{"id":2355,"date":"2020-01-20T23:44:59","date_gmt":"2020-01-21T06:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/?p=2355"},"modified":"2021-11-09T00:20:47","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T07:20:47","slug":"in-search-of-scrappy-cels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/20\/in-search-of-scrappy-cels\/","title":{"rendered":"In Search of Scrappy Cels"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Want to see some Scrappy cels? You can. Just go to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences\u2019 Margaret Herrick Library in LA and look up the \u201cDonald Gledhill Animation Project Collection<\/a>.\u201d Gledhill was the first husband of Margaret Herrick, who earned the honor of having a library named after her by being the Academy\u2019s first executive director (and, at least possibly, the person who named the Oscar \u201cOscar\u201d). He tried to put together a how-to book on animation, and while it never reached publication, he assembled a pretty remarkable-sounding collection of 1930s cartoon artwork for it. It includes a total of nine cels from two Scrappy cartoons, Scrappy\u2019s Rodeo<\/em> and Scrappy\u2019s Side Show<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Here\u2019s one from the latter short, with a late-model Scrappy:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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I haven\u2019t checked out the Gledhill collection myself, but I should\u2014and so should you, especially if you live closer to it than I do. Those nine cels are the only surviving ones from Scrappy cartoons that I know about.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Over the years, I have managed to assemble a small collection of original Scrappy art. Here\u2019s some of it<\/a>, and here\u2019s some more<\/a>. And here\u2019s the original art for the Scrappy pull toy<\/a>. A little more has escaped my grasp<\/a>. But I\u2019ve never seen a Scrappy cel for sale.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If I\u2019d been around in the late 1930s, however, I might have been able to pick up a Scrappy cel at a reasonable price. Original cels from Hollywood cartoons were widely sold as a fun and affordable form of art, with the most famous and influential example being the Disney pieces offered by San Francisco\u2019s Courvoisier Galleries<\/a>. Leon Schlesinger also made cels from his cartoons available, and was nice enough to sign them<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

And Charles Mintz seized the opportunity as well. Here\u2019s a December 1937 article from a New Jersey paper:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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The Mintz cels may have been intended to dress up children\u2019s rooms, but 80 years later, there are a bunch of examples on eBay at prices up to $1200<\/a>. Here are three of them, all in nice shape:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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And here\u2019s the label from one of these cel\u2019s backsides explaining its provenance:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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These cels also have stickers on their backs from Cleveland\u2019s Guenther Galleries; presumably it and Bamberger\u2019s, the department store mentioned in the newspaper article participated in an art sale program that may well have involved other merchants around the country.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

All<\/em> of these Mintz cels on eBay are from Happy Tots<\/em>. Which\u2014you probably already know this\u2014was not a Scrappy cartoon. The Gledhill collection at the Margaret Herrick Library also has some Happy Tots<\/em> cels, suggesting that it was a cartoon whose cels Mintz dispensed with particularly freely.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So which Scrappy cartoons was that newspaper article referring to? That is a toughie. The newspaper piece specifies that the cels were from Color Rhapsodies, and that some featured Scrappy, Margy, Oopy, and Yippy. But Scrappy only appeared in four Color Rhapsodies. The last of them, Merry Mutineers<\/em>, was released in August 1936, well before the newspaper announcement. All his other cartoons were in black and white.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s certainly possible that the newspaper story\u2019s wording was sloppy and that the Scrappy cels you could buy were in black and white. Many of the surviving cels from the Schlesinger studio\u2019s sales program are from black and white cartoons<\/a>, so there\u2019s no reason to assume that Mintz would have rejected the idea of selling b&w cels out of hand. Especially since Scrappy, his most recognizable property, was mostly monochromatic.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Still, the fact that it\u2019s cels from Happy Tots<\/em> that are available in relative abundance makes me uncertain just how many pieces of Mintz art made it to the public. I\u2019m not assuming that any Scrappy cels were sold, let alone that they survived until the present day. But it\u2019s nice to think they may be out there somewhere, perhaps in the possession of some late-1930s child who once had one up in his or her bedroom\u2014and was smart enough to hold onto it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Want to see some Scrappy cels? You can. Just go to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences\u2019 Margaret Herrick Library in LA and look up the \u201cDonald Gledhill Animation Project Collection.\u201d Gledhill was the first husband of Margaret Herrick, who earned the honor of having a library named after her by being the … Continue reading In Search of Scrappy Cels<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-original-art"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2D9Zl-BZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355","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=2355"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3189,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions\/3189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}