{"id":2974,"date":"2020-12-19T00:56:56","date_gmt":"2020-12-19T07:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/?p=2974"},"modified":"2020-12-19T13:13:17","modified_gmt":"2020-12-19T20:13:17","slug":"scrappy-mystery-graffiti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/19\/scrappy-mystery-graffiti\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrappy Mystery Graffiti"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?ssl=1\" rel=\"lightbox[2974]\"><br \/>\n<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-2976 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?resize=600%2C406&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"406\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?w=960&amp;ssl=1 960w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?resize=300%2C203&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?resize=768%2C519&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?resize=150%2C101&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/scrappy-paints-graffiti-clean.jpg?resize=400%2C270&amp;ssl=1 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hello from Scrappyland, where it&#8217;s been far too long since our last post. (I promise to do better in 2021, which won&#8217;t be tough.)<\/p>\n<p>At least this overdue return features something unusually special: a Scrappy image shared with us by my friend Peter Huemer, grandson of Dick Huemer and son of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/01\/remembering-dr-richard-huemer\/\">Dr. Richard Huemer<\/a>. As you can see, it depicts Scrappy and graffiti he has seemingly just painted involving other cartoons. They&#8217;re all items that Dick Huemer worked on, and they include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Mutt and Jeff, whom Huemer began animating for Raoul Barre circa 1916, at the very start of his long career in animation<\/li>\n<li>Koko the Clown, the <em>Out of the Inkwell<\/em> protagonist animated by Huemer beginning around 1916<\/li>\n<li>Disney&#8217;s Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck<\/li>\n<li>Fantasia (&#8220;Fanny&#8221; and &#8220;Tasia,&#8221; which Huemer cowrote<\/li>\n<li>Also referenced are Walt and Lilly Disney as well as Art Davis and Sid Marcus, Huemer&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/staff\/\">Mintz studio collaborators<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, the art is a playful tribute to Dick Huemer&#8217;s career from the beginning through the Fleischer and Mintz periods and well into his Disney days.\u00a0And that&#8217;s all I know about it.<\/p>\n<p>The most obvious mystery: Who drew it? Our candidates must logically begin with Dick Huemer himself, and he seems like a good one. After all, he knew where he&#8217;d worked off the top of his head, and he could draw Scrappy. (As shown here, he&#8217;s ever so slightly off the early-1930s model as established by Huemer, but that wouldn&#8217;t be surprising; by the time he would have drawn this, he would have been rusty.) The style isn&#8217;t so obviously Huemer&#8217;s that it&#8217;s clear it&#8217;s his, but at worst, it&#8217;s in the same Zip Code.<\/p>\n<p>If it <em>wasn&#8217;t<\/em> Dick who drew it, we can reasonably narrow the field of contenders to people intimately familiar with his career, most likely close friends in the animation industry.<\/p>\n<p>Mystery #2 is <em>when<\/em> this piece was created. There&#8217;s a giant hint in the fact that chronologically, the last Huemer work mentioned is <em>Fantasia<\/em>. That came out in 1940; in December 1941, <em>Dumbo<\/em>, which Huemer cowrote with Joe Grant, was released. The fact that Fantasia is there and <em>Dumbo<\/em> isn&#8217;t&#8211;not to mention even later Huemer efforts such as the <em>Disneyland<\/em> TV show&#8211;strongly suggests that this art dates from the period when <em>Fantasia<\/em> had been released or was at least in production but <em>Dumbo<\/em> remained in the future.\u00a0Though that&#8217;s just a guess; maybe our mystery artist just ran out of space for additional Huemer references..<\/p>\n<p>Also mysterious: The precise events that led to this drawing&#8217;s existence. Did Dick do it to amuse himself? Was it for publication? Why does it spotlight Scrappy, who was part of Huemer&#8217;s distant past at this point? Dick left Mintz in 1933; the last Scrappy cartoon, <em>The Little Theater<\/em>, was released in February 1941, ending the series after a long decline. It would seem that the drawing might have been done around the time that Scrappy went away and Screen Gems shed the final vestiges of its Mintz-era origins. Whether that means anything, I can&#8217;t say.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s possible that answers to some or all of these questions lie in some writing next to Scrappy&#8217;s left foot. But it&#8217;s far too faint to decipher, even in the version Peter provided, which I lightened for publication here.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, it would be fun to know the backstory here, and if you happen to know&#8211;or just want to guess&#8211;I&#8217;d love to hear from you. Even if it remains a mystery, it&#8217;s a delightful one&#8211;and more evidence that we&#8217;re nowhere near done rediscovering our lost Scrappy heritage.<\/p>\n<p><em>[<strong>Update<\/strong>: On Facebook, Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden theorizes that Huemer drew this a lot later, for a publication such as <\/em>Cartoonist Profiles<em>: &#8220;The inking matches similar images Huemer created in this era.&#8221;]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello from Scrappyland, where it&#8217;s been far too long since our last post. (I promise to do better in 2021, which won&#8217;t be tough.) At least this overdue return features something unusually special: a Scrappy image shared with us by my friend Peter Huemer, grandson of Dick Huemer and son of Dr. Richard Huemer. As &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/19\/scrappy-mystery-graffiti\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Scrappy Mystery Graffiti<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-original-art"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2D9Zl-LY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974","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=2974"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3015,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974\/revisions\/3015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}