{"id":3213,"date":"2022-01-06T01:26:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T08:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/?p=3213"},"modified":"2022-01-06T09:09:49","modified_gmt":"2022-01-06T16:09:49","slug":"scrappy-and-krazy-to-the-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/06\/scrappy-and-krazy-to-the-rescue\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrappy and Krazy to the Rescue"},"content":{"rendered":"


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

Are you excited by the image above? You would have been, if you ran a TV station in 1955. And maybe even if you were just a kid at home glued to the tube.<\/p>\n

As we discussed back in 2013<\/a>, the state of animation of TV in the early 1950s was pretty darn abysmal. Not counting made-for-TV rarities such as Jay Ward and Alex Anderson\u2019s Crusader Rabbit<\/em>, it consisted entirely of 800 old theatrical shorts, 90% of which were so long in the tooth that they were silent<\/em> cartoons. So when a company called Hygo acquired rights to Screen Gems\u2019 Scrappy and Krazy Kat series\u2014which had ended in 1941 and 1940, respectively\u2014TV viewers didn\u2019t regard them as a throwback. Instead, they felt downright fresh.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The fact that Hygo\u2019s ad specifies that the cartoons in question have sound is evidence of just how ancient the competition was. For a moment, I wondered if anyone had a problem with them being in black and white, until I remembered that color TV didn\u2019t exist yet.<\/p>\n

After Scrappy ended his theatrical run, there wasn\u2019t much reason for anyone to create new artwork of him, so his depiction in this ad is a rare reappearance. (Here\u2019s another<\/a>.) Whoever drew him seems to have had fun with the assignment, though I can\u2019t quite tell whether Scrappy is turning on the TV he\u2019s already appearing on. Or changing the channel. Or maybe controlling the horizontal or the vertical<\/a>. (I won\u2019t dwell on the fact that he has four fingers on one hand but only three on the other.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Scrappy\u2019s reign as a TV kingpin did not last long\u2014newer cartoons starring more popular characters arrived soon after he did. In 1956 and 1957, for instance, a company called AAP<\/a>\u00a0acquired TV rights to Warner Bros.\u2019 pre-1950 cartoons and all the Popeye cartoons. By the late 1950s, lots of new animation was being produced specifically for broadcast.<\/p>\n

Scrappy stuck around for awhile: The \u201cMr. Cartoon\u201d and \u201cHappy Hal\u201d ads shown here are from 1961. But the onslaught of new cartoons\u2014in color, even!\u2014eventually left him seeming as out of date as the silent shorts he had displaced. I don\u2019t remember him still being around by the time I started my TV cartoon-watching days in the late 1960s, and a quick search of TV listings Newspapers.com does not indicate that he was.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, Scrappy has been so obscure for so long that it\u2019s invigorating to remember a moment when he was hailed as a hero. It probably won\u2019t happen again. But it would be nice if he at least got the chance.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, here\u2019s an only vaguely related oddity I came across when researching this article. It\u2019s from an Algona, Iowa newspaper, and reports the winners of a Scrappy cartoon contest at a local theater\u2026<\/p>\n

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

If this was from a 1930s newspaper, I would not have been that<\/em> intrigued: Holding a Scrappy cartoon contest would have been a totally normal thing to do. But this was from a 1964 paper. Scrappy was still the subject of drawing competitions held at theaters then?<\/p>\n

Well, no. More careful inspection revealed that the item was in a section of the paper devoted to republishing old news stories\u2014in this case from 1934. That<\/em> made sense.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the kicker: The paper was recapping the Scrappy contest in its edition for April 2, 1964, the day I was born. Scrappy, bless him, managed to welcome me by being in the news, at least sort of, if only in Algona. It might not have been an omen, but I for one find it to be an entertaining coincidence,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you excited by the image above? You would have been, if you ran a TV station in 1955. And maybe even if you were just a kid at home glued to the tube. As we discussed back in 2013, the state of animation of TV in the early 1950s was pretty darn abysmal. Not … Continue reading Scrappy and Krazy to the Rescue<\/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":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2D9Zl-PP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213","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=3213"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3233,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions\/3233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}