Here’s yet another inexplicable early Scrappy ad, from an August 1931 issue of The Film Daily. As you’ve no doubt already noticed, Scrappy is ladling delight moviegoers out of a bowl, whereupon they turn into coins. The idea is to depict the money-making power of Scrappy shorts, and once again, it seems almost certain that nobody at the Mintz studio was involved in this oddity. If nothing else, it presents a rare opportunity to see Scrappy wearing long pants.
The ad claims that Scrappy is the only human character now in cartoon movies. I don’t think that was true: Farmer Alfalfa was still a working cartoon character at the time, and Bosko had been around for a couple of years. And Van Beuren’s human Tom and Jerry were getting going at nearly the same time that Scrappy was. But Betty Boop was still a dog in 1931, and Popeye hadn’t yet shown up in animated form. Scrappy probably did stick out in an era that was utterly dominated by Mickey Mouse’s anthropomorphic influence — even though he had a Mickey-like black-button nose at first.