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It’s been nearly five years since I revamped Scrappyland into a blog. In that time, I’ve written nearly a hundred posts. But I’ve never made it that easy to look back at all those items, which now greatly outnumber the articles from the site’s early incarnation. To help rectify that, here are links to all the posts, all on one page. (You can also reach it from the “Blog Archive” link to the left.) You’ve been very patient during the many months since I last ran a chunk of the 1930s Scrappy newspaper strip. (If you’re just joining us, here are chunk one and chunk two.) To recap what this thing is: In 1937 or thereabouts, Will Eisner and Jerry Iger tried to sell a Scrappy strip to newspapers. I know of no evidence that it ever ran in any U.S. papers. But it did show up in a comic book called Wags in Australia and the U.K., in another called Bilboquet in France, and–eventually–as a repurposed pseudo-Scrappy named Shorty Shortcake in Wonder Comics. I still don’t know who wrote and drew this. The most logical candidates are Eisner, Iger, and Bob Kane, who did cartoony stuff for them. But I haven’t seen any work by any of them that looks much like this strip. (More on this soon.) Whoever did it, it’s unpolished but (I think) surprisingly entertaining. Even though it doesn’t have much to do with the animated cartoons it’s based on. Anyhow, here you go. (Click on the strips to read them at a larger size.) Our silly (but, um, newly relevant) plotline involves crime along the Mexican border. The characters include Scrappy, Margy, a kleptomaniac tycoon named Mr. De Welth, and a bandito called Tiny.
More to come! I’ll be sorry when I run out of these.
I’ve been meaning to post the above image for a while now. It was brought to my attention by wondrous cartoonist/friend of Scrappy Milton Knight, and shows Scrappy on a battlefield, wearing a Japanese army helmet, with a Japanese flag and a tank in the background. Or at least that sure is what it seems to depict. I did a quadruple take when I saw Milton share the picture on Facebook, and started asking myself questions. Was that definitely Scrappy? Was he even known in Japan? Was this some sort of piece of Axis propaganda? (The Little Theatre, the final Scrappy cartoon, was released in February 1941, depriving the character of the chance of fighting on our side.) Milton told me that he didn’t know anything about the art, and found it on Pinterest. That led me to do a little research…and I found the following images, also on Pinterest.
Maybe these aren’t of Scrappy. But it doesn’t seem like a crazy supposition that whoever drew them could have seen Scrappy and drawn inspiration from the character. (According to the Pinterest postings, these are 1930s postcards, which places them in the Scrappy era.) Way back when I started Scrappyland, someone who visited the site called Scrappy “the ungodly love-child of Mickey Mouse and Astro Boy.” That’s not a bad gut reaction, and as it indicates, Scrappy looks rather like a proto-anime character. Seeing these 1930s Japanese drawings led me to wonder: Is it possible that anime characters look like Scrappy because they’re drawn in a style directly influenced by Scrappy? Having wondered that, I next wondered whether Osamu Tezuka, Japan’s comics and animation genius and the creator of Tetsuwan Atomu (aka Astro Boy) was a Scrappy fan. That led me to a fascinating 2012 Comics Journal article by Ryan Holmberg about Tezuka’s American influences. As Holmberg recounts, the artist frequently spoke about his love of American cartooning, in the form of Disney animation, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Dick Tracy, and other creations. Holmberg’s piece doesn’t mention Scrappy. But it does discuss an early (1946) Tezuka character, Little Ma. Here are some images of him from the Holmberg article.
And here’s Pete, a character from New Treasure Island (1947), a seminal Tezuka comic, which Holmberg discusses in another article that argues that it was influenced by Disney comics by Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson.
Based on this imagery, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Tezuka may have known of Scrappy, and the character may have influenced his early work, as did Disney comics. (D. Wolfe, a Holmberg commenter, said the same thing.) Nothing odd about Tezuka not mentioning Scrappy in interviews–at the time of Tezuka’s death in 1989, the character was even more forgotten than he is now. Exactly what form Tezuka might have seen Scrappy in, I don’t know. He spoke of his father’s home-movie projector, and perhaps some Scrappy reels somehow made their way from the U.S. to Japan. But if Tezuka was a Scrappy fan, then Scrappy isn’t the love child of Mickey Mouse and Atom Boy; Atom Boy is the love child of Scrappy and Mickey Mouse. Any theories? Am I hallucinating?
Over at his wonderful Tralfaz blog, Don Yowp is celebrating Christmas cartoons. He didn’t forget Scrappy–whose 1934 short Holiday Land was the first Color Rhapsody cartoon and an Oscar nominee. (Note from the ad above that Columbia promoted it as a Thanksgiving release–but Santa is part of the festivities.) This isn’t a great Scrappy cartoon–it’s more interested in being a lush, heartwarming pseudo-Silly Symphony extravaganza than a laugh riot–but is worth your time. You can watch it here after you’ve read Yowp. And somewhere in there, you should find time to enjoy Steve Stanchfield’s 2014 piece on the short. Scrappy holidays to you!
Possibly the single best thing about running Scrappyland is that when people decide to research Scrappy on the web, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they will find their way here–even if they start out wholly ignorant of him, as so many people regrettably are. That was the case with Brandon Manzione, who bought a photo of Sally O’Neil, an actress who appeared in silent films and early talkies, and wondered why she was brandishing a carton of candy bars emblazoned with SCRAPPY logos. He Googled around, found my writings on Scrappy candy, and dropped me a note. I can’t blame Brandon for not having heard of Scrappy; I was unfamiliar with Sally O’Neil until I got his email. I was pretty sure why she would pose with Scrappy bars, though, and a quick visit to IMDB confirmed my hunch. Runkel Bros.’ Scrappy candy dated from 1935–it was promoted to a fare-thee-well in Scrappy’s Own Magazine that year–and I assumed that O’Neil made a Columbia film at that time and that the studio pressed her into service to shill for Scrappy, as it was wont to do. Yup: O’Neil costarred with Victor Jory in a 1935 Columbia release, Too Tough to Kill, about a plot to blow up a tunnel out west. She played a newspaper reporter, and I’m sorry to report that the Independent Exhibitors’ Film Bulletin dismissed the movie as “no better than passable for the city dumps and cheap rural houses.” I’m not even sure what a “city dump” is in this case, but it can’t be good.
Even in 1935, O’Neil (1908-1968) was winding down her career. (She made only one more film after Too Tough to Kill.) Born Virginia Louise Noonan, she worked in Vaudeville as “Chotsie” Noonan–a stage name I wish she’d hung onto–before entering the movie business. Some of her silent features, including Don’t, Mike, and The Auction Block, are sadly presumed to be lost; she was also in Buster Keaton’s 1926 feature Battling Butler, which survives, and which I may have seen decades ago, as “the mountain girl.” In the sound era, she starred in 1931’s The Brat, which I assume must be interesting if only because of the fact that it was directed by John Ford.
Sally’s star is said to have fallen in the talkie era because of her thick New Jersey accent and stage fright. A 1932 movie-fan magazine I ran across told a less conventional tale of career woe: Her beloved brother “Hutch” was convicted (perhaps unjustly) of stealing a couple of fur coats that belonged to bandleader Ted Lewis. He was sentenced to seven years in California’s Folsom State Prison, which sounds excessive even if he was guilty; Sally supposedly took off two years to be with the poor guy and spent all her money to defend him.
By the time frame of Too Tough to Kill, O’Neil may have been considered to have become a bit of a has-been: One magazine article about her carried the headline “I Wonder What’s Become of Sally.” But at least Columbia still thought she was enough of a celeb to help move Scrappy candy, which helps to make up for the fact that it misspelled her last name on the photo in which she did so. And hey, at around the same time, the Safe-Kurl people of Cincinnati, Ohio, apparently paid her–handsomely, I hope–to endorse their miracle electric hair waver. I just wish she looked happier in the ad…
If there were a patron saint of Scrappy research, it would probably be Paul Etcheverry. Thirty-five years ago he and Will Friedwald wrote the seminal Scrappy filmography. And now, at this “Way Too Damn Lazy to Write a Blog” blog, he’s published part one of an article on the Mintz studio, with plenty of art, embedded cartoons, and, most importantly, wisdom. Go read. No particular reason for this post other than that I own small figures of two cartoon characters who worked for Charles Mintz–and they seem to enjoy hanging out together.
Hey, remember when Frank Miller rebooted the Scrappy franchise with the grim, dystopian Dark Scamp? Well..me neither. But Ed Loera does. He also remembers Siegel and Shuster’s Scrappy, George Lucas’s Scrappy, and others. And he pays tribute to them in these nifty pieces of artwork, which he gave me permission to reproduce:
Ed says that he created these because he “wanted to pay tribute to Scrappyland in his own way,” and that the Cappy America piece is a work in progress. He features his art and sells prints, Scrappy-themed and otherwise, at his Wondrousworx website. Over on Facebook, Jerry Beck alerted me to the existence of a poster designed by Chip Kidd that features blown-up partial images of Oopy and Yippy. My jaw dropped when I saw it, and I immediately wondered if it was a harbinger of some imminent Great Scrappy Revival. It turns out that it was produced a dozen years ago, for the 2004 Miami Book Fair. And here it is:
I only had to glance at it for a millisecond to recognize the source imagery that Kidd mined:
That’s the legendary Scrappy Puppet Theater, and Kidd clearly zoomed in on Oopy and Yippy’s heads, then made minor adjustments such as filling in Oopy’s cowlick, which is normally–and oddly–the same color as his skin. (Oopy with a filled-in cowlick looks a lot like Scrappy, which makes sense.) A few questions: Do I know why Kidd and/or the fair thought depicting Oopy and Yippy was a relevant way to celebrate books? No, especially since the characters’ only appearances in print were in a few kids’ tomes such as a Big Little Book about 80 years ago. Did Kidd credit Mintz or Columbia, or otherwise acknowledge that his work was a Roy Lichtenstein-esque borrowing of existing art? Not that I can see, though perhaps it’s there in type too small to read. If he didn’t, I think that’s a shame, especially since hardly anybody attending a book fair in 2004 would know. Would I hang the poster on my wall? Maybe, if I could find a copy for sale. You’re waited more than long enough for another installment of the Scrappy newspaper comic strip, which may never have appeared in an actual newspaper, but did run in Wags, a comic weekly published in Australia and the UK. (Here, in case you missed them, are the first six strips.) The Scrappy strip was produced by Eisner & Iger Associates. I’m still not the least bit sure which artist or artists in its employ worked on it–more thoughts on that in a future post–but I find that the strip, while a bit crude, is surprisingly engaging. These strips introduce Mr. De Welth, the kleptomaniac millionaire, who’s a genuinely entertaining character. And whoever is drawing this seems to be having fun. Bottom line: I think that the odds are that the persons or persons responsible for this work did other comics, too, and we’ll be able to figure out who deserves the credit. I find one panel in this sequence especially tantalizing:
With its dramatic staging, that’s either a one-panel contribution by someone other than the person who drew the rest of Scrappy, or proof that the Scrappy artist also did stuff other than a silly strip drawn in a very rough approximation of a third-tier animation studio’s style. Could it be Lou Fine? Mort Meskin? Will Eisner himself? Anyhow, here’s more Scrappy for you. Stay tuned for further adventures.
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