The Story of Sally O’Neil

Possibly the single best thing about running Scrappyland is that when people decide to research Scrappy on the web, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they will find their way here–even if they start out wholly ignorant of him, as so many people regrettably are.

That was the case with Brandon Manzione, who bought a photo of Sally O’Neil, an actress who appeared in silent films and early talkies, and wondered why she was brandishing a carton of candy bars emblazoned with SCRAPPY logos. He Googled around, found my writings on Scrappy candy, and dropped me a note.

I can’t blame Brandon for not having heard of Scrappy; I was unfamiliar with Sally O’Neil until I got his email. I was pretty sure why she would pose with Scrappy bars, though, and a quick visit to IMDB confirmed my hunch. Runkel Bros.’ Scrappy candy dated from 1935–it was promoted to a fare-thee-well in Scrappy’s Own Magazine that year–and I assumed that O’Neil made a Columbia film at that time and that the studio pressed her into service to shill for Scrappy, as it was wont to do.

Yup: O’Neil costarred with Victor Jory in a 1935 Columbia release, Too Tough to Kill, about a plot to blow up a tunnel out west. She played a newspaper reporter, and I’m sorry to report that the Independent Exhibitors’ Film Bulletin dismissed the movie as “no better than passable for the city dumps and cheap rural houses.” I’m not even sure what a “city dump” is in this case, but it can’t be good.

Even in 1935, O’Neil (1908-1968) was winding down her career. (She made only one more film after Too Tough to Kill.) Born Virginia Louise Noonan, she worked in Vaudeville as “Chotsie” Noonan–a stage name I wish she’d hung onto–before entering the movie business. Some of her silent features, including Don’t, Mike, and The Auction Block, are sadly presumed to be lost; she was also in Buster Keaton’s 1926 feature Battling Butler, which survives, and which I may have seen decades ago, as “the mountain girl.” In the sound era, she starred in 1931’s The Brat, which I assume must be interesting if only because of the fact that it was directed by John Ford.

I was also briefly excited by IMDB’s contention that O’Neil was in 45 Minutes From Hollywood, the 1926 Hal Roach short that starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy–without managing to put them together in even one scene–until I learned that the website apparently confused Sally with her sister, who was born Susan Noonan and acted as Sue O’Neil before switching to Molly O’Day.

Sally’s star is said to have fallen in the talkie era because of her thick New Jersey accent and stage fright. A 1932 movie-fan magazine I ran across told a less conventional tale of career woe: Her beloved brother “Hutch” was convicted (perhaps unjustly) of stealing a couple of fur coats that belonged to bandleader Ted Lewis. He was sentenced to seven years in California’s Folsom State Prison, which sounds excessive even if he was guilty; Sally supposedly took off two years to be with the poor guy and spent all her money to defend him.

By the time frame of Too Tough to Kill, O’Neil may have been considered to have become a bit of a has-been: One magazine article about her carried the headline “I Wonder What’s Become of Sally.” But at least Columbia still thought she was enough of a celeb to help move Scrappy candy, which helps to make up for the fact that it misspelled her last name on the photo in which she did so.

And hey, at around the same time, the Safe-Kurl people of Cincinnati, Ohio, apparently paid her–handsomely, I hope–to endorse their miracle electric hair waver. I just wish she looked happier in the ad…

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The Heroic Exploits of Scrappy

Hey, remember when Frank Miller rebooted the Scrappy franchise with the grim, dystopian Dark Scamp? Well..me neither. But Ed Loera does. He also remembers Siegel and Shuster’s Scrappy, George Lucas’s Scrappy, and others. And he pays tribute to them in these nifty pieces of artwork, which he gave me permission to reproduce:

Ed says that he created these because he “wanted to pay tribute to Scrappyland in his own way,” and that the Cappy America piece is a work in progress. He features his art and sells prints, Scrappy-themed and otherwise, at his Wondrousworx website.

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The Scrappy Comic Strip! (Part One)

If you were alive in the UK or Australia in the late 1930s and read a comic book called Wags, you may be intimately familiar with the Scrappy comic strip. Otherwise, your opportunities to be exposed to it–at least in English–have been severely limited. Comics historian In 2010, comics historian Ken Quattro provided one example on his Comics Detective site. And that’s about it.

Me, I’ve shared examples of the strip in French and bizarrely retouched into the adventures of Shorty Shortcake. But it was only recently that I acquired some Scrappy tearsheets from somebody’s bound volume of Wags, circa 1938. I’ll post them here in a few chunks, with a bit of commentary.

Like much Scrappyana, the Scrappy strip is tantalizingly mysterious. Thanks to strip expert Allan Holtz, we know that the 1937 edition of Editor & Publisher included a listing for a Scrappy strip (“by Charles Mintz”) from Eisner & Iger Associates, an outfit run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. I know of no evidence it ever made its way into a newspaper, but Eisner and Iger made good use of what they’d put together by selling it to the French publishers of Bilboquet, repackaging it in Wags, and eventually de-Mintzing it to come up with Wonderworld comics’ Shorty Shortcake.

We don’t know who wrote or drew the strip, other than the safe assumption that Charles Mintz had nothing to do with it. Presumably, it was one or more artists from the Eisner-Iger shop rather than anyone who worked on Scrappy cartoons. I’ll have some more thoughts on candidates in future installments, but for now, I’ll just admit that I don’t see any evidence that Will Eisner himself did any of the art, as fun a notion as that is. (We’re actually looking for at least two artists, I think, since the style of the first strip varies sharply from later installments.)

Anyhow, here you go: chapters 1-6 of “Scrappy and the Border Patrol,” a tale which has virtually nothing to do with anything that ever appeared in a Scrappy animated cartoon other than the fact that it stars Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy. (Sorry, Oopy.)

Note that the “Universal Phoenix Features Syndicate” mentioned in the copyright notice was run by Eisner and Iger. I’m not sure offhand whether the repurposed strips were dailies or Sundays–and actually, come to think of it, I’m not even positive that the entire Wags run of Scrappy consisted of repurposed newspaper strips. Like I said, it’s tantalizing and mysterious.

More strips–and thoughts–to come.

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The Boy Who Was Scrappy

Confession time: I know very little about the voices in Scrappy cartoons. Actually, come to think about it, about the only thing I’ve known–and only because voice maven Keith Scott told me–is that Robert “Bobby” Winckler (1927-1989) was Scrappy’s voice in some shorts.

But now I know at least a tiny bit more. Jerry Beck alerted me to the existence of a Robert “Bobby” Winckler fan group on Facebook–apparently run by his son, William Winckler–and it has some great photos and a couple of items which reference his Scrappy work.

I’ve borrowed a few images from the Bobby Winckler Facebook page and elsewhere for this post.

Here’s Bobby Winckler as a child actor on a Hollywood backlot, circa 1933. He made more than 80 live-action films, including a number of Our Gang shorts, Knute Rockne All American, and Preston Sturges’ iconic Sullivan’s Travels, and was also busy on the radio (where he played W.C. Fields’ son, among other roles).

Here he is (center) serving in WWII with two friends on St. Patrick’s Day 1945 in Manila.

Winckler eventually became a successful Hollywood lawyer, counting Spanky McFarland, Adam West, and Billy Barty among his clients. In 1980, he ran as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. Congress representing California’s 23rd district.

He lost the race–but here he is, presumably in the 1980s, with his Knute Rockne costar Dutch Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Now for the Scrappy stuff. Here’s a Hollywood Radio Artists’ Directory listing which mentions his work in the series. It uses a variant spelling of his last name; as far as I know, he was not related to Charles Mintz’s wife, the former Margaret Winkler.

And this is a sample of the script for The City Slicker (1938), one of the films in which Winckler voiced Scrappy.

And here’s The City Slicker itself–which I’m afraid features a last-gasp version of Scrappy who’s been unappealingly redesigned and who, really, has few redeeming qualities of any sort, aside from his voice.

According to online sources, Bobby Winckler also voiced Hans and Fritz in MGM’s Captain and the Kids cartoons and Petey Parrot in the Warner Bros. cartoon I Wanna Be a Sailor (1937), and was the field mouse in Bambi. Voice acting was a sideline for him, but a long-standing one: In the 1980s, he performed in his son William’s English-language dub of Japan’s Tekkaman animated series.

That’s all I have to tell you about Robert “Bobby” Winckler. But here’s another Scrappy voice tidbit: Andrew Leal tells me that Hollywood veteran Leone Ledoux–who was an adult, and female–also voiced the character. Stay tuned for any information on her which I can cobble together.

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Scrappy Goes GIF

The animated GIF file format wasn’t invented until 1987. But if it had existed in the 1930s, boy, would animators have loved it. They were already creating hypnotic little loops of animation and repeating them–mostly, perhaps, for economy’s sake, though it often accentuated comic rhythm. They just had no way to distribute those loops on their own as mini-entertainments.

Today we do. So I was moved to create a few GIFs from moments in The Beer Parade (1933), one of the most memorable of all Scrappy cartoons. I snagged from from a YouTube version of the cartoon which an anonymous benefactor appears to have videotaped off the screen at the 2005 Scrappy screening in LA, which explains the silhouetted heads at the bottom.

As far as I know, these may be the world’s first Scrappy GIFs. Feel free to copy them and spread the boozy merriment near and far.

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Scrappy, Edith, and Jackie: Together Again

Edith Fellows, Cora Sue Collins, Jackie Moran, and Dickie Walters. All were Columbia child stars, and all were called into service to help promote Scrappy. We’ve brought you photographs of the kids with Scrappy merch several times over the years–here, here, and here. And at long last, I’ve scared up some more of these stills.

Here’s Edith Fellows with a bunch of Scrappy balloons–a piece of Scrappyana which I’ve never seen before.

And here she is wearing a Scrappy Thrift Club pin and brandishing her Scrappy bank and Scrappy Thrift Club membership card.

This is Scrappyland’s own Scrappy Thrift Club card, whose original owner apparently decided to make an unfortunate joke when filling it out.

Here’s the bank itself (ours is in a darker shade than Edith’s).

And here’s the Scrappy pin she’s wearing.

Here are Edith and Jackie Moran, her costar in a 1936 Columbia feature titled And So They Were Married, wearing snappy Scrappy cloisonne pins.

Lastly, here’s an extreme close-up of the pin itself, from the Scrappyland collection. (It’s nicely done, with a surprisingly posh feel–maybe the closest thing I’ve seen to a Scrappy luxury item.)

That photo of Edith and Jackie was apparently taken in April 1936. I’m not sure when the two of Edith alone were, although the box the Scrappy bank came in carried a 1935 copyright.

At this point, it seems like there’s a pretty decent chance that even more of these photos of child stars and Scrappy are out here. Keep an eye out for them for me, would you?

More About Scrappy and Wanton Violations of Prohibition

After watching The Beer Parade, Dr. Richard Huemer–the son of Scrappy’s creator–shared this New Years’ card which was sent to his father by Joe De Nat, the Mintz studio’s musical director:

The card depicts Scrappy and his Mintz stablemate Krazy Kat pumping beer into a mug inhabited by a piano player and a mermaid (presumably representing Mr. and Mrs. De Nat). Assuming that the references to 1933 and the new year mean that the De Nats distributed this card around January 1, 1933, prohibition was still in effect, but the recent election of FDR meant that its days were clearly numbered.

Betcha a lot of folks sent out cards with similar themes that year…

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Scrappy’s Going to Bermuda

If you’ve spent any time at all on this site, you know that there’s no end to ways in which Columbia promoted Scrappy in the 1930s. I’m happy to say that I don’t know about all of them yet.

For instance, I just learned that the British territory of Bermuda used the little guy as an ambassador of goodwill at an apparently elaborate exhibit in New York City in 1936.

The March 15, 1936 issue of a publication named The Motion Picture and the Family has the scoop.

There’s a lot to ruminate over here:

The whole affair seems to have been–like other Columbia marketing blitzes–wrapped up in the theory that cartoons were a form of education. Especially Scrappy cartoons. (I especially like the title of the presentation “The Value of Cartoons, Pedagogically.”)
It’s nice to see that Lester Gaba, the man who sculpted Scrappy out of soap, participated in the festivities.
The story says that cartoons of Scrappy traveling to Bermuda and spending time “in the Island Paradise” were part of the program. Were these created especially for this event?

Earlier, The Film Daily ran two brief items on the Bermuda exhibit, both emphasizing the serious, uplifting nature of it all.

February 3:

February 21:

Googling around the Web, I haven’t found any other references to this exhibit.

Like many things about Scrappy, the details in these articles sound dreamy, apocryphal, and generally made-up rather than factual. But boy, do I ever hope that animation or other materials relating to “Scrappy’s Going to Bermuda” are out there somewhere waiting to be uncovered…

At Last, Scrappy’s Own Magazine

If you’ve ever read about Scrappy’s Own Magazine before, I have a hunch it was in this piece, which I wrote back in August of 2005. I said I might eventually post the magazine in its entirety. And here you are — only eight years later.

I only know a little bit more about this publication than I did in 2007. It was produced by Evanco Products Corp. of Madison Avenue in New York, which was apparently associated with the Engel-Van Wiseman Book Corporation, which published Big Little Book-like movie adaptations in the mid-1930s and at least signed a deal to do fairy-tale tomes based on Ub Iwerks’ ComicColor cartoons.

The Scrappy magazine apparently came out in late 1935. Judging from the quantity of references to Runkel Brothers chocolate, that company had a hand in instigating it, and it was given out at movie theaters. Here’s an evocative, star-filled ad from the December 6 Woodbridge Independent of New Jersey which mentions it.

Scrappy’s Own Magazine is in a comic book-like format, and is almost–but not quite–a comic book. It does have four pages of comics, but it’s dominated by brief features of other sorts — puzzles, a fudge recipe, a short story which may or may not be about Yippy, a Pledge of Allegiance-like motto for kids, drawing lessons, a creepy poem involving the possibility of Scrappy and Yippy dying in their sleep and much, much more. It’s Scrappy, so it goes without saying that a lot of it is a tad peculiar. (I like the fact that Scrappy and Oopy’s “mum” appears to be a wizened senior citizen.)

This issue makes repeated reference to a second issue being in the works, but I’ve seen no evidence that one was ever released. Then again, almost the only evidence I have that the first issue was published is the fact that I own a copy — even by Scrappy standards, it seems to be a rare artifact.

Anyhow, here are all thirty-two pages of it. Click on the cover, then keep clicking to see everything at a legible size.

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The Art of the Charles Mintz Pinback Button

Back in the 1930s, a company called Western Theater issued pins of cartoon characters, which I presume were intended as movie-theater giveaways. It did an impressive job of lining up licenses, producing pins featuring everybody from Harold Teen to Betty Boop to Oswald the Rabbit. And — as you’ve already surmised — the Mintz characters.

Here are Scrappy, two slight Yippy variants, Vontzy and, for good measure, Krazy Kat.

These being Mintz characters, it’s not surprising that the approach to naming is…well, surprising. We all know that Scrappy’s dog is Yippy, but he’s usually a pint-sized, terrier-like pooch. Except when he’s a big old hound dog, as he is here. (This pet was also known to go by the name of Woofus.)

Scrappy’s brother Vontzy, meanwhile, was generally known as Oopy — in fact, this is the only piece of merchandise I know about which calls him Vontzy. Eighty years later, this is still a point of confusion: The Big Cartoon Database thinks that the Scrappy series involved bullies named Vonsey and Oopie.

Unlike a lot of Scrappy merchandising art, these pieces were done with care, apparently by a Mintz artist. Here’s the original art for the only Mintz-related Western Theater pin back I know of that’s not shown above:

That’s Krazy Kat’s girlfriend, Kitty Kat, who seems to be a dog. I hope that George Herriman didn’t know about this — or, if he did, that he was amused rather than outraged.

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Category: Curios

The Story of Sally O’Neil

The Heroic Exploits of Scrappy

The Scrappy Comic Strip! (Part One)

The Boy Who Was Scrappy

Scrappy Goes GIF

Scrappy, Edith, and Jackie: Together Again

More About Scrappy and Wanton Violations of Prohibition

Scrappy’s Going to Bermuda

At Last, Scrappy’s Own Magazine

The Art of the Charles Mintz Pinback Button

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