Yup. I always use Bernard in my playthroughs of Maniac Mansion. He’s so useful. And according to Day of the Tentacle, he was canonically part of the team that rescued Sandy. Although, you can beat the game with any set of kids, it’s just a bit easier with Bernard.

There’s a fan-made remake if you want something free with the simplified controls of Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle and the graphical improvements that Zak McCracken got when they ported it to the FM-TOWNS Marty.

Yeah. It slipped past the censors for the U.S. release while they were busy butchering a lot of other, racy jokes.

It’s both a matter of taste and a matter of era.

Back when Maniac Mansion was released, it was normal for a point-and-click game to have sort of a play-by-email sort of pace where you often had to sleep on a puzzle before the solution would come to you.

…and if anyone wants to play Zak McCracken, it’s been re-released DRM-free on GOG.com for $6 US and you get both the higher-res V2 version of the EGA release that everyone probably knows and the VGA-quality port with CD-audio ambient sound made for the Japan-only FM-TOWNS Marty.

Yeah. It was something that slipped past the censors when they were neutering the naughty jokes. (citation)

The Edisons (Dr. Fred, Weird Ed, etc.) originally had flesh-tone skin in the earlier versions but it was changed for later versions like the NES port and the high-res re-release for PC.

I have yet to find an explanation for it.