Almost 16 years ago, I created a Twitter account for Scrappyland. It was never that huge a deal—all it did was post automated links to new posts on this site, and only 74 people bothered to follow it. So Elon Musk may not bother to fly into a rage upon hearing this—but given his abominable behavior, I’ve decided that maintaining even a minor presence on his site is no longer tenable.
If for some unaccountable reason you’ll deeply miss this feed, fear not: I’ve reestablished it on the much friendlier social network known as Bluesky. You can follow @scrappyland.com here. While you’re at it, you may want to follow my main Bluesky account, @harrymccracken.com, as well. Scrappy and I thank you for your support.
Here’s a recent addition to the Scrappyland archive, and a pretty remarkable one: a print that Charles Mintz presumably sent out to personal friends and/or business associates in the mid-to-late 1930s. I know it looks like a Christmas card, but it’s much larger than one and extremely suitable for framing. If you click on it, you can inspect it at a much larger size. If you insist, you can also see a color version here.
Exactly what it depicts remains enigmatic to me. The lad inside the wagon is surely Scrappy, and the girl with him looks like a brunette version of Margy. The boy doffing his hat on top of the wagon could be Scrappy, though he might just be a generic 1930s cartoon kid of the sort who appeared in Mintz’s Color Rhapsodies. That would mean the girl next to him is likely not Margy herself but simply Margyesque. But that must be Oopy on the other end of the wagon roof. Right?
The wagon is being pulled—or, actually, not pulled—by what seem to be inebriated seals. Thank you to Friend of Scrappy John Vincent for pointing out their resemblance to the title character of the 1936 Screen Gems cartoon The Untrained Seal.
There are also seven spindly elves. Wrapped gifts abound—some possibly to be delivered by the kids—raising the possibility that the structures in the background are Santa’s workshop. Not present: Krazy Kat, Mintz’s other principal continuing character besides Scrappy.
I am, of course, curious who painted this idiosyncratic and opulent piece. Rather than looking like a scene from a Mintz cartoon, it has the feel of a European children’s book illustration. That turned my mind to the work of such celebrated 1930s Disney inspiration artists as Albert Hurter, Gustav Tenggren, and Ferdinand Horvath. And what do you know: Horvath worked for Charles Mintz. According to Didier Ghez’s fine 2015 book They Drew as They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney’s Golden Age, he joined the studio on May 31, 1938, after two tours of duty at Disney. “By the new year, however, he was out of work again,” Ghez writes.
I don’t know which Columbia cartoons Horvath worked on, or why his stint was so short, but his employment at the studio is an intriguing glimmer of ambition on Mintz’s part. After leaving Columbia and failing to get re-rehired at Disney, the artist briefly sculpted characters for George Pal’s Puppetoons. Then he tried again at Disney. When that didn’t pan out, he left animation.
Horvath, who famously contributed pre-production art to Snow White, certainly had a quaint style in the same aesthetic Zip Code as Charlie Mintz’s Christmas print. But after studying examples of his drawings from Ghez’s book and elsewhere, I haven’t found any that obviously identify him as our mystery artist. Indeed, I’m inclined to say he probably wasn’t. Maybe someone else at the studio was also capable of this fairy tale-esque flair: If you know of any candidates, I’d love to hear about them.
Season’s greetings and a happy new year to you from me and the entire Scrappyland gang.
I’m not sure when people stopped carrying handkerchiefs. But it was certainly later than the 1930s, when Kleenex was still a relatively new invention and hadn’t yet cornered the market on nose-blowing aides. I’m guessing here, but I imagine that in the pre-tissue era, good parents made sure their kids carried hankies with them, just in case. What better way to encourage the habit than by giving them ones with featuring Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy?
These three examples are new to the Scrappyland collection. They use stock art, but someone put thought into their design: I like the 360-degree effect. They are in good condition given that they must be something like 90 years old and were meant to serve as portable germ collectors.
I’m not going to sneeze into them, of course—but I am halfway tempted to tuck one into my breast pocket the next time I wear a suit.
Ub Iwerks will always be best remembered for the essential role he played in bringing Mickey Mouse to life. But if you’re interested enough in 1930s animation to be reading this site, you probably familiar with the cartoons he made at his own studio, featuring characters such as Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper. They were not particularly successful, and he ended up going back to the Disney studio and working productively on special effects for the rest of his career.
But between the closure of Iwerks’ studio in 1936 and his return to Disney, he directed a bunch of cartoons for other studios—including Charles Mintz’s Screen Gems. They were in the Color Rhapsodies series, and we haven’t mentioned any of them here because didn’t feature Scrappy.
Or so I’ve always assumed. I kinda figured if they had, I’d know about it! But in a recent Scrappyland comment, Mark Kausler—a Friend of Scrappy and as good a friend as animation history has, period—amazed me. He pointed out that Iwerks’ 1938 Color Rhapsody Horse on the Merry Go Round includes a Scrappy appearance.
(Actually, I’m not sure whether the name of this short was Horse on the Merry Go Round or The Horse on the Merry Go Round—newspaper ads that mention it use both titles.)
This isn’t a Scrappy cartoon. Not quite, anyhow. It’s set at an amusement park, and an early scene involves a booth with a wheel-of-fortune style game. Someone wins a prize. A Scrappy doll!
Here he is:
We’ve written about real-world Scrappy dolls in quite a few Scrappyland posts, including this one, this one, and this one. None of them look like the Scrappy doll in Iwerks’ cartoon, but I wouldn’t be startled if Scrappy dolls were indeed awarded as prizes at amusement parks and carnivals. Or at least they should have been.
As Mark says in his comment, this fleeting Scrappy appearance is a bit of a mystery. Did Iwerks himself decide to plant the character in this cartoon? Or maybe the writer did? (Readily-available prints of the short have reissue titles sans credits.) Perhaps it was a willful bit of cross-promotion for the Mintz studio’s biggest star. Or maybe it wasn’t meant to accomplish anything in particular.
I’m not even positive whether most of the people in a typical 1938 audience would have instantly recognized Scrappy and been at least mildly pleased to spot him. If they didn’t, the whole thing would have been kind of pointless, since it’s not a gag—just a bit of scene-setting.
Regardless, I thank Mark for bringing this to our attention. It’s not quite a lost Scrappy cartoon—or a lost cartoon at all, since it’s aired on the Totally Tooned In syndication package and MeTV, and may well show up on the new MeTV Toons channel. Maybe you already knew about it, even. But it’s my favorite Scrappy discovery of 2024.
Here’s Horse on the Merry Go Round in … well, not quite its entirety, but close. An unfortunate gag right after the Scrappy doll’s appearance is cut from this modern TV print. (If you must, you can find a worse copy of the cartoon on YouTube where it’s intact.) This version also gives the cartoon yet another name: the no-nonsense Horse on Merry Go Round. I’m fairly confident that wasn’t its precise original title.
We’ve got a new link in our left-hand sidebar: Newsletter. Click it, and you can sign up to receive every Scrappyland post right in your inbox. Until now, subscribing to Scrappyland—which I only vaguely knew was possible, though a bunch of you managed to do it—got you an excerpt, and you had to go to the site to read the whole thing. Henceforth, the email version should offer each post in its entirety.
Just dont expect the emails to arrive on anything like a regular schedule—but I do plan to post more frequently than I have so far in 2024. The topic here is Scrappy, so I’m in no danger of running out of material—ever.
I’m not surprised that you could buy Scrappy stationery in the 1930s. But I didn’t know for sure until recently, when I acquired this letter written on it. It features Scrappy and Yippy in an iconic pose, and–well, you can read it for yourself:
If you didn’t get through the whole thing, it’s from a girl named Mary Sue. She gave her mother a brief account of a lovely wedding (Aunt Marie wore an orange silk dress), and part of it is by a third person—most likely Mary Sue’s father. Whoever Mary Sue was, I hope she was a raving Scrappy fan rather than merely someone who had received a box of Scrappy notepaper as a gift.
After all these years of writing Scrappyland, I’m still uncertain just how well-known Scrappy was in the 1930s. We do know that he wasn’t Mickey Mouse. He probably wasn’t even Porky Pig. I do feel he was probably more recognizable than Flip the Frog, though I have no way to prove it. But I’m intrigued by the fact that this Scrappy stationery feels no need to identify the character. Maybe that’s a tiny sign that if you wrote someone a letter on it, there was a decent chance they’d know who he was on sight.
Hello out there! Apologies for the lack of posts this year. But I haven’t forgotten Scrappyland—far from it. I’ve just been busy behind the scenes.
Back in 2012, I turned Scrappyland into a blog by putting it on the WordPress platform. I’m glad I did. However, that involved choosing a theme to use as the basis of the site’s design. The one I picked worked well, but in the decade-plus since I chose it, it became archaic from a technical standpoint. At some point, its settings even seized up. I could post to the site, but its design was frozen in place, and I worried it might stop working altogether.
So earlier this year, I finally got around to moving the site to a new, modern theme. If you don’t notice any changes, that’s kind of the point—for now, I want it to look pretty much the same as ever. Getting that done turned out to push my WordPress skills to the limit. (I might make a few more tweaks, and lemme know if you spot any glitches.)
There is one major change: If you read the site on a phone, it now shrinks down gracefully to fit on a small screen, and swaps out the sidebars for a menu button. If I feel like further adjustments, I can make them now. And I’m pretty sure this new theme will serve the site well for at least the next few years. I think of it as Scrappyland 3.0, with the original 2005 site being 1.0 and the 2012 blog as 2.0.
Anyhow, now that this migration is out of the way, I can get back to writing about Scrappy, and I promise that I will. Until then, please enjoy this photo of a purse with Scrappy and Margy on it—and see you soon.
You look like you’d enjoy a good Scrappy story. Here’s one from 1932—the start of one, at least.
More specifically, it’s Chapter 1 of Book One of The Adventures of ‘Scrappy’ and His Dog Yippy—written by F. Heath Cobb and illustrated by our friend Dick Huemer (working under his occasional pen name of Dick Heumor, which he adopted because it hoped it would help people figure out how to pronounce his name—which it didn’t).
While this would seem to be the first Adventures of ‘Scrappy’ booklet, it’s the second I’ve shared (here’s the earlier one). I don’t know much about them other than that they were given away at theaters. How many booklets there were, I can’t say. But in all my years of Scrappy collecting, I haven’t seen that many for sale. Unless I find a copy of Book One, Chapter 2, someday, we may never learn what happened to Scrappy and Yippy at their fishing party, and for that, I apologize in advance.
Oh, and as I wrote back in the early days of Scrappyland—and forgot until I looked it up just now–these booklets were also included in Scrappy paint sets.
But really, the main reason I’m writing this is not to talk about The Adventures of ‘Scrappy.’ My topic today is F. Heath Cobb. Along with writing these Scrappy booklets, he was the author of How to Draw a Cartoon, an instructional pamphlet—credited to Scrappy himself—distributed through schools. (It’s less interesting than it sounds, which is why I haven’t gotten around to writing about it here yet—I will someday, I promise.)
Cobb wasn’t the only author credited with writing a Scrappy book. Pat Patterson wrote the Scrappy Big Little Book, and Hal Hode was responsible for a BLB-esque book from another publisher. But as the author of several adventures of Scrappy serialized through multiple booklets, Cobb must have been bylined on more Scrappy publications than any other scribe. He also had a wonderfully evocative name. It brings to mind a man of accomplishment—the author of works other than Scrappy booklets, surely. Maybe a bit of a toff.
Still, I couldn’t be positive that “F. Heath Cobb” wasn’t some sort of house pseudonym along the lines of Burt L. Standish, the author of the Frank Merriwell books. So I set out to learn if he was a real person—and if so, what he did with himself other than write Scrappy books.
It turns out that there have been more F. Heath Cobbs than you might expect. Take, for instance, the one who taught at a community college in Tacoma in the 1970s. He seemed like an unlikely candidate to be chronicling Scrappy’s adventures forty years earlier. But with a bit of rummaging on Newspapers.com, I found this January 9, 1949 Atlanta Constitution obituary:
A long-time publicity agent for Columbia? This is our Cobb. Scrappy’s Cobb.
Though the obit didn’t mention Cobb writing Scrappy books, it did cover a lot of other ground. Producer of the Cole Porter musical No, No, Nanette. Writer and director of other musicals. Owner of Hollywood’s famous El Capitan Theater. Prominent ad man. Father of two—here he is, on the right, with F. Heath Cobb Jr. (who, it turns out, was the aforementioned Tacoma professor).
Via Ancestry.com
When I tried to dig into all this, I usually didn’t get very far. For instance, I couldn’t find any evidence that Cobb owned the El Capitan (which does have a roundabout association with Charles Mintz: It’s now a Disney property). Maybe he came up with Buick’s long-running tagline, but I saw mention of that achievement only in his death notices. I am also suspicious about the claim that he produced anything for Broadway, including No, No, Nanette (which wasn’t actually by Cole Porter).
Still, Cobb did have a Nanette connection: He was married to Nancy Welford, a former Zigfield Girl who’d starred in one of several productions of the wildly popular musical that played simultaneously in 1925. Hers got to San Francisco and Los Angeles, at least. Decades later, stories about her identified her as the original Nanette (no) and said she’d played the role on Broadway (not that I’ve been able to verify).
When Cobb and Welford married in October 1924, it had made headlines—in part because she was already a celebrity but also because her parents claimed to be in disbelief. It was Welford’s first marriage but—according to one Ancestry.com family tree—Cobb’s fifth. A 1922 article, which cited his “smart clothes and irresistible manner,” said he’d gotten in trouble for marrying one of his wives before divorcing the prior one. He also narrowly avoided being prosecuted for impersonating an Army Captain; charges weren’t pressed because he’d sold $250,000 of Liberty Bonds.
Do you begin to understand why Mr. and Mrs. Welford weren’t thrilled with the idea of their daughter marrying this guy?
Note that the above story identified Cobb as someone “said to be a screen director,” adding to the general mystery about the man’s actual profession. A 1925 article about him, published in a trade publication he’d joined, provided more details about his background—child of show people, newspaperman, circus, vaudeville publicist, employee of Essanay Studios. But given that it repeats his apparently spurious claim of having been an Army Captain during the Great War, I’m not sure what to believe.
Getting back to the Cobb obit: Its mention of his involvement with a musical called Nancy is one of its few alleged factoids that definitely is accurate, more or less. By now, you’ve guessed that the show starred Nancy Welford, who supposedly inspired it. According to The Los Angeles Times, she played “a little country girl bent upon spreading happiness.” Other articles on the production compared it to Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Unfortunately for Cobb and Welford, Nancy was “not a pronounced success in any of the cities where it was shown,” reported a Seattle Star story. After tryouts in Long Beach, the show premiered at Los Angeles’s Playhouse Theater on May 24, 1926. On June 14, it opened in San Francisco. A little over two weeks later, newspaper accounts said it was about to begin its final week. Even that was apparently cut short when the chorus walked out in a salary dispute.
As far as I know, Cobb’s career as a theatrical producer did not survive Nancy‘s disappointing reception. But as the 1920s wound down, Welford continued to perform in stage musicals, including Twinkle Twinkle (with Joe E. Brown) and a light opera called Bambina. In 1929, she made her movie debut in Gold Diggers of Broadway—the second all-talking, all-Technicolor picture. (Sadly, only two reels survive.) I’m guessing this publicity shot, depicting her literally digging gold, relates to the film.
Gold Diggers of Broadway was a big hit, but Welford only made four more movies. By 1933, her Hollywood career was over.
Meanwhile, Cobb had already returned to the PR work he’d pursued before marrying her. A 1930 Exhibitors Herald World story noted he was involved with the promotion for a revival of (ugh) D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In 1931, the Motion Picture Daily reported that he had joined Columbia’s advertising department. And in 1932 and 1933, newspaper articles—ones possibly planted by him—said he was the First Assistant National Chief Ranger of the Buck Jones Rangers Club, a fan group for the studio’s cowboy star.
This was also the same timeframe when Cobb wrote Scrappy books. We can assume he got the gig as part of his Columbia publicity duties. But I’d love to know: Was he just being dutiful? Or did he eagerly seize the opportunity to tell Scrappy stories? Maybe he had some measure of interaction with Mintz studio personnel—Dick Huemer, at least, since he illustrated the booklets. We’ll probably never know. But I prefer to believe he enjoyed the project. After all, he did choose to take credit for it.
And hey, in Chapter 8 of “The Adventures of ‘Scrappy,'” Cobb may have told a story with an oddly autobiographical angle. Book One, “Scrappy Meets a Hero,” involved him getting the chance to hear a WWI vet explain “what really happened to the boys in the trenches.” I don’t have this booklet—just some sample pages from an old auction listing. But the vet’s name–”Colonel Fullerton Bull”—hints at the tantalizing possibility that he, like Cobb, wasn’t a war hero after all.
Increasingly, Cobb made the news for reasons no PR man would seek out. In January 1928, The Los Angeles Times said that he and Welford had lost a suit brought by Fred Hartsook, a well-known Hollywood photographer, over a $910 bill they hadn’t paid. In 1934, Variety reported on a scandal Cobb was involved in that does sound pretty scandalous: He admitted to having forged the signatures of Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sydney, Mae West, and other stars on contracts to endorse a hosiery firm he represented. (He claimed he did it “to save time,” confident that he could gain their consent later.) Later in the month, Variety noted that Cobb and Welford had been sued again, this time over an unpaid $150 clothing bill at a New York store.
That last item is the final one I’ve found indicating that Cobb and Welford were still married. At some point, possibly around then, they split up. Cobb went on to wed wife #6. He mostly disappeared from newspapers by the mid-1930s, but in 1946, at least a couple of newspapers published an anti-union letter from an F. Heath Cobb of North Augusta, S.C. I think he may be our man, engaging in what we’d now call astroturfing. In any event, I’m curious what brought him to Atlanta, where he died three years later.
As for Welford, she too remarried. She also worked as a sales clerk in San Francisco, did local theater in the Bay Area (including some Gilbert and Sullivan), and enjoyed being remembered for No, No, Nanette, especially after its 1971 Broadway revival. You’ve already seen that she wasn’t mentioned in Cobb’s obituary. And when she died in 1991—more than 40 years after her ex-spouse—he was absent from hers.
I seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole here, as we so often do on Scrappyland. As usual, it’s been a rewarding experience. If there are Scrappy books written by someone named F. Heath Cobb, you know there’s going to be a story behind the intriguing name. And it will probably be even weirder than whatever pops into your head. Or did you naturally assume he was an oft-married fabulist and failed impresario?
We’ve discussed the Scrappy doll manufactured by E.D. & T.M. Co., Inc. for the Great Lakes Novelty Co. of Chicago here before. He was one of at least four Scrappy dolls offered in the 1930s, and I think I can safely declare he was the most popular. All the others are super hard to seemingly impossible to find, while this one shows up all the time. In fact, I see two on eBay right now.
In past Scrappyland posts, we’ve shared promotional photos featuring the little guy being fussed over by other Columbia stars—namely Edith Fellows, Moe, Larry, and Curly. The chances seem high that it’s the same doll in both photos and that the shots were taken around October, 1937 in a shoot that involved both Edith and the Stooges. (Note that the Scrappy doll in these photos is the apparently rarer variant with soft cloth hands.)
As familiar with the Scrappy doll as I was, I’d never seen proof that actual kids not employed by Columbia owned and liked it. But now I have, and it’s a delightful experience.
Back in the 1930s, a boy named George Kaupas owned the E.D. & T.M./Great Lakes Scrappy. Actually, he still does, reports his son Jeff, who wrote me about his dad’s plaything. And Jeff shared something amazing: a photo of young George with Scrappy. George, who looks like he could have won a Scrappy lookalike contest, has Scrappy in his lap, accompanied by a stuffed dog and something in the front I can’t quite identify.
I know that’s just the stock Scrappy doll George is holding, with the same head made out of some ceramic-ish substance. But his expression somehow seems to possess more of a glint of life than the one in Columbia’s promo pictures, don’t you think?
Jeff reports that his father still owns his Scrappy—but that the doll lost his original clothing at some point over the past eight decades. That’s no shock, and is also true of a fair number of the Scrappys who show up on eBay. Others, however, have managed to hold onto their outfits, which consist of surprisingly classy velvet brown overalls and a silky shirt. A decent percentage—including one of the two I own—even have their original E.D. & T.M. Co. tags.
As a Scrappy collector, you’d naturally want to find a minty example of the Scrappy doll—one who’d somehow avoided the rough and tumble of being dragged around, played with, and generally cherished. But if you come across a beat-up Scrappy, remember this: It’s evidence he was loved.
Among Scrappy rarities, few items are as tantalizingly obscure as the Scrappy newspaper strip. Though perhaps “newspaper strip” is a misnomer: As far as I know, the guys who tried to sell it to papers, Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, didn’t get it into any. But they did manage to sell it overseas, where it appeared in an Australian comic book called Wags around 1938. If you didn’t read it there (or in France’s Bilboquet), chances are that you didn’t read it anywhere—at least until 2016, when I began running the Wags version here. I apologize for taking so long to complete this exercise, but at long last I’m going to share the last Scrappy strips I have with you.
First, in the unlikely event that you’ve somehow forgotten our story thus far, kindly revisit these four previous Scrappyland posts:
Second, a little background on the strip…well, actually, more of an admission that I don’t know anything about it. Man, I wish I’d known about it a little earlier when I might have been able to buttonhole Will Eisner at the San Diego Comic-Con and grill him on the topic.
The big question, of course, is: Who drew this thing? When I started running these examples, I tried to answer that question, and failed. The one thing I was pretty confident about is that Eisner himself didn’t do it. But then, after seeing some additional examples of his early work, I changed my mind and decided he might well have been the mystery artist. However, I was thinking about the earliest examples: As the strip continued, the style changed noticeably. I really don’t have an opinion about who did the ones you’re about to read, except that they don’t feel like they were by an otherwise unpublished neophyte. The quality of the cartooning and storytelling is quite good, even if it has virtually nothing to do with the Mintz theatrical cartoons. So there seems a decent chance that we’ll eventually figure this out.
With that out of the way, here are strips 23-26 in the thrilling tale of “Scrappy and the Border Patrol.” Return with us now…
And that’s all the Scrappy comics I have for you. Whether it’s all that was drawn and/or Wags ran, I’m not sure. You’ll note that it seems to end in mid-action. But a few years later, when Eisner and Iger transmogrified Scrappy into a “new” character named Shorty Shortcake for Wonderworld Comics and ran a lightly retouched version of the Border Patrol story, they left off the last panel in the last strip above, giving the tale an abrupt conclusion in Wonderworld #3. And then, in the next issue, “Shorty” and his girlfriend “Suzy” were on to a new adventure set in Guatemala, drawn by a new artist. (The nominal creator, Jerry Williams, was a whole bunch of different guys over the feature’s run.)
Shorty Shortcake continued to run until Wonderworld #20. So if you consider him to be Scrappy operating under an assumed name, as I do, the end of the official Scrappy comic strip didn’t mean the end of Scrappy comics. Maybe I’ll run some of his stories here—it would be sad to think there are no more Scrappy strips out there to rediscover.
