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.

Let’s face it: In movie theaters, Scrappy was not particularly stiff competition for Mickey Mouse or Popeye in terms of sheer star power. But the old-time home-movie cartoon business had a curious leveling effect. I’m not sure if it raised the profile of second-stringers or diminished the lustre of iconic characters—maybe both—but anyone who was enough of a name brand to appear on a home-movie box was a star.

And Scrappy beamed from box art for years, long after his cartoon series was history.

Oddly enough, even though I’ve owned several Scrappy home movies for years, I’ve never seen any of them, since I don’t have a projector handy. But Friend of Scrappy Jason Fiore (who is, incidentally, 12) has done us all a favor by digitizing two examples, adding Scott Joplin soundtracks, and putting the results on YouTube.

Here’s Excel’s Stage Struck, a cut-down version of The Concert Kid (1934):

And this is Exclusive Movie Studios’ Bucking Horse, better known to you and me as an extract from Scrappy’s Pony (1936):

I never thought of Scrappy cartoons as being overly burdened by complex plots. But both of these silent short-shorts are less than half as long as the theatrical shorts they’re derived from, and in both cases, whoever did the editing accomplished it in part by chopping off roughly the first half, eliminating lengthy set-ups which explain how Oopy came to be onstage with a violin and where Scrappy got his pony. The results still feel like Scrappy cartoons, albeit ones that have been denuded of a fair amount of both coherency and charm. The lack of of dialog, music, and sound effects is also a bigger deal than I might have guessed.

I doubt that the people who watched these in the comfort of their own homes decades ago were overly critical, though. And there was a time in my life, before the advent of home video, when I’d have been pretty pleased by them myself. Actually, I still am. Thanks, Jason.

Over at his wonderful Tralfaz blog, Don Yowp is celebrating Christmas cartoons. He didn’t forget Scrappy–whose 1934 short Holiday Land was the first Color Rhapsody cartoon and an Oscar nominee. (Note from the ad above that Columbia promoted it as a Thanksgiving release–but Santa is part of the festivities.)

This isn’t a great Scrappy cartoon–it’s more interested in being a lush, heartwarming pseudo-Silly Symphony extravaganza than a laugh riot–but is worth your time. You can watch it here after you’ve read Yowp. And somewhere in there, you should find time to enjoy Steve Stanchfield’s 2014 piece on the short.

Scrappy holidays to you!

Thunderbean Animation’s Steve Stanchfield is a friend of fans of vintage animation everywhere. He’s also a friend of Scrappy. For his latest Cartoon Research column, he shared the eighteenth Scrappy cartoon, The Bad Genius (1932). And since he posted it on YouTube, I share it here with you.

This isn’t one of my favorite Scrappys. But I agree with Steve that the animation and posing of Oopy for the film’s vaguely Weekend at Bernie’s-like conceit is pretty nifty. And many thanks to Steve for his kind words about this site.

When the Scrappy series began in 1931, it had a premise. It really was about a little boy doing little-boy things, and cartoons such as Yelp Wanted and The Little Pest, despite their extreme lack of structure, had at least rudimentary plots.

By the time Columbia released The World’s Affair in 1933, however, all that had changed. This cartoon shows multiple telltale signs that a studio has tired of a series: It has a topical hook (it’s set at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair), it’s a spot-gag cartoon, and it’s rife with celebrity caricatures.

The cartoon begins with an elaborate production number featuring Fred Fisher’s song “Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)”–which was apparently already a standard even though it was a mere eleven years old at the time. Then a bunch of spot gags involving inventions, technical progress being the theme of this World’s Fair even more than usual.

And then in rush the celebrities: an especially loose-limbed FDR, Mussolini with a bucket of spaghetti, Von Hindenburg with a mug of beer for Scrappy, George V, Chevalier (who gets beer down the trousers), Gandhi and Durante in their diapers, Einstein, and others. They’re all swell folks.

Between this short, Scrappy’s Party, Movie Struck, and Hollywood Babies, an awful lot of the Scrappy cartoons of 1933 were celebfests. (I sort of like old cartoons which are overly dependent on caricatures, such as Mother Goose Goes Hollywood and Hollywood Steps Out, but I feel sheepish admitting it.)

Scrappy and Oopy don’t have all that much to do in The World’s Affair except grin, wear top hats, and tap dance, but they do it well. (Oh, and Oopy gets to smoke a cigar.) The animation of them is pretty darn charming–which is good, since the “story” and gags are so lazy.

Here’s a bit of good news: The Scrappy series eventually got a second wind. Some of the best shorts appeared long after thing one, including The Puppet Murder Case and Let’s Ring Doorbells, both of which were released in 1936. Neither of those ones are on YouTube at the moment, but I hope to be able to share them here someday.

Bonus non-Scrappy footage: Here’s some live-action newsreel footage of the 1933 World’s Fair.

Kindly ignore the fact that the cartoon above was obviously shot off a screen during a public performance, and therefore features cameos by the people sitting in front of the videographer. It’s The Beer Parade, by the original Scrappy team of Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus, and Art Davis. This is one of the most amazingly Scrappy-esque of all Scrappy cartoons, and you need to see it. (I learned it was on YouTube when Devon Baxter linked to it in the pre-UPA Columbia cartoon group on Facebook.)

Plot summary: Scrappy and Oopy joyfully serve beer by the barrelful to dozens of drunken elves until Old Man Prohibition shows up. The boys and the little men assault him from the ground and the air–even using explosives–until he chooses to bury himself. Whereupon the good times roll once more.

(I particularly like the moment when Oopy, having rigged up a rope to trip Old Man Prohibition, tugs at it to verify that it’s tight enough to do the job.)

The cartoon is an obvious allegory concerning prohibition and its repeal. But it was released on March 4, 1933, when the federal ban on alcoholic beverages was still in force, so its celebration of unrestrained imbibing was anticipatory.

FDR, who famously made repeal part of his campaign, had taken office in January; a couple of weeks after the cartoon debuted, he signed the Cullen-Harrison act, which permitted the sale of wine and 3.2 percent beer starting the following month. In December, prohibition on the federal level was fully repealed.

Prohibition was never enforced all that rigorously in cartoon land. The 1929 Silly Symphony The Merry Dwarfs presaged The Beer Parade by showing its title characters quaffing beer; 1931’s Lady Play Your Mandolin, the first Merrie Melody, takes place in a saloon and is full of tippling animals, although it’s possible that it’s set in Mexico. But the sheer quantity of beer in The Beer Parade–served by two small boys without any adult supervision–remains startling. It’s unimaginable that anyone would have made a cartoon with this theme a few years later. Or today.

(Scrappy and Oopy aren’t shown drinking in the cartoon, but they are depicted brandishing foamy mugs themselves, and do seem to be in an awfully exuberant good mood.)

Bonus: Here’s the excellent original poster for The Beer Parade, which is preserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. (Thanks to Nick Richie for alerting me to it.)

It’s been far too long since we watched a Scrappy cartoon together. And what a Scrappy cartoon to watch: The Flop House (1932), the one which Paul Etcheverry and Will Friedwald’s pioneering article on Scrappy rightly called “perhaps the ultimate depression-era cartoon.”

The flop house in question is operated by Scrappy, and all the customers are down-on-their-luck animals — except for Scrappy’s brother Oopy. This is the Scrappyverse, so the premise is no odder than those of numerous other cartoons in the series. I’ve watched this probably fifty times and never get tired of it — but if you’re about to be entertained by it for the first time, I’m jealous.

This one’s Sunday Clothes, and it’s the third Scrappy film, released on September 15th, 1931. Like the first two, it’s a stream-of-consciousness assemblage of gags about a given topic, and simply ends rather than reaching any sort of crescendo. But some of the drawings are funny: Scrappy gamboling along in his fancy duds remains amusing in exactly the way it must have been eighty-one years ago.

Here’s Uncle John’s perceptive writeup of the short.

I’m blessed to own a nice animation drawing from this cartoon. Actually, it’s the only Scrappy animation drawing I’ve ever seen. (But oh, how I hope that there’s a large supply of them safely stashed somewhere.) Here’s mine…

This is the second Scrappy cartoon. It was released on August 15, 1931, and it’s still pretty crude. It looks like it was made up as the animators went alone, and that nobody cared much about consistency. Which makes sense, because that’s all true.

The best part of the short is the first bit, in which Oopy cheerfully irritates his big brother, Scrappy, by tagging after him and singing. It’s character-based comedy of a sort that was unusual in the early 1930s, when most every new cartoon character was a Mickey Mouse knockoff. And the drawing, though crude, is funny: I love how Oopy belts his tune.

In the first Scrappy cartoon, Scrappy thinks that Yippy is deathly ill. In this one, he thinks Oopy is dead. Fortunately for everyone involved, the melodramatic plots didn’t continue on forever.