|
|
Edith Fellows, Cora Sue Collins, Jackie Moran, and Dickie Walters. All were Columbia child stars, and all were called into service to help promote Scrappy. We’ve brought you photographs of the kids with Scrappy merch several times over the years–here, here, and here. And at long last, I’ve scared up some more of these stills.
Here’s Edith Fellows with a bunch of Scrappy balloons–a piece of Scrappyana which I’ve never seen before.
And here she is wearing a Scrappy Thrift Club pin and brandishing her Scrappy bank and Scrappy Thrift Club membership card.
This is Scrappyland’s own Scrappy Thrift Club card, whose original owner apparently decided to make an unfortunate joke when filling it out.
Here’s the bank itself (ours is in a darker shade than Edith’s).
And here’s the Scrappy pin she’s wearing.
Here are Edith and Jackie Moran, her costar in a 1936 Columbia feature titled And So They Were Married, wearing snappy Scrappy cloisonne pins.
Lastly, here’s an extreme close-up of the pin itself, from the Scrappyland collection. (It’s nicely done, with a surprisingly posh feel–maybe the closest thing I’ve seen to a Scrappy luxury item.)
That photo of Edith and Jackie was apparently taken in April 1936. I’m not sure when the two of Edith alone were, although the box the Scrappy bank came in carried a 1935 copyright.
At this point, it seems like there’s a pretty decent chance that even more of these photos of child stars and Scrappy are out here. Keep an eye out for them for me, would you?
As you may well know if you’re reading this website–and you are–Columbia’s Scrappy cartoon series lasted from 1931-1941. He wasn’t drawn in a consistent fashion during that time: In fact, he sometimes looked like he was different people in different scenes in the same cartoon.
But when the Scrappy cartoons ended in 1941, the character was frozen in time. He has remained a creature of the 1930s, unaffected by later trends in animation design.
But…
Here’s a box from home-movie purveyor Official Films. It contains a Krazy Kat cartoon, Railroad Rhythm. But the box, which I’m guessing dates from the 1950s or 1960s, features a number of characters–and two of them are Scrappy and Oopy drawn in a distinctly more modern style.
Here’s a close-up:
Basically, if UPA had decided to produce a Scrappy cartoon, it might have looked something like this. And given that its cartoons were released though Columbia, it probably could have done so, although I’ll bet the idea never, ever crossed anyone’s mind.
Why Scrappy and his brother got streamlined for this packaging, we’ll never know. Perhaps Official wanted to bring the characters up to date. Or maybe the artist simply drew them in his or her own style rather than mimicking the Mintz look. The box also depicts Krazy Kat using a stock image from the 1930s, so the whole approach is mysterious.
Bonus: Dailey’s Studio in Delano, California–the store which originally sold this home movie, and affixed its sticker to the box, covering Scrappy’s cowlick in the process–is apparently still in business. Judging from how it looks in Google Maps Street View, it may not have changed much since it was selling old Mintz cartoons on 8mm:
Back in the 1930s, a company on Fifth Ave. in New York called Peterson Manufacturing licensed the rights to issue Scrappy art supplies. The packaging it created for these products has some of the nicest art I’ve seen in the whole world of Scrappyana.
I’ve shared these two images before:
And here’s another one, courtesy of Friend of Scrappy Jerry Beck–who recently spotted it in Leonard Maltin’s collection. It shows Scrappy sculpting a life-sized statue of his brother Oopy.
These three boxes were clearly illustrated by the same person. I’ve never seen any other Scrappy art that was clearly by that artist.
Did Peterson get this art from the Mintz Studio, or did it company whip it up on its own, as manufacturers of Scrappy products often seemed to do? I don’t know. Either way, these drawings of Scrappy, Margy, and Oopy have considerable verve and charm.
I’d never seen Peterson’s Scrappy Modeling Clay box until Jerry brought it to my attention–and I’d like to think there’s more Scrappy art out there by this artist waiting to be discovered.
After watching The Beer Parade, Dr. Richard Huemer–the son of Scrappy’s creator–shared this New Years’ card which was sent to his father by Joe De Nat, the Mintz studio’s musical director:
The card depicts Scrappy and his Mintz stablemate Krazy Kat pumping beer into a mug inhabited by a piano player and a mermaid (presumably representing Mr. and Mrs. De Nat). Assuming that the references to 1933 and the new year mean that the De Nats distributed this card around January 1, 1933, prohibition was still in effect, but the recent election of FDR meant that its days were clearly numbered.
Betcha a lot of folks sent out cards with similar themes that year…
I’ve come across reproductions of several Scrappy posters over the years and own a few original ones which I haven’t yet posted on this site. But Scrappyland reader Vince Bellassai recently acquired the niftiest one I’ve ever seen–and he was nice enough to share it with us.
It’s for Scrappy’s Party (1933), which was one of the last Scrappy cartoons that Dick Huemer worked on. And the poster looks very much like his work. I like everything about it–especially the expressions on Scrappy, Oopy and Yippy.
Vince had the poster restored and is selling it on eBay. The price is a bit outside Scrappyland’s budget, but the piece is a gem and an extreme rarity. He says that he knows of no other recorded sales of any Scrappy poster for a specific short–and neither do I.
If you’ve ever read about Scrappy’s Own Magazine before, I have a hunch it was in this piece, which I wrote back in August of 2005. I said I might eventually post the magazine in its entirety. And here you are — only eight years later.
I only know a little bit more about this publication than I did in 2007. It was produced by Evanco Products Corp. of Madison Avenue in New York, which was apparently associated with the Engel-Van Wiseman Book Corporation, which published Big Little Book-like movie adaptations in the mid-1930s and at least signed a deal to do fairy-tale tomes based on Ub Iwerks’ ComicColor cartoons.
The Scrappy magazine apparently came out in late 1935. Judging from the quantity of references to Runkel Brothers chocolate, that company had a hand in instigating it, and it was given out at movie theaters. Here’s an evocative, star-filled ad from the December 6 Woodbridge Independent of New Jersey which mentions it.
Scrappy’s Own Magazine is in a comic book-like format, and is almost–but not quite–a comic book. It does have four pages of comics, but it’s dominated by brief features of other sorts — puzzles, a fudge recipe, a short story which may or may not be about Yippy, a Pledge of Allegiance-like motto for kids, drawing lessons, a creepy poem involving the possibility of Scrappy and Yippy dying in their sleep and much, much more. It’s Scrappy, so it goes without saying that a lot of it is a tad peculiar. (I like the fact that Scrappy and Oopy’s “mum” appears to be a wizened senior citizen.)
This issue makes repeated reference to a second issue being in the works, but I’ve seen no evidence that one was ever released. Then again, almost the only evidence I have that the first issue was published is the fact that I own a copy — even by Scrappy standards, it seems to be a rare artifact.
Anyhow, here are all thirty-two pages of it. Click on the cover, then keep clicking to see everything at a legible size.
Back in the 1930s, a company called Western Theater issued pins of cartoon characters, which I presume were intended as movie-theater giveaways. It did an impressive job of lining up licenses, producing pins featuring everybody from Harold Teen to Betty Boop to Oswald the Rabbit. And — as you’ve already surmised — the Mintz characters.
Here are Scrappy, two slight Yippy variants, Vontzy and, for good measure, Krazy Kat.
These being Mintz characters, it’s not surprising that the approach to naming is…well, surprising. We all know that Scrappy’s dog is Yippy, but he’s usually a pint-sized, terrier-like pooch. Except when he’s a big old hound dog, as he is here. (This pet was also known to go by the name of Woofus.)
Scrappy’s brother Vontzy, meanwhile, was generally known as Oopy — in fact, this is the only piece of merchandise I know about which calls him Vontzy. Eighty years later, this is still a point of confusion: The Big Cartoon Database thinks that the Scrappy series involved bullies named Vonsey and Oopie.
Unlike a lot of Scrappy merchandising art, these pieces were done with care, apparently by a Mintz artist. Here’s the original art for the only Mintz-related Western Theater pin back I know of that’s not shown above:
That’s Krazy Kat’s girlfriend, Kitty Kat, who seems to be a dog. I hope that George Herriman didn’t know about this — or, if he did, that he was amused rather than outraged.
Behold the Scrappyland National Gallery’s latest acquisition, and one of its most fascinating possessions. It’s a letter from Marvin S. Springer of the Scrappy Franchise Department — which we already knew existed — written on Christmas Eve, 1935, to the proprietor of the Dent Hardware Company, a one-time major producer of cast-iron toys. (It’s still around, though no longer in the toy business.)
Springer is following up on an earlier inquiry involving Dent licensing Scrappy, and he sounds eager — maybe even pushy — about closing the deal. If he and his Scrappy Franchise colleagues were always this aggressive, it helps explain why Scrappy was so remarkably well-merchandised, especially for a character who was never a top-tier cartoon star.
The sticker at the bottom of the letter is worth examining at a larger size:
That’s a wonderful advertising slogan, but not a very good likeness of Scrappy — it seems to be a badly-redrawn version of a classic Dick Huemer image, and note that it looks nothing like the version on the letterhead. And neither of these Scrappies looked like the on-screen Scrappy did in late 1935. If Columbia wasn’t very good at depicting him, it’s no surprise that its licensees were often lackadaisical about the job.
So did Dent Hardware end up making Scrappy stuff? I’m not sure. I can’t find any reference to it doing so in the Film Daily, which seems to have done a good job of reporting on Scrappy merchandise deals. Maybe the metal Scrappy bank I wrote about in a previous post is a Dent. Or perhaps there are other cast-iron Scrappy toys out there somewhere, still waiting to be discovered.
This uncredited article from the December 27, 1932 issue of something called The Hollywood Filmograph is weird. Was there a Scrappy short with caricatures of movie stars acting like Krazy Kats, whatever that means? Is the piece joking when it calls Charles Mintz a directing genius, considering that neither of the words in that description is accurate?
It’s so odd that I don’t know whether to trust any of the facts and figures in it which I don’t otherwise know to be true. But for the record, here it is.
I don’t claim to be psychic. But then again, consider this evidence: Earlier this month, I flew to San Diego for Comic-Con and entered the cavernous, merchandise-packed convention center. And after just ten minutes of browsing, I’d found a new and unknown Scrappy item to add to Scrappyland’s archives.
By “new and unknown” I mean, of course, old and unknown. The lost treasure in question — which cost me a very reasonable $10 — is this valentine card, which depicts Margy brandishing a valentine given to her by Scrappy. Pull her bow up, and her eyes move and a new message is revealed: “To ‘Letter’ Know She’s a Swell Pal”
(Note that the artist, who I’m guessing worked for a card company rather than the Mintz studio, had to take artistic license to make the idea work. He’s replaced Margy’s pie-slice eyes with ones with brown pupils, irises, whites…the whole deal.)
The card makes no reference to Scrappy or Margy’s names, nor does it carry a Mintz or Columbia copyright. That might be evidence that the characters, back in the 1930s, were so famous that any kid would know them on sight. But your average 21st-century memorabilia seller has no idea who Scrappy is, which means that if there are more cards out there — and I’ll bet there are — they’re not going to be a cakewalk to track down.
|
|
