just the "Unplugged" performance. Scott Litt, who produced the performance, returned to produce the record. The performance was released on DVD in 2007.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: "MTV Unplugged in New York" was released on November 1, 1994. It debuted at number one on the "Billboard" 200 and sold 310,500 copies, the highest first-week sales of Nirvana's career. By March 1995, the album had outsold "In Utero" with 6.8 million copies sold.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The album received positive reviews from critics. Tom Hibbert of "Q" said that as an acoustic ensemble, Nirvana sounded "most moving, possessed of a ragged glory". "Rolling Stone" writer Barbara O'Dair found the record "stirring and occasionally brilliant" with "spare and gorgeous spots everywhere", highlighting the band's chemistry on "All Apologies" and Cobain's unaccompanied performance of "Pennyroyal Tea". Ben Thompson from "Mojo" felt that unlike most "unplugged" releases, the format's "colourless, generic aspect" and not seeing the actual performance benefits Nirvana's record because of how intense it seems in light of Cobain's death. In "Entertainment Weekly", David Browne felt unsettled listening to it: "Beyond inducing a sense of loss for Cobain himself, "Unplugged" elicits a feeling of musical loss, too: the delicacy and intimacy of these acoustic rearrangements hint at where Nirvana (or at least Cobain, who was said to be frustrated with the limitations of the band) could have gone."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: "MTV Unplugged in New York" was voted the fourth best album of the year in Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of prominent American critics published by "The Village Voice". Robert Christgau, the poll's supervisor, also ranked the album fourth in his own year-end list, deeming it a testament to Cobain's depth of feeling, "sincerity" as a vocalist, and distinction from other sensitive alternative rock types such as Eddie Vedder and Lou Barlow: "The vocal performance he evokes is John Lennon's on "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band". And he did it in one take."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: In a retrospective review for AllMusic, senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine said "MTV Unplugged in New York" was "fearlessly confessional", as it found Nirvana and Cobain "on the verge of discovering a new sound and style". Jason Mendelsohn from "PopMatters" believed its intimate folk rock quality was radical from Nirvana and Cobain, "as crass of a business move as it was" by their record label. In "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" (2004), journalist Charles M. Young called it Nirvana's "second masterpiece" after "Nevermind", and claimed that Cobain could have "revolutionized folk music the same way he had rock" because of his striking voice; he said his songs worked equally well with "a loud band bashing away behind you" or "with just an acoustic guitar". Maeve McDermott of "USA Today" called it "an album of transcendent folk rock that glimpsed what could’ve been the band’s next post-grunge era, had frontman Kurt Cobain survived long enough to see its musical leanings through."


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: In 2007, episode 6 of the BBC's "" called the band's performance of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" a surreal requiem for Cobain. A 2013 article by critic Andrew Wallace Chamings in "The Atlantic" noted the song as one of the greatest live performances of all time, writing:


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: According to Acclaimed Music, "MTV Unplugged in New York" is the 309th most ranked record on critics' all-time lists. In 2012, it was placed at number 313 on "Rolling Stone"s list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The 2020 edition of the list placed it at number 279. "Rolling Stone" also named it the 95th best album of the 1990s. The readers rated it the 8th best live album of all time. "NME" placed "MTV Unplugged in New York" at number 1 on their list of the "50 Greatest Live Albums". Kerrang listed it among the 11 best live albums of all time. In July 2014, "Guitar World" ranked "MTV Unplugged in New York" at number 30 in their "Superunknown: 50 Iconic Albums That Defined 1994" list. The same magazine listed it at number 4 on their list of "The 10 Best Live Albums You Must Hear". Far Out magazine also included it at number 4 on their list of the best 20 live albums of all time. In 2020, The Telegraph included it at number 13 on their list of the best live albums of all time. Also in 2020, "Planet Rock" magazine included the album in their list of "The 100 Greatest Live Albums Ever". The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: Reviewing the "MTV Unplugged in New York" DVD release in 2007, the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that it "deserves a place on the rock TV history shelf alongside the informal, sit-down section of Elvis Presley’s epic comeback special in 1968". In June 2020, the 1959 Martin D-18E guitar used by Cobain at the "Unplugged" concert was sold at Julien's Auctions for US$6 million to Peter Freedman of Røde Microphones, making it the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.


title: MTV Unplugged in New York

text: The "MTV Unplugged In New York" performance was released on DVD on November 20, 2007. The DVD release featured the entire taping, in 5.1 DTS surround sound, including the two songs ("Something in the Way" and "Oh Me") excluded from the broadcast version. Bonus features consisted of the original broadcast version of the performance, a 1999 MTV special titled "Bare Witness: Nirvana Unplugged" featuring the recollections of MTV producers and audience members, and five full-band songs taped during the pre-show rehearsal: "Come as You Are", "Polly", "Plateau", "Pennyroyal Tea", and "The Man Who Sold the World".


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward Taylor Pendleton Johnston (born September 23, 1982), known professionally as Pendleton Ward or simply Pen Ward, is an American animator, screenwriter, producer, director, and voice actor who has worked for Cartoon Network Studios, Frederator Studios, and Netflix Animation. He created the Emmy Award-winning series "Adventure Time", the Internet series "Bravest Warriors", and the adult animated interview series "The Midnight Gospel".


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward grew up in San Antonio, Texas and currently resides in Los Angeles. His mother Bettie (born 1947) is an artist.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward became interested in animation at an early age, inspired by his mother, who is an artist and worked with animators. He started drawing flipbooks in first grade. He often worked with his best friend, Alec "The Logdog" Coates, on short comic books. He graduated from North East School of the Arts in San Antonio.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward attended CalArts, where he became friends with J. G. Quintel and Alex Hirsch. They later worked on "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack" together. Eric Homan, vice president of Frederator Studios, offered Ward a job at the studios after watching one of his films at the annual CalArts animation screenings. Ward is a graduate of the school's Animation Program.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: In 2002–2003, Ward published a webcomic titled "Bueno the Bear". He later took down the comics because he thought they were "terrible". However, he retains the name "buenothebear" for his website and his handle on sites such as Twitter. Ward created a student film titled "Barrista", starring Bueno the Bear that was later released by Frederator Studios.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward continued to work on short animations for Frederator's "Random! Cartoons", which aired on the Nicktoons Network. There he worked with several people who would later join him on the "Adventure Time" series, including composer Casey James Basichis, Adam Muto and Niki Yang, many of whom had attended the California Institute of the Arts alongside Pen. His two shorts were "The Bravest Warriors" and the "Adventure Time" animated short. The "Adventure Time" short was made in 2006 and went on to become an internet phenomenon in 2007, with over a million views by November of that year. Ward initially pitched "Adventure Time" to Nickelodeon, but was rejected. It also took some time before Cartoon Network decided to pick it up.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: In 2007, Ward was hired to work on the first season of Cartoon Network's "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack" as a writer and storyboard artist. "Flapjack" was a storyboard-driven show, allowing the storyboard artists to write all the dialogue and draw all the action based on an outline assigned to them. The artists each worked in pairs, and during his time on "Flapjack", Ward was partnered up with Mike Roth (who became the supervising producer of "Regular Show") and later Alex Hirsch, who has since gone on to create the show "Gravity Falls" and develop "Fish Hooks" for Disney Channel. The experience inspired Pen to approach "Adventure Time" the same way once it was picked up as a series.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: In 2012, Frederator Studios developed "Bravest Warriors" and turned it into a web series for the relaunch of Cartoon Hangover, however Ward has little involvement in the series. Former "Adventure Time" lead designer Phil Rynda worked on the redesigns of the characters for the series. The series premiered during the fall of 2012 through Cartoon Hangover's YouTube channel alongside a comic book series of the same name by Boom! Studios.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward released a short animation in support of LA Game Space that November, a project intending to build a games-focused exhibition space in Los Angeles. Ward announced development of a short game with Bennett Foddy entitled "Cheque Please" intended to be part of "Experimental Game Pack 01", which the organisation released in 2013.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Sometime during the fifth season of "Adventure Time", Ward abruptly stepped down from running the show, explaining it was negatively affecting his "quality of life". In the October 2, 2014 edition of the "Rolling Stone" magazine, Ward stated "I quit because it was driving me nuts". However, he continued to work as one of the show's writers and storyboard artists until the end of season six, and still served as an executive producer up until the series finale. In an interview with Indiewire prior to the debut of season seven, head writer Kent Osborne noted that Ward had stopped writing episode outlines at the beginning of season 7 but still looked over them and provided input.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: In 2017, Ward was credited as "Story Consultant" for the current hard-cover adventure for the 5th Edition of "Dungeons & Dragons", 'Tomb of Annihilation'.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: In 2019, "Card of Darkness", an Apple Arcade exclusive game, was released with Ward serving as art director.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: On March 16, 2020, a trailer was released for an adult animated Netflix original show, "The Midnight Gospel", co-created by Ward and Duncan Trussell. The plot reads, "Clancy is a space-caster who uses a multiverse simulator to interview beings living in other worlds." Eight episodes of the show were released on Netflix on April 20, 2020.


title: Pendleton Ward

text: In 2021, Ward was credited with special thanks in the Double Fine-developed video game "Psychonauts 2". Allegedly, Ward created an animatic that expressed interest in having the opening of the game be about a pregnant Raz, this can be seen in game in the level "Hollis' Hot Streak" where players are made to shoot a pen at a sign that spells out "Ward".


title: Pendleton Ward

text: At the inaugural Children's and Family Emmy Awards ceremony held in 2022, Ward received an Emmy for "Outstanding Directing for an Animated Program" (alongside Ako Castuera, Luis Grane, Elizabeth Ito, and Bob Logan).


title: Pendleton Ward

text: Ward has previously stated that his friends, many of whom he works alongside on "Adventure Time", are his biggest drawing and animating influences. In another interview, he explained that he was influenced by shows like "The Ren & Stimpy Show", "Beavis and Butt-Head", and "The Simpsons". He would later go on to be a couch gag singer in the latter show's episode "Monty Burns' Fleeing Circus" in Season 28.


title: Devilman

text: "Devilman"s 39-episode anime series was developed by Toei Animation in 1972, while Nagai began the "Devilman" as a manga in Kodansha's "Weekly Shōnen Magazine", barely a month before the anime series started. The manga was published between June 1972 and June 1973, while multiple publishers have released it in collected volumes ("tankōbon"). Seven Seas Entertainment published the English translation of the original manga in two volumes in 2018. The series has since spawned numerous OVAs, manga, novels, films, and a sequel. Devilman and other characters from the series have shown up in cameo appearances numerous times in Go Nagai's other works. The most notable is Tomoharu Katsumata's 1973 feature film "Mazinger Z vs. Devilman", which features Devilman teaming up with Nagai's titular robot to fight Dr. Hell. In 2018, a remake titled "Devilman Crybaby" directed by Masaaki Yuasa was created showing an alternate more modern-like retelling of the manga.


title: Devilman

text: The manga has sold 50 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling manga series. Despite mixed reception in regards to whether or not the art was appealing, critics enjoyed Nagai's darker take on the superhero tropes mostly due to how violent the manga was and recommended the manga to most readers who are not sensitive to gore. The series' themes and Akira's design have influenced multiple other series such as "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "X".


title: Devilman

text: Akira Fudo is a shy teenager who lives in his friend Miki Makimura's house as his parents work abroad. One day, Akira's childhood friend Ryo Asuka reveals to him that the Earth is about to be invaded by demons, monstrous beings hibernating for centuries in the ice that are about to return to the surface. According to Ryo, demons have lived on Earth before the appearance of man, and now they want to claim possession of it. The only way to defeat them is to take control of the powers of the demons themselves to fight them on equal terms. Ryo then involves his friend in a ritual called the Black Sabbath, an event where numerous demons plan to merge with humans to infiltrate society. During the Black Sabbath, Akira merges with Amon, a demon warrior both idolised and feared among his kind for his incredible strength. However, instead of Amon holding control over Akira, the latter's pure soul triumphed over that of Amon, bringing the demon to heel and creating Devilman.


title: Devilman

text: After fighting his way out of the Black Sabbath, Akira uses his demon persona to battle multiple enemies hidden in society. However, Akira starts to question his own methods after he encounters Sirene and Kaim, two demons whose relationship to one another challenged Akira's prior perception of all demons being immoral, and the cruel Jinmen, a turtle-like demon who contained the still-living souls of his human victims on his shell, forcing Akira to destroy them in order to defeat the demon. A large detachment of demons led by the demon Lord Zennon invades Tokyo, alerting the population of the world to the existence of demons. Akira learns that other humans are becoming Devilmen, and resolves to contact them to form a team dedicated to protecting humankind from the demons. However, during a TV broadcast, Ryo confirms that demons exist, but claims that Akira and the Devilmen are also dangerous. This panic leads to humans turning on each other across the world.


title: Devilman

text: Ryo journeys back to the mansion where he informed Akira of the world of the demons, and finds an album about his life which states he died years ago in a car accident. During his ensuing existential crisis, he is met by a group of demons led by the demoness Psycho Jenny, who informs him of the reality of his identity. Ryo is actually Satan, a fallen angel who was sealed by God with the demons for sympathising with them, who God sought to exterminate. As part of Satan's plan to lead an all-out war on humanity, he had Psycho Jenny erase his memories and replace them with those of Ryo Asuka until the time when he was ready to begin the war. Akira is devastated when humans kill Miki and her family for being associated with him. Akira confronts Ryo to get revenge, and learns the truth of his former friend's identity. Several years pass, and all humans - save for the Devilmen recruited by Akira - are extinct. On the day of the final battle, Xenon confronts Satan with the question as to why he wanted Akira to survive by becoming a Devilman, when this would conflict with his plans to leave Earth to the demons. Xenon then asks him if the reason for this is because he loved Akira and wanted to protect him, a statement which Satan implies to be true. The two forces collide, and the Devilmen are wiped out. In the midst of the confrontation, Akira and Satan fight each other, but Satan unknowingly kills Akira by bisecting him with his attacks. As Satan reflects on the events, then comes to realise what he has done, God’s angels descend upon the Earth.


title: Devilman

text: One of the Demon Tribe's strongest warriors, Devilman is sent to lead a full-scale invasion of the human world by Zennon. After he ambushes and kills Akira and his father in the Himalayas, not far from the base of operations of the Demon Tribe, he selects Akira as his host, restoring him to life, but giving him a wild and unpredictable streak. However, after returning to Japan, Akira encounters and falls in love with Miki Makimura, and Devilman is tamed by his desire to protect her. Devilman resolves to defect from his orders, and from then on fights a slew of opponents sent by Zennon and his Demon Generals.


title: Devilman

text: "Devilman" evolved from Go Nagai's previous manga, "Demon Lord Dante", after Toei Animation approached Nagai about turning "Dante" into a television series. The producers wanted certain elements toned down, and a more human-like anti-hero created. "Devilman" was born as a result of this. Devilman's outfit seems be inspired by a villain from the 1972 "Gekko Kamen" anime. Go Nagai worked on the anime's scenario along with renowned screenwriter and science-fiction novelist Masaki Tsuji, who wrote the scripts for 35 of the TV series' 39 episodes. Along with the television series, "Devilman" was also produced as a serialized manga in "Weekly Shōnen Magazine" beginning in 1972. Go Nagai designed the manga to be more horror-like and mature than the anime version. When developing the "Devilman" manga, Nagai was told by his editor to write an alternative take of the anime aimed towards a more mature audience.


title: Devilman

text: Nagai designed "Devilman" as an anti-war work; the fusion of humans and demons is an analogy for the draft, and Miki's violent death symbolizes the death of peace. "There is no justice in war, any war," wrote Nagai, "nor is there any justification for human beings killing one another. "Devilman" carries a message of warning, as we step toward a bright future."


title: Devilman

text: In further exploring themes of war, Nagai stated that he wrote this manga to alert the world in regards of the narrative's chaos possibly happening in the real world. He further stated that despite Satan's actions in the manga, he was not a stereotypical villain as Nagai believes that God would fit more into this category as a result for the actions he committed against demons years before the series' start.


title: Devilman

text: The manga was originally published by Kodansha from , to , in "Weekly Shōnen Magazine". The series has been published in "tankōbon" format several times, most of them by Kodansha. Starting with the 1987 publishing, most Kodansha editions include "Shin Devilman", which originally was not meant to be included in the canon of the original series, as a part of the volumes.<ref name="Shin Devilman - d/visual"></ref> The manga has been translated into English in a series of five bilingual manga volumes published by Kodansha.


title: Devilman

text: The manga has also been published along with "Cutie Honey" in the magazine published by JIVE during 2004 in order to take advantage of the release of the live-action films of both series.


title: Devilman

text: Seven Seas Entertainment published the English translation of the original manga in two volumes in 2018, and of "Devilman G" and "Devilman VS. Hades" in 2017 and 2018.