Here’s yet another inexplicable early Scrappy ad, from an August 1931 issue of The Film Daily. As you’ve no doubt already noticed, Scrappy is ladling delight moviegoers out of a bowl, whereupon they turn into coins. The idea is to depict the money-making power of Scrappy shorts, and once again, it seems almost certain that nobody at the Mintz studio was involved in this oddity. If nothing else, it presents a rare opportunity to see Scrappy wearing long pants.

The ad claims that Scrappy is the only human character now in cartoon movies. I don’t think that was true: Farmer Alfalfa was still a working cartoon character at the time, and Bosko had been around for a couple of years. And Van Beuren’s human Tom and Jerry were getting going at nearly the same time that Scrappy was. But Betty Boop was still a dog in 1931, and Popeye hadn’t yet shown up in animated form. Scrappy probably did stick out in an era that was utterly dominated by Mickey Mouse’s anthropomorphic influence — even though he had a Mickey-like black-button nose at first.

Another early Scrappy ad from The Film Daily — this one’s from the issue of August 2, 1931. Yes, that’s Yippy using a meat grinder-like machine to convert dozens of “real” boys into Scrappy. Who has four fingers and a thumb on each hand, and appears to be wearing a dress.

As with the first ad, I doubt that the Mintz operation had anything to do with this.

One of the many wonders to be found at the Internet Archive is a run of the Film Daily, a now-defunct, Variety-like publication for the movie trade. It did a remarkably good job of documenting the world of Scrappy, and I'm going to share a lot of stuff from it. (Variety itself, however, rarely mentioned the guy.)

The ad above is from the Film Daily for July 27, 1931, right when the Scrappy series was getting going. The art, I feel certain, is by someone in Columbia's promotion department rather than a Mintz artist. And even for Scrappy, the scene depicted — a black-eyed Scrappy cheerfully assaulting three other boys at once — is strange.

Also strange: The ad refers to Scrappy's dog as “Pokie,” a moniker I've never heard before. Even in the first short, Yelp Wanted, the pooch was named Yippy (or, if The Film Daily was right, Yippi. Then again, Mintz had a casual attitude towards names: Oopy was sometimes Oopie or Vontzy, and Margy was occasionally Margie. It's a wonder that Scrappy himself was never called anything else…as far as I know.