For years, I’ve known about the Scrappy lamp—a fine little plastic table lamp with color decals of Scrappy, Yippy, Margy, and Oopy on its shade. There are two of them in the Scrappyland archive, and at least one of them still works, though I wouldn’t recommend leaving a 1930s electrical device plugged in except under constant supervision. What I didn’t know was the backstory behind the lamp—including the fact that it was a product of what might have been the largest company ever to hitch its merchandising wagon to Scrappy
Then Scrappy merchant extraordinaire David Welch alerted me to something he was selling on eBay: ads from a 1930s magazine for the premium industry. They were from General Electric, and touted lamps made of a Bakelite-like GE plastic called Textolite. And they spotlighted … the Scrappy lamp.
Did that mean that the lamp was designed to be given away? Well, it was. Or at least I found a 1940 article about a bowling tournament in Meriden, Connecticut where Scrappy lamps seem to have been doled out as last-place prizes. I hope the recipients were pleased nonetheless.
That’s not to say that the Scrappy lamp was manufactured purely for giveaway purposes. Here it is being sold for a buck, which was real money back then—about $20 in 2021 dollars.
And here it is marked down to the irresistible price of fifty cents.
Whatever the price or lack thereof, the Scrappy lamp remains pleasing. GE’s ad copy about Textolite’s durable nature may help explain why quite a few of the lamps have survived in nice shape; at any given time, you can probably find one or more on eBay, should this post leave you coveting one.
If you haven’t seen the lamp in person, here’s a closer look courtesy of photos from a 2017 auction.
That particular Scrappy lamp came with a bonus I’d never seen until I put together this post: the original box, with elaborate artwork depicting Scrappy (praying, with a picture of Margy on his wall) and Margy (reading, with a picture of Oopy on the wall). Yippy somehow made it into both scenes. And so did the Scrappy lamp.
I don’t remember ever having heard of Textolite before, and indeed had forgotten that GE was ever in the plastics business. Then I remembered that Jack Welch, who eventually became the company’s fabulously successful (though in recent years reputationally damaged) CEO, got his start in the plastics division in Pittsfield, Mass, the address mentioned in the Scrappy lamp ad. In his memoir Jack: Straight From the Gut he even mentions his difficulty selling Textolite in the 1960s, though by that time GE was applying the brand to its lackluster answer to Formica.
Like J.C. Penney—which also embraced Scrappy in the 1930s—GE is still with us, but a shadow of its once-mighty self. The company (which sold its plastics business in 2007) recently announced plans to split itself into three parts, ending its long run as as one of the U.S.’s most iconic industrial giants. It just goes to show: Ending a relationship with Scrappy is always bad luck, even if it takes seventy or eighty years to catch up with you.
I may be the proprietor of the National Scrappy Gallery, but I’m not the only serious Scrappy collector out there. I’ve known that for a long time, if only because I’ve occasionally been outbid at online auctions by one or more competitors with seemingly limitless budgets for Scrappyana.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen someone else’s extensive Scrappy collection though. Until just recently, that is, when Doug Nichols sent me photos of his.
Doug currently lives in the Bay Area–which, since it’s also my home, may well be the epicenter of Scrappy collecting in the U.S. But he’s getting ready to move to Portland, and has decided to downsize.
I can’t imagine living a Scrappy-less life myself, but Doug’s loss may be someone else’s gain. He’s selling his all his Scrappy goodies, and hopes to do so in one fabulous lot: “Any reasonable offer accepted! Likely any unreasonable offer! They need a new home.”
What’s up for sale includes nearly everything in these photos:
As you can see, the Nichols Collection includes the Scrappy pull toy (in variants both with and without Margy), two Scrappy dolls (one in a possibly homemade knit outfit), Scrappy Christmas lights, the wonderfully-boxed Scrappy modeling clay, Scrappy home movies, multiple copies of the Scrappy Big Little Book, several Scrappy banks, and more. Having spent close to 20 years assembling my own Scrappy collection, I know how tough it is to find some of this stuff. Like Doug, I hope there’s someone out there who wants all of it (except for a couple of items which I didn’t have and Doug was nice enough to offer to me).
If you covet these prize examples of the Scrappy Franchise Department‘s work, drop Doug a line. As with Patek Philippe watches, you never actually own Scrappy collectibles–you merely take care of them for future generations. But it would be nice to find someone to safeguard these ones for Scrappy fans yet unborn.
Every so often, I post examples of what I think of as Scrappy Mystery Art–pieces whose origins I can’t readily identify. When Debra Brossack bought an apparent Scrappy item at an estate sale, she emailed me to ask about it–and while I’m sorry I couldn’t tell her much, I’m glad she shared it.
Here’s Debra’s find…
That’s two pieces of art, which she reports seem to be painted on clipboards, connected by a piece of string. They depict the classic yanking-out-a-tooth-via-doornob gag. And the kid supervising the yanking certainly looks like Scrappy as he appeared in his later cartoons, when his proportions got a tad more realistic and his design evolved in what the Mintz studio probably thought was a cuter direction. (I suspect that if you’re reading this, you prefer the earlier, rubber hose-y Scrappy, as I do.)
I asked Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden, who knows about this kind of stuff, if he could shed any light on this artifact. He said that he has several examples of connected-frame Americana of this sort, and isn’t sure if they were sold at tourist traps or were home projects. Either explanation might explain the crudity of Debra’s art, which looks like someone’s unpolished rendition of what might have been a slicker pose by a Mintz artiste.
If you know more about this curiosity–or just want to idly speculate about its provenance–I’d love to hear from you.
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.
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.
Back in 2012, I wrote about a 1935 Scrappy doll and included a wonderful photograph of the Three Stooges posing with an example of it. As I noted, the Stooges’ version differed from the one in the Scrappyland collection in one obvious way: theirs seemed to have fabric hands rather than ones made of the same hard, composite material as the doll’s head and feet. I wondered at the time whether the doll in the photo was a prototype.
Well, over on eBay, someone’s selling two Scrappy dolls as a lot, and they’re nearly identical to each other. Except…well, examine this photo for yourself:
Judging from the frequency with which it turns up on eBay, this Scrappy doll was reasonably popular. But that left-hand Scrappy is the first I’ve seen with the cloth mitts from the Stooge photo, and apparent proof that such a version got out in the wild. No collection of Scrappy dolls is truly complete without one.
Have I ever mentioned that Scrappyana is the best imaginable subject to pursue as a collector? On one hand, it’s small enough in scope that it’s possible to be a completist. On the other, it’s full of surprises, since it’s not so well documented that you know exactly what’s out there to collect.
In the case of Scrappy wrappers for Runkel Bros. chocolate, I knew that they existed–in fact, I’d written about them–but wasn’t sure I’d ever get my hands on any examples. After all, how much packaging for 1930s candy has survived for eighty years? But I’m now the proud owner of the circa-1935 wrapper you see above–which, since it has a Scrappy drawing and “jingle” on its flipside, was designed to be collected. (There were apparently at least 113 in the series.)
The highpoint of Scrappy’s association with the Runkel people was Scrappy’s Own Magazine, which was sponsored by the chocolatier and apparently published in late 1935. Here’s a page from the publication, showing some Scrappy chocolate and explaining that his relationship with Runkel came about because he tried their products and was impressed.
I didn’t know much about Runkel Bros., so I Googled around and found a site run by a contemporary Runkel. He seems to say both that the company folded in 1936 and that it was acquired by Nestle in 1982. So take your choice–being associated with Scrappy either almost immediately drove it out of business, or led to decades of success and the attention of one of the biggest names in chocolate.
In either case, eBay has some nice examples of other Runkel Bros. packaging–the kind that doesn’t have Scrappy on it. Here’s some Runkel Liberty cocoa, which sure looks more patriotic than Swiss Miss.
Confession time: I know very little about the voices in Scrappy cartoons. Actually, come to think about it, about the only thing I’ve known–and only because voice maven Keith Scott told me–is that Robert “Bobby” Winckler (1927-1989) was Scrappy’s voice in some shorts.
But now I know at least a tiny bit more. Jerry Beck alerted me to the existence of a Robert “Bobby” Winckler fan group on Facebook–apparently run by his son, William Winckler–and it has some great photos and a couple of items which reference his Scrappy work.
I’ve borrowed a few images from the Bobby Winckler Facebook page and elsewhere for this post.
Here’s Bobby Winckler as a child actor on a Hollywood backlot, circa 1933. He made more than 80 live-action films, including a number of Our Gang shorts, Knute Rockne All American, and Preston Sturges’ iconic Sullivan’s Travels, and was also busy on the radio (where he played W.C. Fields’ son, among other roles).
Here he is (center) serving in WWII with two friends on St. Patrick’s Day 1945 in Manila.
Winckler eventually became a successful Hollywood lawyer, counting Spanky McFarland, Adam West, and Billy Barty among his clients. In 1980, he ran as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. Congress representing California’s 23rd district.
He lost the race–but here he is, presumably in the 1980s, with his Knute Rockne costar Dutch Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Now for the Scrappy stuff. Here’s a Hollywood Radio Artists’ Directory listing which mentions his work in the series. It uses a variant spelling of his last name; as far as I know, he was not related to Charles Mintz’s wife, the former Margaret Winkler.
And this is a sample of the script for The City Slicker (1938), one of the films in which Winckler voiced Scrappy.
And here’s The City Slicker itself–which I’m afraid features a last-gasp version of Scrappy who’s been unappealingly redesigned and who, really, has few redeeming qualities of any sort, aside from his voice.
According to online sources, Bobby Winckler also voiced Hans and Fritz in MGM’s Captain and the Kids cartoons and Petey Parrot in the Warner Bros. cartoon I Wanna Be a Sailor (1937), and was the field mouse in Bambi. Voice acting was a sideline for him, but a long-standing one: In the 1980s, he performed in his son William’s English-language dub of Japan’s Tekkaman animated series.
That’s all I have to tell you about Robert “Bobby” Winckler. But here’s another Scrappy voice tidbit: Andrew Leal tells me that Hollywood veteran Leone Ledoux–who was an adult, and female–also voiced the character. Stay tuned for any information on her which I can cobble together.
It’s possible that there’s stuff relating to Scrappy that’s so mundane that it isn’t worthy of attention at Scrappyland. Then again, maybe not.
Jerry Beck alerted me to these two bills which Columbia sent out to an L.A. theater in 1937–both referencing Scrappy–and I’m glad I was able to acquire them and share them with you here.
Here’s a bill which–with a little IMDB research–lets us deduce that Columbia charged $4 rental for a live-action two-reeler, $3 for a color cartoon, and $2 for a black-and-white cartoon. The paperwork was sent to Los Angeles’s Muse Theater on May 26, 1937, and seems to be for the following shorts:
“Caught Act” is Caught in the Act, an Andy Clyde short released on March 5, 1936.
Li’l Ainjil is a rather famous Mintz Krazy Kat, as Mintz Krazy Kats go–the only one done in an approximation of George Herriman’s style. It was released on March 19, 1936.
Movie Maniacs is a Three Stooges released on February 20, 1936.
“Dr. Bluebird” is Doctor Bluebird…a Scrappy cartoon! One of the few color ones, a Color Rhapsody released on February 5, 1936.
“Share Wealth” is Share the Wealth, another Andy Clyde film, released on March 16, 1936.
“Snobbery” is surely Highway Snobbery, a Krazy cartoon released on August 9, 1936.
I’m assuming “Blunders” is “Midnight Blunders, a live-action Columbia short which IMDB describes as “frankly racist.” It was released on April 21, 1936.
Football Bugs is a Color Rhapsody released on April 29, 1936. I haven’t seen it, but I presume it involves bugs who play football.
Half Shot Shooters was another Stooges short, released on April 30.
Unless you can convince me otherwise, I shall work under the assumption that “Go Getters” is Gold Getters, a Scrappy released on March 1, 1935. If you’ve seen it, you will remember the maniacally infectious title song.
Note that all these cartoons were quite old by the time the Muse showed them. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about film distribution in the 1930s than me can explain whether there’s anything interesting about that fact.
Here’s another bill sent to the Muse a day later. This one is demanding 15 cents for a two-column ad for a Scrappy cartoon. (Boy, I’d love to track down the ad itself.)
Bonus ephemera: From the Huntington Library’s collection, here’s a 1950s photo of the Muse Theater (towards the left). It had already closed and was scheduled to be demolished.
I wonder: How many theaters which showed Scrappy cartoons are still extant? Not too many, I assume, though Radio City Music Hall apparently did and is still very much with us.
