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:
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.
When I officially launched Scrappyland on January 21, 2005, I don’t recall having a master plan. All I knew was that—as one of my first posts argued—Scrappy mattered. Very little had been written about him at the time. I’d already realized that there was plenty of fodder, such as the unexpectedly vast quantities of merchandise he inspired.
Basically, when I first started calling Scrappy “America’s favorite forgotten cartoon star”—a line I stole from Friend of Scrappy Jerry Beck—I was joking. Now you can make a decent case that’s just plain fact. If this site has played a role in this Great Scrappy Resurgence, I’m happy to claim my share of the credit.
For me, writing for Scrappyland is a refuge. It’s fun to spend time in a tiny world with Scrappy at its center, where problems don’t get much more severe than the fact that Petey Parrot is, as Paul Etcheverry and Will Friedwald’s filmography rightly pointed out, “arguably the most obnoxious cartoon character of all time.” I may not post incessantly, but I always have stuff in the works, and I can’t imagine losing interest in keeping it going. Recently, I’ve invested a considerable amount of time to renovating the technical underpinnings that will make that possible.
Fun thought: The earliest Scrappy cartoons go into the public domain in two years. Back in 2005, that eventuality was so far off it hadn’t even occurred to me to contemplate it. Now it’s not too early to begin thinking about throwing a party. Mark your calendars. And thanks for your support all these years.
We’ve got a new link in our left-hand sidebar: Newsletter. Click it, and you can sign up to receive every Scrappyland post right in your inbox. Until now, subscribing to Scrappyland—which I only vaguely knew was possible, though a bunch of you managed to do it—got you an excerpt, and you had to go to the site to read the whole thing. Henceforth, the email version should offer each post in its entirety.
Just dont expect the emails to arrive on anything like a regular schedule—but I do plan to post more frequently than I have so far in 2024. The topic here is Scrappy, so I’m in no danger of running out of material—ever.
We’ve discussed the Scrappy doll manufactured by E.D. & T.M. Co., Inc. for the Great Lakes Novelty Co. of Chicago here before. He was one of at least four Scrappy dolls offered in the 1930s, and I think I can safely declare he was the most popular. All the others are super hard to seemingly impossible to find, while this one shows up all the time. In fact, I see two on eBay right now.
In past Scrappyland posts, we’ve shared promotional photos featuring the little guy being fussed over by other Columbia stars—namely Edith Fellows, Moe, Larry, and Curly. The chances seem high that it’s the same doll in both photos and that the shots were taken around October, 1937 in a shoot that involved both Edith and the Stooges. (Note that the Scrappy doll in these photos is the apparently rarer variant with soft cloth hands.)
As familiar with the Scrappy doll as I was, I’d never seen proof that actual kids not employed by Columbia owned and liked it. But now I have, and it’s a delightful experience.
Back in the 1930s, a boy named George Kaupas owned the E.D. & T.M./Great Lakes Scrappy. Actually, he still does, reports his son Jeff, who wrote me about his dad’s plaything. And Jeff shared something amazing: a photo of young George with Scrappy. George, who looks like he could have won a Scrappy lookalike contest, has Scrappy in his lap, accompanied by a stuffed dog and something in the front I can’t quite identify.
I know that’s just the stock Scrappy doll George is holding, with the same head made out of some ceramic-ish substance. But his expression somehow seems to possess more of a glint of life than the one in Columbia’s promo pictures, don’t you think?
Jeff reports that his father still owns his Scrappy—but that the doll lost his original clothing at some point over the past eight decades. That’s no shock, and is also true of a fair number of the Scrappys who show up on eBay. Others, however, have managed to hold onto their outfits, which consist of surprisingly classy velvet brown overalls and a silky shirt. A decent percentage—including one of the two I own—even have their original E.D. & T.M. Co. tags.
As a Scrappy collector, you’d naturally want to find a minty example of the Scrappy doll—one who’d somehow avoided the rough and tumble of being dragged around, played with, and generally cherished. But if you come across a beat-up Scrappy, remember this: It’s evidence he was loved.
Almost seven years ago, I wrote about Scrappy’s seeming influence on Japanese animation—and, in particular, on the work of Osamu Tezuka. Among the legendary cartoonist’s early creations were two characters, Little Ma and Pete, who looked quite a bit like our hero. But it was all pretty tentative, since I had no proof that Tezuka was even aware of Scrappy—though it is well-known that he was a great fan of American cartoons and comics.
Well, Friend of Scrappy Noah Stone alerted me to a drawing by Tezuka that settles it. Kind of. Well, actually, there’s a surprise twist.
The drawing in question features Tezuka’s charming, pretty on-model renditions of Oswald the Rabbit, Andy Panda, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, Olive Oyl, The Little King, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Mighty Mouse, Hoppity, Sourpuss, Krazy Kat, Tom and Jerry, Felix, Sylvester, Goofy, The Practical Pig, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Chip ‘n Dale, and (from Cinderella) Gus. And Scrappy.
Here it is:
I’m not sure when the drawing dates from, but I believe Tezuka drew it in 1951 at the earliest. That’s because its version of Krazy seems to be the one from Dell Comics’ odd Krazy Kat comic book, which debuted with an issue cover-dated June 1951. It owed little to either Herriman or Charles Mintz’s 1930s cartoons, but might have been the only reference material Tezuka had close at hand.
Curious about what Tezuka’s text said, I fed the image into Google Translate, which spat out a version in English. It did an impressive job, too:
You may have spotted some quirks in the translated version. The two pigs are bigs, for instance. Sourpuss is Soapas. Goofy is Fee. Gus is Gas. Chip ‘n Dale are Drip and Lip. Whether these relate to the characters’ names in Japanese or reflect glitches with Google’s translation, I’m not sure.
But the weirdest problem is also the one most relevant to this post: Scrappy is identified as a Fleischer character named “Binbo.” Correcting that to Bimbo doesn’t really correct anything. That definitely is not Bimbo, and definitely is Scrappy.
What gives? I’m not sure. Conflating Bimbo and Scrappy seems far-fetched, but … not impossible? It might help if we knew for sure whether Tezuka cribbed his drawing of Scrappy from a particular piece of art, which seems difficult to do if you think you’re drawing Bimbo. However, I don’t recognize it. So I can’t say for sure that Tezuka didn’t get very, very confused at some point between the 1930s and the 1950s.
For now, the bottom line seems to be: Osamu Tezuka knew Scrappy. But maybe not very well. If you have additional information and/or theories, I’d appreciate hearing them. And thank you, Noah.
As you already know if you’ve spent any time at all on this website, Scrappy appeared on an incredible array of merchandise in the 1930s. Which makes it all the more surprising that they never bothered to put out a Scrappy watch. (Or at least I’m pretty confident they didn’t—if I’m wrong, it would be a delightful surprise.)
It’s never too late to right a wrong, and I’m happy to say that I figured out how to turn my new Apple Watch into a Scrappy Watch. Here it is—I’m a southpaw, so this is also the first left-handed Scrappy Watch:
Now, the Apple Watch is rather notorious for the fact that Apple doesn’t really trust anyone to design watch faces except itself. So I wasn’t positive that I could create a Scrappy Watch deserving of the name. But I figured it out using an iPhone app called Clockology, which lets you hack Apple’s “Portraits” watch face to layer a drawing (such as Scrappy) on top of the current time. That’s what I did with it, anyhow. Getting it all working properly required a fair amount of experimentation, but the results are more than worth it.
From the very start, Apple did offer an excellent Mickey Mouse watch face, with classic moving hands, available in color or black and white. It later gave us Minnie and, with the new WatchOS 10, has added an extremely ambitious Snoopy face. So the company isn’t opposed to faces based on some of the Truly Great Cartoon Characters of All Time. Realistically, though, Scrappy is probably relatively low on its priority list. I’m guessing they’d get around to it by 2062 or thereabouts, and I just couldn’t wait that long.
If you’d like to be the first person to put Margy, Oopy, or Yippy on a watch face, there’s still time. But act fast: I probably won’t be able to resist the temptation to continue Mintzing out my timepiece.
I’m not sure how I’ve gone this long without writing anything for Scrappyland. It’s true that I’ve been busy with other journalistic efforts—I wrote Fast Company‘s new cover story about Satya Nadella and Microsoft—but that’s hardly an excuse. In any rational assessment of their relative contribution to society, Scrappy ranks well above Microsoft and should be prioritized.
The good news is that I’m nowhere near running out of stuff to post on this site. In fact, I have an impressive backlog to work my way through, and I promise to chip away at it. And as I do, I’m pretty confident that more Scrappy-related matters will surface. It would be a shame if I ever felt like my work here was done.
For now, here’s the newest addition to the archive: an envelope that someone at Charles Mintz’s studio sent to C.A. Loescher, the postmaster of Menasha, Wisconsin, in November 1932. It’s postmarked on the evening of the day before Thanksgiving.
I show it here, of course, mostly because of that wonderful return address art, which is worth looking at more closely. I think it might be by Dick Huemer, and the inkwell theme is so prominent that I feel like Max Fleischer might have reasonably demanded a royalty.
In 2017, I wrote about 1154 North Western Ave., which was Mintz’s first Hollywood studio. As best I can tell, he relocated to 7000 Santa Monica Blvd. sometime in 1933. He continued to use the artwork from this envelope, with the address updated, for years. It was on the letter of recommendation given to Mintz employee (and eventual Cartoonist Profiles editor) Jud Hurd when he left in October 1936—even though neither Krazy nor Scrappy’s on-screen versions much resembled these designs by that time. Then again, if I had this art, I wouldn’t want to give it up either.
The Charles Mintz Studio gradually changed its name to Screen Gems; I imagine it eventually had stationery and envelopes reflecting that fact. I haven’t seen them, but if this envelope turned up on eBay—and it did—there’s no reason later ones couldn’t someday.
By now, you are wondering why the Mintz people were contacting a Wisconsin postmaster. I’m not sure. The envelope is sealed, but that seems to be an artifact of its age—there’s nothing in it; I’d love to think that C.A. Loescher was a Scrappy fan, but I’m afraid I have no evidence to support that theory. It’s possible that he was one of many postmasters who received envelopes from Mintz, perhaps as part of some marketing campaign.
In any event, we do know what Loescher looked like, thanks to the Menasha Historical Society. In the photo below, he’s fourth from the left in the middle row. (“Backes” is the fellow in the front row at whom the arrow is pointing—maybe a snappy mail carrier?)
It’s also clear that Loescher was a pillar of Menasha society—the secretary/treasurer of the Wisconsin Postmasters’ Association, post commander of the American Legion, a speaker at local events, and more. He sounds entirely admirable, and loving Scrappy—which we have no evidence he didn’t do—would only make him more laudable. I’m sorry to say he died in 1941, the same year the final Scrappy cartoon reached theaters.
I don’t mean to brag, but Scrappyland—which will celebrate its 17th birthday later this month—has been around so long that YouTube didn’t quite exist yet when it launched. Back then, Scrappy’s cartoons were surprisingly hard to come by: In an introductory article, I even compared him to the famously missing Judge Crater. For years, all I had myself were a couple of gazillionth-generation VHS tapes given to me by Friend of Scrappy Kip Williams.
Now YouTube has become the most comprehensive archive of old cartoons we have. Nearly every Scrappy cartoon has made its way there. That being the case, it felt like it made sense to embed them here on Scrappyland.
Rather than creating a new section of the site, I decided to stick the cartoons into an existing one: Our online version of the Scrappy filmography that originally appeared in Animania #20 and #21 in 1981. Written by Paul Etcheverry and Will Friedwald, it was a pioneering work of Scrapology at the time. More than 40 years later, it’s still the most comprehensive look at Scrappy’s cinematic oeuvre. In 1981, the idea that you could read it and watch Scrappy cartoons right inside the article would have blown my mind. Maybe it still does.
A few notes on the filmography: Paul and Will didn’t manage to screen every Scrappy cartoon as part of their 1981 research, and so some still don’t have descriptions/critiques. Cartoon #64 in their listing, The Scary Crows, features a blond kid whom the 1981 description says is Scrappy; he appears in a few other cartoons and was dubbed “Sparky” by Jerry Beck in this century. Until someone else creates a Sparkyland site, I’m leaving The Scary Crows in the filmography as it originally appeared.
While adding in the YouTube cartoons, I discovered that Paul and Will’s roster was missing one short that’s unquestionably a Scrappy, though not exactly a career highlight: 1940’s Fish Follies. With Paul’s permission, I’ve added it to the filmography.
Another Scrappy film has come to light since 1981: The promo for his puppet theater, which includes some bizarre animation along with live action of Edith Fellows—and which was preserved by UCLA through Jerry’s generosity. Since it’s not quite a Scrappy cartoon, I will present it to you here rather than trying to backfill it into the filmography.
As rich in Scrappy as YouTube has become, two cartoons are unavailable there: The Chinatown Mystery and Stepping Stones (both 1932). Neither was included in the 1950s Scrappy TV package, which gave us most of the prints on YouTube. They aren’t lost films, thank heavens—just not in readily-available circulation. No complaining, please: The fact that there are only a couple of Scrappy cartoons you can’t watch instantly for free is pretty astounding.
Samuel and Rose Davidavitch of Yonkers, New York had four sons who went into the animation business–all after changing the family name to Davis. There was Art, who–at least here at Scrappyland–is best remembered as part of the Mintz brain trust that gave us Scrappy. (His later work as a director and animator at Warner Bros. has its fans, too.) There was Mannie, who stayed in New York and was a key Terrytoons employee for decades. There was Sid, who was also known as Butch and worked alongside Art at Mintz after it became Screen Gems. And there was Phil, who also worked with Art at Mintz/Screen Gems.
Except that in March 1933, Phil left the studio and returned to New York. A few years later, he’d come back and head the Screen Gems in-between department. But his coworkers didn’t know that Phil would be back when they filled a scrapbook with drawings wishing him well as he departed. (Many of them were also New Yorkers who’d headed west–and in some cases would themselves go back and continue their animation careers on the east coast.)
Over at Patreon, Devon Baxter–whose presence there is a must for cartoon fans–has posted dozens of these drawings, courtesy of Art Davis’s granddaughter Sharon Davis and her husband, Steve Marshall. They’re a remarkable collection of work by people who were major figures in the animation industry long after Scrappy left the stage.
Like all good behind-the-scenes gag sketches, these ones are full of in jokes, some of which we probably don’t get. (I do believe that the references to pool in several of them involve the fact that there was a pool hall on the ground floor of the studio’s building.) They feature studio characters diverging from their on-screen behavior, are occasionally racy, and sure look like the people who drew them were having fun. (A few of them even contributed more than one piece.)
You should head to Patreon to see all the drawings–but Devon generously allowed me to share a few here. Naturally, I picked those most closely related to Scrappy.
First of all, here’s Dick Huemer himself, with a fine drawing (given that Scrappy isn’t in it, at least). That’s a self-caricature of Dick–himself a New York transplant–in the foreground. I imagine the whip references his supervisory capacity at the Mintz studio. Within a few weeks, he was at Disney, having left Scrappy and Mintz behind for the studio that would occupy most of this time for the rest of his career.
This one does show Scrappy and Oopy bidding Phil farewell. It’s by Carl Urbano, whom I didn’t realize worked at the Mintz studio. He later directed industrial cartoons for John Sutherland and eventually ended up at Hanna-Barbera before dying in 2003–relatively recently for a Scrappy artist.
Here’s another Scrappy drawing by Marshall Dunning, who worked at Columbia and Disney–but spent most of his career as a political cartoonist. This sketch references WWI, which Dunning served in–and maybe Phil Davis, too, since he would have been old enough.
Reuben Timmins had a long career in animation spanning both coasts and lots of studios, from Fleischer to Filmation. He crammed a lot into his farewell drawing for Phil Davis, starting with a hula girl causing an earthquake–surely the Long Beach one which had occurred the previous week and caused about 115 fatalities. Also in the drawing is Scrappy with a random message for Fleischer animator Dave Tendlar, whom I’m guessing had fallen out of touch with his former colleague Timmins; and Krazy Kat seemingly encouraging Phil to look up Reuben’s relatives in NYC (“Dewey 5888” would have been their phone number).
Lastly from Phil’s Scrappy-book, here’s an amazing drawing with Bimbo, Koko, Betty Boop, Scrappy, Oopy, Mutt, Jeff, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse, and a dame whom apparently enjoyed Phil’s company during his time in California. Devon and I am not sure who did this. It’s tempting to wonder if it’s someone who worked on all these characters, but I’m not sure if anyone had in 1933. (Dick Huemer had worked on Mutt and Jeff cartoons and spent time at Fleischer–and left Mintz later in 1933 for Disney–but was gone from Fleischer before Betty Boop arrived.) Perhaps one of you knows who might have done this–Don Yowp’s list of Mintz staffers from 1933 could provide a clue.
[Update: Devon now says: “I’ve talked it over with some trusted experts, and we believe it’s the work of Rudy Zamora. To borrow an observation from Mark Newgarden: ‘The handwriting is a reasonable match with his signature here [on this Fleischer Christmas card]. The way he handles hands & feet & line strokes all check.'”
Bonus material: This Mintz studio gag drawing isn’t from Phil Davis’s scrapbook–it was recently auctioned off by Howard Lowery. It’s by Preston Blair and features caricatures of himself and a “Joe” whom the Lowery listing says is Mintz composer Joe De Nat. I have no reason to doubt that identication, but will note that it’s not readily identifiable as De Nat based on the photos I’ve seen of him. I’m not sure about the precise meaning of the “The March of Time” caption, but it’s presumably a reference to either the radio show (which started in 1931) or the more famous newsreels (which debuted in 1935), both of which were spinoffs from TIME magazine.
You’ve been waiting for this for almost five years–or, in a way, more than 80. Or maybe not. But I hope you’ll enjoy these four examples of the ill-fated Scrappy newspaper comic strip, which seems to have failed to … well, appear in any newspapers.
Though Will Eisner and Jerry Iger couldn’t get U.S papers interested in the strip in 1937, they did sell it to comics publications overseas, including France’s Bilboquet and the U.K. and Australia’s Wags. Eventually, they lightly retouched it and ran it as “Shorty Shortcake” in Wonderworld comics. The strips below are from Wags, and as far as I know they haven’t been reprinted anywhere since their original appearance in 1938.
By the time the strips below appeared, the style had morphed and I don’t have any bright ideas about who drew them–could be Eisner, could be somebody else. The one person whom we can be positive had nothing to do with them is the guy who signed them: Charles Mintz.
Except for starring Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy, these comics have almost nothing to do with the Scrappy theatrical cartoons. By this point in the chronology, even the fact that Scrappy is a small boy has stopped making sense. But whoever was drawing the strip by this point had fun and deserves at least a little belated glory. So I hope the mystery artist doesn’t remain a mystery forever.
How did the Scrappy comic strip come to be? Did Columbia approach Eisner and Iger, or did they come up with the idea? How hard did they try to sell it to newspapers before shipping it overseas? We’ll probably never know, and I’m just sorry I didn’t ask Will Eisner, who was still attending comics conventions I was also at in this century. (Don’t blame me for not seizing the opportunity: I didn’t know of his Scrappy connection at the time.)
I still have some more Scrappy strips to run, but for now, I’ll leave you with this page from Wonderworld #3 (July 1939), which repurposed the above material and claimed it involved Shorty Shortcake, Suzy, and Woofy.
