The Art of Yippy, or Possibly Woofus

If you’re collecting vintage animation art on a budget, specializing in Scrappy will save you money. But not because Mintz art is exceptionally cheap. It’s just that so little of it ever comes up for sale that you’ll only rarely have the opportunity to buy anything at all.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never seen a Scrappy cel reach the market. And some of the Scrappy artwork I have managed to buy—like this, this, and this—is so ephemeral that don’t know how or where it was used. It seems unlikely that the Mintz studio went out of its way to preserve its production art, though I cling to the vanishingly minuscule chance that Columbia still has it all neatly filed away somewhere.

Anyhow, I was pleased to recently add another piece of Scrappy art to my collection—or, more specifically, a piece of Yippy art. Except I’m about to question whether it is, indeed, a depiction of Yippy.

The drawing in question was made for a series of cartoon-character pinback buttons manufactured by a firm called Western Theater in the 1930s. The company did an impressive job of lining up licenses with animation studios and newspaper syndicates, resulting in 50 pins. They included everyone from big names (Betty Boop, Hans, Fritz) to also-rans (Goopy Gear, Marty Monk). Several featured Mintz characters, from both the Scrappy and Krazy Kat series.

Here’s the drawing I bought:

Curiously, Western Theater released its Yippy button in two slightly different designs. One features the art shown above. The other is a pretty crude version of the same image, as if copied by a lesser artist. I don’t know which came first, but I’d hate to think Western Theater started with the button at left and saw fit to replace it with the one at right.

I don’t know who drew the art I bought, but it has a pleasingly Mintzian verve to it, and the odds seem high that it was done at the studio rather than by somebody working directly for Western Theater.

But here’s the strange thing about the drawing: That isn’t the Yippy we know. That Yippy is a small dog, possibly some sort of terrier. Like all Mintz characters, he can look shockingly different from appearance to appearance, but at least you can generally tell who he is.

A few examples from previous Scrappyland posts:

The pooch shown on the pin is entirely different—seemingly a larger, lankier hound dog of some sort. But he does resemble the dog in several 1932 Scrappy cartoons: The Pet Shop, Camping Out, and The Bad Genius, at least. Whether or not that dog is Yippy, he did replace the terrier as a supporting character in the series for a time. And let’s face it, he comes off as a bit of a Pluto knockoff:

Via Animation Resources, here’s a model sheet from Ray Patterson’s collection. Showing Oopy and Scrappy for scale, it seems to establish that the hound is nearly Marmaduke-esque in size, though he was never particularly gigantic in the cartoons. Note that Patterson or some unknown person seems to have used this art as a scratchpad for personal notes.

The hound also appears on the poster for 1933’s Scrappy’s Party—a cartoon that doesn’t involve a dog at all:

And then there’s the 1934 Scrappy Big Little Book. Most, if not all, of its illustrations look like they might have existed before the book was conceived. The author, Pat Patterson—who was also credited on two other Columbia-related BLBs—patched together an episodic storyline around that art. Yippy is a major character. But other dogs make fleeting appearances, including a hound bearing a striking resemblance to the one on the pin.

His name is Woofus—not to be confused with the Texas Woofus, which didn’t come along until a couple of years later:

So did Scrappy have two dogs in this book? Nope: Patterson explains that Woofus was “a schnozzle hound owned by Brinker the baker.” There you go: Woofus is a schnozzle hound.

In the Scrappy Big Little Book, Yippy and Woofus are unquestionably different dogs. But the whole purpose of Patterson’s text was to weave existing art into a (semi-)coherent narrative. Revisiting the Scrappy cartoons themselves for this article, I realized that the classic terrier version of Yippy appeared in fewer cartoons than I thought. He came and went, and in between, Scrappy had other dogs who might have been Yippy—and at least one who definitely wasn’t. Bottom line: It’s not all that easy to tell if any given dog is or isn’t Yippy.

1934’s Scrappy’s Dog Show has dogs aplenty, but none of them seem to be Yippy. In 1935’s Scrappy’s Camera Troubles, the terrier Yippy is back, though significantly redesigned. The following year, In My Gondola gives Scrappy … a french bulldog, maybe? Then in 1937’s Canine Capers, Yippy is back in pretty much his original design. A year later, in Scrappy’s Playmates (1938), Scrappy buys a St. Bernard named Butch. 1939’s The Charm Bracelet and 1940’s Practice Made Perfect and The Pooch Parade have a dog who may be Yippy—but if so, he’s been redesigned in the mode of Betty Boop’s regrettably cutesy pal Pudgy.

So I’m not ready to discount a scenario in which Yippy started out as a terrier, was briefly a schnozzle hound (possibly under the alias of Woofus), may have tried life as a french bulldog, went back to being a terrier, and ended his days as a generic cute pup of indeterminate breed. If you have any better theories, please let me know.

Meanwhile, Pluto—who’s about 11 months older than Yippy—began life as a bloodhound named Rover but quickly became his still-recognizable self, and stayed so. Nine decades later, he remains a big business for Disney—okay, a minor one, but surely a heck of a lot more profitable than Yippy was even at his peak. (The Western Theater pin is the only piece of merchandise I know that was solely devoted to Yippy.)

Maybe if Scrappy’s cartoons and merchandising hadn’t been so hap-hazard in terms of consistency, we’d have a Mintzland, Mintz World, Mintz Stores, and Mintz Plus streaming service today. Or possibly not—but it’s fun to think about.

Addendum: Another of Western Theater’s Mintz buttons is noteworthy for naming-related reasons. On the pin for Scrappy’s little brother, he’s called Vontzy rather than Oopy. In a 2013 Scrappyland comment, Mark Kausler said that Dick Huemer himself told him that he intended the character to be known as Vontzy—a reference to Vontz, the Yiddish word for bedbug. Western Theater’s button is the only piece of Scrappy merchandise I’ve seen that uses that name, but if Dick Huemer said Oopy was really Vontzy, that’s all we need to know. He wouldn’t be the first or last movie star who adopted a stage name to conceal his heritage.