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.