Normally, I would not publish a drawing featuring Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Gertie the Dinosaur, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, Willie Whopper, Farmer Alfalfa, and Katharine “Bo Peep” Hepburn on Scrappyland. But this drawing is special–it’s by Al Kilgore.

And hey, you’ve probably already spotted Scrappy in there, too, down in the lower right-hand corner next to fellow Columbia alum Gerald McBoing Boing–a character my wife loves so much she mentions him in her Twitter profile, which is more than I do for Scrappy.

Al Kilgore (1927-1983) was a wonderfully gifted cartoonist who mostly worked on projects that weren’t all that widely seen. In the 1960s, he wrote and drew the syndicated Bullwinkle comic strip, as good a dead-tree interpretation of an animated cartoon as anyone has ever done. He also illustrated book covers (including this one), designed the glorious Sons of the Desert escutcheon, drew a monthly panel for a magazine for the floor-covering trade, created paper-doll books featuring Elvis and the Reagan family, and did some of the world’s kindest, most charming caricatures for a syndicated feature and film-fan magazines.

I’m guessing that the drawing above, which I recently acquired after learning about it from Jerry Beck, may have been a preliminary sketch for a piece in such a magazine–conceivably Alan G. Barbour’s Screen Facts or Leonard Maltin’s Film Fan Monthly. It seems likely that it dates to the 1960s. But I don’t know for sure. Come to think of it, I’m not positive that Kilgore ever turned this rough into an inked drawing, though I can’t imagine why he’d produce something so ambitious and not finish it for publication, unless he had second thoughts about copyright issues. (It’s drawn on the back of a giant piece of illustration board preprinted with blueline panels for some comic-book publisher–perhaps Gold Key.)

Kilgore loved old movies (especially those starring Laurel and Hardy), comics, and related pop-culture artifacts and imbued his work with his passions every chance he got; even the later part of his Bullwinkle run was crowded with allusions and in-jokes that feel deeply personal. So he must have enjoyed the opportunity to draw so many cartoon characters in one place. At least some of the poses are borrowed from elsewhere, but the composition has a Kilgorian feel–he often did crowd scenes of familiar figures–and it would have been even more distinctive in finished form. (Along with everything else, Kilgore was a great inker.)

At the time Kilgore would have drawn this, Scrappy was even more forgotten by history than he is today. But Kilgore remembered him, and appears to have had enough reference material handy to draw an excellent, on-model version of the character. I’m so glad their paths crossed.

If you’d like to see more Kilgore–way more Kilgore–you must check out Drew Friedman’s incredible assemblage of his art. Over on eBay, the people I bought my drawing from have scads of other Kilgore originals for sale, all of them fascinating and some costing as little as $20. And if you happen to know where my sketch might have appeared in completed form, do tell me, won’t you?

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.

Way back when Scrappyland was new–almost fifteen (!) years ago–I published some Columbia publicity photos of a 1930s child actress named Cora Sue Collins using Scrappy products. Then I found some featuring her fellow Columbia kid contract players Edith Fellows and Dickie Walters. And lastly, back in 2012, one of Edith with a costar named Jackie Moran.

Thanks to Jerry Beck, who generously alerted me to some recent eBay auctions, I have finally procured more examples of what Columbia called Scrappy Tie-Ups. They efficiently promoted current Columbia live-action features and Scrappy merchandise … although, come to think of it, I’m not sure where they appeared. (Newspapers, maybe, although I’ve never seen one in print.)

First, here’s Dickie Walters again, showing off his Scrappy necktie, as photographed by William A. “Bud” Fraker (father of the celebrated cinematographer) and approved by the Hays Office on January 29, 1935.

IMDB lists only four movies that Dickie appeared in. The first was Carnival, which premiered on February 15, 1935–a couple of weeks after Columbia readied this photo (and one week before my mother was born). Besides Dickie, who had a fairly meaty role as a little kid named “Poochie”–which sounds like the name of a Scrappy bit-player–it starred Lee Tracy, Sally Eilers, and Jimmy Durante. And it indeed was set at a traveling carnival. (Dickie, incidentally, also appeared in MGM’s 1935 Anna Karenina, along with both Garbo and Cora Sue Collins.)

Scrappy ties (“For He-Boys”) were manufactured by a company called Guiterman Bros., and were popular enough that I’ve assembled a small collection of them and even found a photo of a small boy who was seemingly wearing one because he liked it, not because he was being paid by Columbia to do so. If they came in slightly larger sizes, I might well be wearing one right now.

Next, say hello to Cora Sue Collins, who seems quite pleased with her copy of the Scrappy Big Little Book. (Oddly, hers seems to be in more battered condition than the one currently in the Scrappyland Archive.) This photo was released in conjunction with the May 1936 Columbia picture The Devil’s Squadron, in which Cora Sue costarred with Richard Dix, Karen Morley, and Lloyd Nolan.

The back of this photo credits it to A.L. “Whitey” Schafer, who succeeded Fraker as chief of Columbia’s stills department and later left for a similar gig at Paramount. He took a lot of photos of stars, such as this 1944 portrait of Veronica Lake, which I borrowed from an excellent post on his work at Aenigma. (I’m sorry to report that we lost him in 1951 in a tragic accident involving an exploding stove on a yacht.)

Here we have Edith Fellows and Jackie Moran in a Schafer photo released in conjunction with And So They Were Married, another Columbia release in May 1936. Melvyn Douglas and Mary Astor got top billing, but Edith and Jackie were right behind them and get tons of screen time. (You can watch the movie over at the Internet Archive.)

But the big news about this Scrappy Tie-Up is that young Jackie is brandishing a Scrappy Army Plane from the Scientific Model Airplane Company, an apparently noted maker of toy aircraft. This is a new Scrappy product to me, and it seems like a major one. I’d love to think there’s still a chance I’ll stumble across one someday.

And here’s the weirdest part: Only a day or two before Jerry alerted me to this photo, I’d heard from another Friend of Scrappy, David Welch of Childhood Memorabilia. Over at eBay, where he’s “pezdudewelch,” he’s selling a 1938 photo of a Lionel train setup at a retail store, and he noticed that the background included … an upside-down Scrappy Army Plane box. When he asked about it, I wasn’t even positive that the Scrappy in question was our Scrappy.

Edith also posed for Whitey Schafer with Transogram’s Scrappy Ring Toss, a fine game which we do have in the Scrappy Archive. This photo is undated and bears no Hays stamp, and I’m not sure what Columbia feature it tied into.

And here’s Edith again in a Schafer photo approved by the Hays Office on October 16, 1937–but apparently produced with the Christmas season in mind. It features the Great Lake Novelty Co.’s Scrappy doll, which I believe had been around for a couple of years by then.

Just so you can get a taste of what the back of these photos looked like, here’s the flip side of the one above, with the Hays stamp, another stamp for the Advertising Advisory Council, Whitey Schafer’s credit, and a caption plugging a Columbia feature called Wonder Child.

That confused me, since I couldn’t find evidence of Edith or Leo Carillo appearing in anything called Wonder Child. It turned out that the movie, when Columbia released it in January 1938, had a much better name: Little Miss Roughneck. And it was a genuine Edith Fellows starring vehicle.

This photo features Edith and her Columbia colleagues the Three Stooges promoting a 1937 Pillsbury giveaway–a successor to the Scrappy Puppet Theater–and I include it here mostly because Edith seems to be wearing the same dress as in the photo above, suggesting that they were part of the same Schafer shoot.

Speaking of the Scrappy Puppet Theater, I lied when I said I’d never seen a Scrappy Tie-Up photo in print. While I was working on this post, I found several papers that published this photo of Edith with her Scrappy theater in December 1936. The caption talks about it as if she just happened to be a fan of cartoon-related puppetry–and I hope that was true, even if was a contractual obligation.

At this point, it doesn’t seem the least bit unreasonable to assume that there are still more Scrappy Tie-Ups out there. I won’t rest until my collection is complete–even if it takes another fifteen or more years, and it probably will.

Eighty-three years ago, the Great Depression still seemed intractable and a dollar was a meaningful amount to spend on a child’s plaything. But what a plaything the Scrappy pull toy was. Manufactured by the Gong Bell Co. of East Hampton, Conn. and officially known as the “Scrappy Band,” it featured Scrappy playing a xylophone and Margy doing the hula in a grass skirt. It’s funny and charming, with great graphics, and deserves a spot high on any list of the best Scrappy products of all time.

Enough examples survive that it’s not tough to find a Scrappy Band on eBay, though their condition is often poor. Margy, for instance, has most often lost her skirt. The one in the Scrappyland Archive is in near-mint condition; maybe it was owned by a kid who didn’t play with it much.

How well did this toy sell back in 1936-1938, which seems to have been the duration of its availability? We’ll probably never know for sure. But here are three 1937 photos of little girls surrounded by toys, and in each case you can spot the Scrappy Band among the goodies.

Here, in a photo originally published in the Milwaukee Journal on February 14, 1937, is Betty Ann Gaudynski posing with toys donated by Milwaukee schoolchildren to be sent to their counterparts affected by the Ohio River’s Great Flood of 1937, which killed hundreds and left a million people homeless. Along with the Scrappy Band in the lower right-hand corner–Scrappy himself is in the shadows–the donations include two Donald Duck pull toys (one with Pluto), which were also products of the Gong Bell Co.

In this photo, published in the Tampa Bay Times on December 18th, 1937, Barbara Jean Williams is flanked by a Scrappy Band and a Shirley Temple doll (apparently in scouting togs). Barbara Jean is using a toy telephone-another popular product from Gong Bell, whose president, the wonderfully-named Mayo Purple, was the subject of an accompanying article.

And in this Christmas picture from 1937, by a photographer for the NEA wire service, boxing legend Jack Dempsey’s daughters Joan and Barbara enjoy their loot, with a Scrappy Band near Joan’s right foot (and a doll spread-eagled on top of it).

It’s tempting to think that Columbia, which was generally intrepid in its Scrappy marketing efforts, had something to do with the Scrappy Band popping up in so many newspaper photos of kids and toys. But unless the studio snuck Scrappy Bands into flood donations and sent one to Jack Dempsey’s daughters, maybe this pull toy was just popular enough to have a decent chance of appearing in any image involving a quorum of playthings. I mean, if you’d been alive in 1937 and had a buck–or as little as 79¢ at a discount house–wouldn’t you have bought one?

(Another piece of evidence for that theory: If Columbia had a hand in the creation of the photos, you’d think the girls would be fawning over Scrappy and Margy rather than ignoring them.)

Coda: If someone was a child in 1937, it’s not unrealistic to think that she might still be alive in late 2019. But I’m sorry to report that Betty Ann Gaudynski, Joan Dempsey, and Barbara Dempsey have all died–in 1986, 1993, and 1994, respectively. (Barbara is not to be confused with a different Dempsey daughter named Barbara, whom he adopted with a later wife; that one ended up being the coauthor of his autobiography.)

Barbara Jean Williams is a common enough name that I can’t research the one in the photo with any confidence. So here’s hoping she is still with us, happy and healthy.

 Even if they’d never made a single Scrappy cartoon at 861 Seward St. in Los Angeles, the address would have its place in animation history. After all, it was home to the Harman-Ising studio. And Bambi sprung from work done there. And the Walter Lantz studio was headquartered in the building for many years.

And partway through all of that, Screen Gems–the former Charles Mintz studio–was located at 861 Seward. Columbia moved the operation there in 1940–leaving behind 7000 Santa Monica Blvd.–after Charles Mintz’s death at the end of 1939. It’s therefore the last location I have to cover in this series on Scrappy’s homes, which began with my piece on 1154 N. Western Ave.

861 Seward St. was built in 1924 and was apparently devoted to the making of movies from the start. The earliest mention of it I’ve found in trade journals is from that December. Here’s that reference, in an ad for D’Alessandro Productions, producer of The Sagebrush Lady.

Other companies in the building during the same era included Walter W. Kofeldt Inc., a film importer; and the wonderfully-named Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions, which an actress named Dorothy Davenport named to leverage the brand power of her late husband, a silent star who had died in a sanitarium where he was attempting recovery from his morphine addiction. (Human Wreckage, mentioned in the ad below, had an anti-drug message.)

In Hollywood Cartoons, Mike Barrier cites Rudolf Ising as remembering that Disney used a laboratory at 861 Seward for film processing in the 1920s; Martha Sigall’s Living Life Inside the Lines is more specific, saying that Steamboat Willie had been developed there. And indeed, a lab called National Aeromap that catered to the movie industry was in the building by 1926 and stayed there for at least a few years. Seward St. may have been a bit of a film-processing district: The 1932 Film Daily Yearbook lists five lab facilities on the street, including one belonging to Technicolor.

The June 25, 1935 Film Daily reported  that the Harman-Ising studio–by now making shorts for release by MGM–was moving into 861 Seward to get the space it needed to make more cartoons and adopt three-strip Technicolor. (The two-reelers referenced below–one of which might have been based on “The Nutcracker”–did not get made.)

In February of 1937, MGM terminated its contract with Harman-Ising. The two animators worked on other projects such as Merbabies–which Disney released as a Silly Symphony–but went bankrupt. They then joined a new MGM cartoon studio, overseen by Fred Quimby and located on the studio lot.

This website may be about Scrappy cartoons, but let’s be honest: 861 Seward’s next era was its most intriguing. Disney, which was in the process of building its new Burbank studio, was out of room at its old Hyperion one and had to shunt some projects into other premises. It leased Harman-Ising’s Seward St. space and moved the group doing early work on Bambi into the building in October 1938.

It wasn’t until I began thinking about 861 Seward’s Screen Gems years that I realized I’d talked about its Disney period with Maurice Noble in 1991, when he told me about his work on Bambi:

About that time [Disney] were constructing their new studio in Burbank, and the Bambi unit was shifted over to a small building down in Hollywood on Seward Street. That’s where we were isolated for almost two years. All I did on that particular picture was sketchwork; I probably did three or four thousand watercolor sketches for it. As it finally appeared, my influence was probably minimal, because they decided to go with the approach that Tyrus Wong gave it – a certain Oriental flavor, if you recall the film. My view of the story of Bambi was more on the grand scale, and Tyrus’s rendering and type of background seemed to lend itself to the intimate approach. My contributions were probably more indirect on the film.

Mike Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons says that Walt Disney himself rarely showed up at Seward St. In Walt Disney’s Bambi: The Story and the Film, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston make the outpost sound rather pleasant:

 At first there was much resentment over on Seward at being separated from the stimulation of the main studio, but gradually the staff realized that there were certain benefits in being isolated. Clair Weeks, artist and story sketch man, said, “It was … sort of a little paradise we had … free of the hurly-burly of Hyperion–nobody bothered us.” No one made trips back to the main studio and the only person who came over to Seward was Mr. Keener, the paymaster.

In the fall of 1939, Disney’s Seward St. lease ran out and the Bambi unit moved to the new Burbank studio. Screen Gems moved in the following year. I don’t know what instigated the relocation from Santa Monica Blvd. but perhaps it had something to do with Columbia’s consolidation of control over the studio.

By that time, the Scrappy series was withering away. Paul Etcheverry and Will Friedwald’s Scrappy filmography lists only seven shorts released in 1940. None of them were classics and some were Scrappy cartoons in only a technical sense at best.

The final Scrappy, The Little Theatre, was released in February 1941. 861 Seward, in other words, was the place where Scrappy died.

If you’re interested enough in old cartoons to be reading this website, you probably know what happened at Screen Gems as the ’40s wore on. The last vestiges of the Mintz years gave way to an era of revolving-door management (including Frank Tashlin and Dave Fleischer, among others); a failure to create new successful new series (with the Fox and Crow cartoons as the closest thing the studio had to a flagship); and an approach that veered from experimental to generic and then back again without giving Disney, Warner, or MGM any reason to worry. Hollywood business directories show Screen Gems as being located at 861 Seward through 1946. As far as I know, it was there until Columbia ceased producing its own cartoons.

I don’t have any fascinating facts about the studio’s time there. Well, maybe one: When I visited the building,  I saw that it was at the intersection of Seward and Willoughby: 

And it dawned on me that Willoughby Ave. must have provided the Screen Gems character Willoughby Wren, a tiny strongman, with his name. I already dimly knew that the Lantz studio named Inspector Willoughby (whose first name is Seward) after its intersection; Willoughby Ave. must be the only street in Hollywood to have inspired two cartoon characters.

Here’s Willoughby Wren in Bob Wickersham’s Magic Strength:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izeNkFlcBmg

861 Seward wasn’t bereft of animation activity for long. In August 1947, Box Office reported that the Walter Lantz studio, which was severing its ties with Universal (temporarily, it turned out), had leased the place.

The best thing about Lantz’s long residency at 861 Seward—at least from a Scrappyland perspective—is that we have film footage documenting it. The early years of TV’s Woody Woodpecker Show featured numerous mini-documentaries about the making of cartoons, with Lantz employees coming up with stories, animating them, painting cels, and running animation cameras. Judging from the scenes that made it onto TV, it wasn’t the world’s most evocative Hollywood animation studio, but I’m glad this material survives. Here’s some of it.

At least one animation notable, Sid Marcus, worked for both Screen Gems and Lantz in their respective 861 Seward eras; I’ll bet there were other folks who did, too. If you can identify any of the faces in the video above, please let me know. (And if Lantz shot these live-action segments at a soundstage elsewhere in Hollywood, don’t tell me.)

Another neat thing about 861 Seward’s Lantz years: If you want a memento of them, you can go on eBay and buy any one of a surprisingly large number of checks signed by Walter Lantz and bearing that address.

Walter Lantz seems to have bought his building at some point, which I imagine was a savvy investment. As his studio’s production slowed, he began renting out space to other companies. According to Martha Sigall’s Living Life Inside the Lines, one such tenant was the commercial studio operated by the great Warner Bros. animator Abe Levitow. And here’s a letter–which I borrowed from ChipJacobs.com–in which Lantz agrees to least space “formerly occupied by an [sic] our animators” to Gordon Zahler’s General Music Company. (Jacobs is the author of Strange as It Seems, a biography of Zahler–who was, among other things, Lantz’s partner in the Walter Lantz Music Company, a purveyor of stock music for other cartoon studios, and the man who patched together a score for Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space.)

 

Even after Lantz ceased production of cartoons in 1972, it retained offices at 861 Seward. It remained there until at least the late 1970s, but eventually moved less than half a mile to 6311 Romaine, an art deco building known as Television Center that had once been the original Technicolor film-processing laboratory.

After Lantz moved out of 861 Seward, the building was home to a variety of small, obscure Hollywood-type outfits: Schulman Video Services and JPJ Productions were two of them. Eventually, it housed a post-production company called Laser-Pacific–which was successful enough that it was bought by Technicolor in 2011. Today, that company continues to provide services to Hollywood out of 861 Seward. (I was too shy to go in when I dropped by in 2017, but maybe I’ll try to arrange a tour someday.)

To recap: Walter Lantz ended up moving into Technicolor’s former headquarters, and Technicolor ended up taking over Walter Lantz’s former headquarters. That’s surely evidence that Hollywood is a small town. And given that the Screen Gems brand still exists–as a label for Sony horror films and an independent operator of film production facilities–it isn’t entirely unthinkable that the current incarnation of the studio that gave us Scrappy could return to its one-time home a mere eight decades after it first moved in.

 

Back in 2013, I wrote about Eugene Talmadge (1884-1946), a member of the Scrappy Club who also happened to be the governor of Georgia. In 1934, he and his secretary helped Columbia’s Ted Toddy promote Scrappy by accepting membership in the club, a moment reported on at the time by the Film Daily.

I’m happy to report that I just discovered that the Motion Picture Herald also covered this development–and ran a picture:

That’s Talmadge’s secretary, Eva Drew, at the left; she was inducted as the first honorary member of the girls’ division of the Scrappy Club (in Georgia, at least–and I wasn’t aware that the organization was segragated by gender). Talmadge is in the center, looking pleasantly bemused. And Columbia’s Toddy is at right, literally glad-handing the governor.

And boy, I’d love to be able to see what Toddy is holding-he seems to be presenting a document to Talmadge, and has something that may be a folder tucked under his arm. I imagine that he’s presenting the governor with an honorary Scrappy Club membership certificate, and I’d love to think it still exists. Perhaps Herman Talmadge III–great-grandson of Eugene, whose name he recently fought to keep on a bridge between Georgia and South Carolina–has it proudly framed on his wall.

The top sketch above is a preliminary piece, obviously. I'm not positive who it's by, but my guess (and hope) is that it was drawn by Dick Huemer, and I suspect it dates from 1931 and was prepared in conjunction with The Little Pest, the second Scrappy cartoon. That short doesn't contain this precise scene, but it does involve Oopy irritating Scrappy and Yippy as they attempt to go fishing.

The bottom drawing is from a 1937 Scrappy coloring book. But it was almost certainly an old publicity piece. In the cartoons of 1937, Scrappy had evolved into a less idiosyncratically-proportioned, vaguely more realistic little boy, but Scrappy merchandise rarely bothered to precisely reflect what the character looked like in the cartoons.

I wish I knew more about the precise details of both pieces — but it's still nice to have both of them, and I'll bet this is the first time they've ever been published in one place.

Bill Turner of ASIFA-Hollywood sent me this amazing image, which he found while going through some papers belonging to Sid Glenar, who ran an animation and title service from the 1940s into the 1970s.

That's Scrappy in the lower left-hand corner. (He is, of course (c) copyright Sony/Columbia.) But we don't know who the fellow in the photo is — if you do, please let me know.

Why did Sid create this? Well, before he had his own company, he worked at the Mintz studio. Here he is in a company photo from 1931 or thereabouts, in front on the far left. (Charles Mintz is second from right in the top row.)

Sid, Bill says, apparently tried his hand at portrait photography in the 1930s — and judging from this example, he offered photos decorated with Scrappy, or at least hoped to do so. I know of no other examples except this one, but I'd like to think there are more lurking out there somewhere.

As long as we're talking Sid Glenar and Scrappy, here's a Christmas card he sent to his friend Dick Huemer, borrowed from the wonderful collection of cards at Huemer.com. You can tell that he was proud of his job and proud of his camera…

And here's a Pabst Blue Ribbon commercial from the 1950s, animated by Glenar's company…

If you can own only one Scrappy Painting Book — and really, life is incomplete without at least one — it should probably be this one, No. 54. The cover is similar to that of No. 52, but Oopy looks happy rather than ticked off. And the drawings on the inside are accompanied by Scrappy poems! I’ll show you some of them before long, I promise.

(The numbering system is misleading: As much as I’d like to think that Rosebud Art Co. published fifty-four Scrappy Painting Books, these are the only two I know about. See here for a photo of Scrappy’s friend Edith Fellows posing with No. 54.)