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 aids. 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.

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.

For years, I’ve known about the Scrappy lamp—a fine little plastic table lamp with color decals of Scrappy, Yippy, Margy, and Oopy on its shade. There are two of them in the Scrappyland archive, and at least one of them still works, though I wouldn’t recommend leaving a 1930s electrical device plugged in except under constant supervision. What I didn’t know was the backstory behind the lamp—including the fact that it was a product of what might have been the largest company ever to hitch its merchandising wagon to Scrappy

Then Scrappy merchant extraordinaire David Welch alerted me to something he was selling on eBay: ads from a 1930s magazine for the premium industry. They were from General Electric, and touted lamps made of a Bakelite-like GE plastic called Textolite. And they spotlighted … the Scrappy lamp.

Did that mean that the lamp was designed to be given away? Well, it was. Or at least I found a 1940 article about a bowling tournament in Meriden, Connecticut where Scrappy lamps seem to have been doled out as last-place prizes. I hope the recipients were pleased nonetheless.

That’s not to say that the Scrappy lamp was manufactured purely for giveaway purposes. Here it is being sold for a buck, which was real money back then—about $20 in 2021 dollars.

And here it is marked down to the irresistible price of fifty cents.

Whatever the price or lack thereof, the Scrappy lamp remains pleasing. GE’s ad copy about Textolite’s durable nature may help explain why quite a few of the lamps have survived in nice shape; at any given time, you can probably find one or more on eBay, should this post leave you coveting one.

If you haven’t seen the lamp in person, here’s a closer look courtesy of photos from a 2017 auction.

That particular Scrappy lamp came with a bonus I’d never seen until I put together this post: the original box, with elaborate artwork depicting Scrappy (praying, with a picture of Margy on his wall) and Margy (reading, with a picture of Oopy on the wall). Yippy somehow made it into both scenes. And so did the Scrappy lamp.

I don’t remember ever having heard of Textolite before, and indeed had forgotten that GE was ever in the plastics business. Then I remembered that Jack Welch, who eventually became the company’s fabulously successful (though in recent years reputationally damaged) CEO, got his start in the plastics division in Pittsfield, Mass, the address mentioned in the Scrappy lamp ad. In his memoir Jack: Straight From the Gut he even mentions his difficulty selling Textolite in the 1960s, though by that time GE was applying the brand to its lackluster answer to Formica.

Like J.C. Penney—which also embraced Scrappy in the 1930s—GE is still with us, but a shadow of its once-mighty self. The company (which sold its plastics business in 2007) recently announced plans to split itself into three parts, ending its long run as as one of the U.S.’s most iconic industrial giants. It just goes to show: Ending a relationship with Scrappy is always bad luck, even if it takes seventy or eighty years to catch up with you.

Every so often, I post examples of what I think of as Scrappy Mystery Art–pieces whose origins I can’t readily identify. When Debra Brossack bought an apparent Scrappy item at an estate sale, she emailed me to ask about it–and while I’m sorry I couldn’t tell her much, I’m glad she shared it.

Here’s Debra’s find…

That’s two pieces of art, which she reports seem to be painted on clipboards, connected by a piece of string. They depict the classic yanking-out-a-tooth-via-doornob gag. And the kid supervising the yanking certainly looks like Scrappy as he appeared in his later cartoons, when his proportions got a tad more realistic and his design evolved in what the Mintz studio probably thought was a cuter direction. (I suspect that if you’re reading this, you prefer the earlier, rubber hose-y Scrappy, as I do.)

I asked Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden, who knows about this kind of stuff, if he could shed any light on this artifact. He said that he has several examples of connected-frame Americana of this sort, and isn’t sure if they were sold at tourist traps or were home projects. Either explanation might explain the crudity of Debra’s art, which looks like someone’s unpolished rendition of what might have been a slicker pose by a Mintz artiste.

If you know more about this curiosity–or just want to idly speculate about its provenance–I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve been meaning to post the above image for a while now. It was brought to my attention by wondrous cartoonist/friend of Scrappy Milton Knight, and shows Scrappy on a battlefield, wearing a Japanese army helmet, with a Japanese flag and a tank in the background.

Or at least that sure is what it seems to depict. I did a quadruple take when I saw Milton share the picture on Facebook, and started asking myself questions. Was that definitely Scrappy? Was he even known in Japan? Was this some sort of piece of Axis propaganda? (The Little Theatre, the final Scrappy cartoon, was released in February 1941, depriving the character of the chance of fighting on our side.)

Milton told me that he didn’t know anything about the art, and found it on Pinterest. That led me to do a little research…and I found the following images, also on Pinterest.

Maybe these aren’t of Scrappy. But it doesn’t seem like a crazy supposition that whoever drew them could have seen Scrappy and drawn inspiration from the character. (According to the Pinterest postings, these are 1930s postcards, which places them in the Scrappy era.)

Way back when I started Scrappyland, someone who visited the site called Scrappy “the ungodly love-child of Mickey Mouse and Astro Boy.” That’s not a bad gut reaction, and as it indicates, Scrappy looks rather like a proto-anime character. Seeing these 1930s Japanese drawings led me to wonder: Is it possible that anime characters look like Scrappy because they’re drawn in a style directly influenced by Scrappy?

Having wondered that, I next wondered whether Osamu Tezuka, Japan’s comics and animation genius and the creator of Tetsuwan Atomu (aka Astro Boy) was a Scrappy fan. That led me to a fascinating 2012 Comics Journal article by Ryan Holmberg about Tezuka’s American influences. As Holmberg recounts, the artist frequently spoke about his love of American cartooning, in the form of Disney animation, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Dick Tracy, and other creations.

Holmberg’s piece doesn’t mention Scrappy. But it does discuss an early (1946) Tezuka character, Little Ma. Here are some images of him from the Holmberg article.

And here’s Pete, a character from New Treasure Island (1947), a seminal Tezuka comic, which Holmberg discusses in another article that argues that it was influenced by Disney comics by Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson.

Based on this imagery, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Tezuka may have known of Scrappy, and the character may have influenced his early work, as did Disney comics. (D. Wolfe, a Holmberg commenter, said the same thing.) Nothing odd about Tezuka not mentioning Scrappy in interviews–at the time of Tezuka’s death in 1989, the character was even more forgotten than he is now.

Exactly what form Tezuka might have seen Scrappy in, I don’t know. He spoke of his father’s home-movie projector, and perhaps some Scrappy reels somehow made their way from the U.S. to Japan. But if Tezuka was a Scrappy fan, then Scrappy isn’t the love child of Mickey Mouse and Atom Boy; Atom Boy is the love child of Scrappy and Mickey Mouse.

Any theories? Am I hallucinating?

Over on Facebook, Jerry Beck alerted me to the existence of a poster designed by Chip Kidd that features blown-up partial images of Oopy and Yippy. My jaw dropped when I saw it, and I immediately wondered if it was a harbinger of some imminent Great Scrappy Revival.

It turns out that it was produced a dozen years ago, for the 2004 Miami Book Fair. And here it is:

I only had to glance at it for a millisecond to recognize the source imagery that Kidd mined:

That’s the legendary Scrappy Puppet Theater, and Kidd clearly zoomed in on Oopy and Yippy’s heads, then made minor adjustments such as filling in Oopy’s cowlick, which is normally–and oddly–the same color as his skin. (Oopy with a filled-in cowlick looks a lot like Scrappy, which makes sense.)

A few questions:

Do I know why Kidd and/or the fair thought depicting Oopy and Yippy was a relevant way to celebrate books? No, especially since the characters’ only appearances in print were in a few kids’ tomes such as a Big Little Book about 80 years ago.

Did Kidd credit Mintz or Columbia, or otherwise acknowledge that his work was a Roy Lichtenstein-esque borrowing of existing art? Not that I can see, though perhaps it’s there in type too small to read. If he didn’t, I think that’s a shame, especially since hardly anybody attending a book fair in 2004 would know.

Would I hang the poster on my wall? Maybe, if I could find a copy for sale.

You’re waited more than long enough for another installment of the Scrappy newspaper comic strip, which may never have appeared in an actual newspaper, but did run in Wags, a comic weekly published in Australia and the UK. (Here, in case you missed them, are the first six strips.)

The Scrappy strip was produced by Eisner & Iger Associates. I’m still not the least bit sure which artist or artists in its employ worked on it–more thoughts on that in a future post–but I find that the strip, while a bit crude, is surprisingly engaging. These strips introduce Mr. De Welth, the kleptomaniac millionaire, who’s a genuinely entertaining character. And whoever is drawing this seems to be having fun.

Bottom line: I think that the odds are that the persons or persons responsible for this work did other comics, too, and we’ll be able to figure out who deserves the credit.

I find one panel in this sequence especially tantalizing:

With its dramatic staging, that’s either a one-panel contribution by someone other than the person who drew the rest of Scrappy, or proof that the Scrappy artist also did stuff other than a silly strip drawn in a very rough approximation of a third-tier animation studio’s style. Could it be Lou Fine? Mort Meskin? Will Eisner himself?

Anyhow, here’s more Scrappy for you. Stay tuned for further adventures.