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.

It’s difficult to imagine now, but when Scrappyland first appeared, there was no YouTube, and therefore no easy way to bring you any actual Scrappy cartoons. Today…well, there still aren’t as many Scrappy cartoons on YouTube as you or I would hope for. Which isn’t surprising given that most of them haven’t been shown anywhere in decades.

But let’s not look free Scrappy in the mouth. In the weeks to come, I’m going to embed the Scrappy shorts I can find on YouTube. Starting with the very first one, Yelp Wanted, which was released slightly over 81 years ago.

This isn’t one of the best Scrappy cartoons, but it does represent the debuts of Scrappy, Yippy, and either Oopy or an Oopy-like little kid who appears in one scene. In this one, Scrappy has an enormous head and a dog-like black nose; as the years wore on, he became more and more conventionally kidlike.

As Paul Etcheverry and Will Friedwald have written, this is a strikingly Fleischeresque cartoon, with a healthy dose of questionable taste and bizarre gags. Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis had all been Fleischer employees before moving west, and they brought their former employer’s sense of humor and casual attitutude towards story construction and on-model drawing with them.

Yelp Wanted ends with a shocking revelation which, as far as I know, was never addressed again.