On January 21, 2005 at 9:00am San Francisco time, I sent an email to a few animation-loving friends:
Subject: Scrappyland is live
At long last, the greatest obscure cartoon character of all time has a home on the Web: Scrappyland is up and running.
Tell your friends–at least if they’re Scrappy fans!
— Harry
That makes today the 15th anniversary of this site. (It did have a preview mode, with a smidge of content, that lasted through much of 2004.) I don’t remember wondering what sort of future the site would have when I was launching it. But I do know that 2005 Harry would be pleased to know that 2020 Harry was still at it.
Why has writing for this site been such a rewarding experience? Well, it’s rare to get the opportunity to create the definitive resource on anything. (I hope you won’t think me full of myself for considering Scrappyland to be such a resource.) There are other folks who write about Scrappy from time to time—hello, Paul, Steve, and Uncle John—but nobody else would be silly enough to spend so much time on the topic. (Even my own silliness flagged from mid-2005 through mid-2012, a stretch when I performed no meaningful updates to the site—but then I converted it into a blog and have since published over a hundred posts.)
It’s nice knowing that if people Google for Scrappy, the odds are high they’ll end up here. I can usually answer their questions, and some of the people who land here have stuff of their own to share. I find it therapeutic, after spending my days thinking about the present and future of technology, to devote some of my brain cells to cartoons that are almost ninety years old. I still get a little tingle from every new Scrappy discovery.
The challenge with a site like Scrappyland is that the day might arrive when I have nothing left to say—either because I’ve lost the urge or because I’ve covered every possible aspect of the subject. I’m pretty sure my interest won’t flag anytime soon. And even if all I do is write up stuff that’s still in my queue of Scrappy learnings, I’ll have enough material for the next several years.
Thank you for reading, and please stick around for more. Scrappyland has already had a longer run than Scrappy himself did as a cartoon star, so there’s no reason this can’t go on indefinitely.
Congratulations Harry. I won’t “mintz” words: This is a fantastic website and resource. And I rest easy every night knowing that Scrappyland is out there, knowing I can access it an anytime for up to the minute Scrappy news. I can only think of one word to celebrate your 15 year accomplishment: Yippy!
Congrats, Harry! I love the site because I love Scrappy! Keep up the great work and let’s keep scrappy’s legacy alive. I’ve got a few more scrappy superheroes that I’m working on, but of course, I changed it to “scamp” in case of copyright issues.
Will be awaiting your next post.
Congrats! Those early 1930’s Mintz cartoons, especially the Huemer-Marcus-Davis ones are, as Johnny Carson would have said, “wild wacky stuff.”
If you run out of ideas, maybe you can start posting about other obscure characters from the time period like willie whopper. Idk tho. Im just happy to see old sites like this one update in 2020
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