{"id":1015,"date":"2013-10-02T22:47:12","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T05:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/?p=1015"},"modified":"2013-10-02T23:13:32","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T06:13:32","slug":"your-scrappy-franchise-departmentat-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/02\/your-scrappy-franchise-departmentat-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Scrappy Franchise Department at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Scrappy<\/a>
\nBehold 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<\/a> — 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<\/a>, though no longer in the toy business.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The sticker at the bottom of the letter is worth examining at a larger size:<\/p>\n

\"Scrappy<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, which seems to have done a good job of reporting on Scrappy merchandise deals. Maybe the metal Scrappy bank<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Your Scrappy Franchise Department at Work<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artifacts","category-merchandise","category-toys"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2D9Zl-gn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1025,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions\/1025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}