Here’s Charles Mintz’s entry in the biographical section of the 1937 Film Daily Product Guide and Director’s Annual. It speaks of the cartoon producer in the third person, but one suspects that it’s his official view of himself. And it’s fascinating.

Mintz doesn’t mention his wife, pioneering cartoon distributor Margaret Winkler. He does assign himself credit for some series we usually associate with her, including the Felixes and Alice cartoons. And he dwells on his ill-fated association with Walt Disney, claiming to have “discovered” Walt and been the first person to “appreciate the young man with great ideas.”

Mintz calls himself the producer of the Oswalds and calls Disney his production chief for the Alices and Oswalds; I’m not sure if that counts as downplaying Disney’s role, but it surely emphasizes Mintz’s involvement more than most people would. (Elsewhere in the directory, Walt Disney’s entry says that he was the producer of the Alice cartoons and Oswald’s creator and producer.)

Oh, and Mintz says that he’s released cartoons solely through Columbia since the dawn of sound — news which would come as a surprise to RKO’s Toby the Pup.

Was Mintz haunted by the Oswald debacle? We may never know for sure. But once Disney became a phenomenon, he seems to have been happy to remind everyone else in the business that he was once Walt Disney’s boss.

He also cheerfully takes credit for personally creating Scrappy — and mentions that he’s president of the Motion Picture Cartoon Producers Association, an organization I’m unfamiliar with. Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall at its meetings?

I hope I won’t offend anyone by saying this: Columbia may have worked harder promoting Scrappy cartoons than it did making Scrappy cartoons. There were Scrappy clubs and educational aids and clothing and comics and toys and other tie-ins of all sorts. And I’ve always assumed that if there wasn’t a Scrappy radio show, there should have been one.

Now Scrappyologist and radio scholar Andrew Leal has the first definitive evidence that Scrappy did hit the airwaves — or tried to do so, at least. The July 15, 1937 issue of Broadcasting featured the following news tidbit:

“Presentation series” means that the Biddick company created (or intended to create) a pilot for a Scrappy program. I don’t know whether anything it produced survives. I have no idea whether it led to anything. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, it’s good to get confirmation that Columbia made a good-faith effort to put Scrappy on radio. And further research is warranted.

When I read this, I thought for a moment that it was saying that the proposed Scrappy show was sponsored by America’s furriers. Nah — Andrew explained that was a totally different Biddick program. But it’s still a delightful idea.

If you know Dick Huemer’s drawing style, you won’t need to look at the signature to identify this illustration as his work. It’s of President Lyndon Baines Johnson dancing with a dame representing the U.S. voter, and that’s Barry Goldwater cutting in.

The image above is part of the cover of a 1964 LP titled Presidential Primer — full art here — and was shared with me by Andrew Leal. I don’t know much about it except that Huemer wrote part of it. Perhaps Andrew will tell us more in the comments.