Even here on Scrappyland, it feels impudent to overly fixate on Cora Sue Collins’ connection to Scrappy. The former child star, who died on Sunday at 98, had a remarkable career in the 1930s and early 1940s. She played the little-girl version of characters played by Garbo and Norma Shearer and the daughter of Claudette Colbert in one movie and William Powell and Myrna Loy in another. After making more than 40 films starting at age five, she gave it all up at 18 and had a quiet, private life thereafter, though in recent years she enjoyed a bit of a rediscovery and clearly took pleasure in reminiscing about her Hollywood career.
Still, this is Scrappyland, and so I mark Collins’ passing here for a reason so minor it didn’t make it into any of her obits as far as I know. In 1936, she appeared in a Columbia drama about test pilots, The Devil’s Squadron. (She didn’t play a test pilot—she played a little girl named Mary.) The studio was quick to commandeer its child stars in service to promotion of Scrappy. And so it got Cora Sue to pose for photos with several then-current Scrappy products.
As I’ve added these publicity stills to the Scrappyland collection over the years, I’ve shared them in these posts:
- ”The Great Cora Sue Collins Mystery” (2005)
- ”More Kid Stars and Scrappy” (2005)
- ”All Hail Cora Sue Collins” (2015)
- “Scrappy Tie-Ups Galore” (2019)
That’s a lot of material to squeeze out of a handful of photos apparently taken in one day—Cora Sue is wearing the same dress in all of them—about 89 years ago.
With Scrappy’s centennial fast approaching—he turns 100 in July 2031—we long ago lost most of the people who were involved with producing his cartoons when they were adults. Even Bobby Winckler, who was a boy when he voiced Scrappy, died more than 35 years ago. Edith Fellows, who was a Columbia contract player as a child and may have posed for more photos with Scrappy merchandise than anyone else, passed away in 2011. A couple of other kid stars whose photos I’ve posted, Dickie Walters and Jackie Moran, are also deceased.
It’s possible—likely, even—that Cora Sue Collins was the very last person alive with a professional Scrappy affiliation dating from when Columbia was still making Scrappy cartoons. And now she’s gone. Whether it mattered to her—whether she even remembered it—I’m not sure. But I was very glad that at least one link to the Golden Age of Scrappy was still with us well into the 21st century. It’s sad to think those days are over. Godspeed, Cora Sue.
I probably asked this one before: was Bobby Winckler, related to George Winkler, who was the production manager for Charles Mintz on the Scrappy cartoons? Sad to hear about Cora Sue Collins, may she rest in peace.
Hi, Mark. I don’t know of any relationship between Bobby and the Winklers whose family Charles Mintz married into. It seems like he was a well-established child actor well before voicing Scrappy, so it may be a coincidence. He does seem to have sometimes spelled his name “Winkler,” though.
I may dig into Ancestry.com to see if there’s any information that might suggest that Bobby and George/Margaret were related.