Scrappyland is 15

On January 21, 2005 at 9:00am San Francisco time, I sent an email to a few animation-loving friends:

Subject: Scrappyland is live

At long last, the greatest obscure cartoon character of all time has a home on the Web:  Scrappyland is up and running. 

Tell your friends–at least if they’re Scrappy fans! 

— Harry

That makes today the 15th anniversary of this site. (It did have a preview mode, with a smidge of content, that lasted through much of 2004.) I don’t remember wondering what sort of future the site would have when I was launching it. But I do know that 2005 Harry would be pleased to know that 2020 Harry was still at it.

Why has writing for this site been such a rewarding experience? Well, it’s rare to get the opportunity to create the definitive resource on anything. (I hope you won’t think me full of myself for considering Scrappyland to be such a resource.) There are other folks who write about Scrappy from time to time—hello, Paul, Steve, and Uncle John—but nobody else would be silly enough to spend so much time on the topic. (Even my own silliness flagged from mid-2005 through mid-2012, a stretch when I performed no meaningful updates to the site—but then I converted it into a blog and have since published over a hundred posts.)

It’s nice knowing that if people Google for Scrappy, the odds are high they’ll end up here. I can usually answer their questions, and some of the people who land here have stuff of their own to share. I find it therapeutic, after spending my days thinking about the present and future of technology, to devote some of my brain cells to cartoons that are almost ninety years old. I still get a little tingle from every new Scrappy discovery.

The challenge with a site like Scrappyland is that the day might arrive when I have nothing left to say—either because I’ve lost the urge or because I’ve covered every possible aspect of the subject. I’m pretty sure my interest won’t flag anytime soon. And even if all I do is write up stuff that’s still in my queue of Scrappy learnings, I’ll have enough material for the next several years.

Thank you for reading, and please stick around for more. Scrappyland has already had a longer run than Scrappy himself did as a cartoon star, so there’s no reason this can’t go on indefinitely.