I was sorry to hear—via Mark Evanier—of the passing of Michael Schlesinger, a film fan, film preservationist, and filmmaker par excellence. Almost 20 years ago, when Mike was at Sony/Columbia, he provided the beautifully restored prints of Scrappy cartoons for Jerry Beck’s memorable Scrappyland event. (Here’s video of the festivities.) I wish everyone could see for themselves how good those shorts looked on the big screen. But it’s reassuring to know they exist, even if they spend most of their time locked up in the Columbia vault. I’m forever grateful to Mike for his role in protecting our Scrappy heritage.
Mark’s post covers some of Mike’s other activities in the film world, which were many and varied. My condolences to his family and friends.
As part of my ongoing effort to polish things up around here, I recently updated Scrappyland’s Scrappy Links page—mostly by adding the wonderful Scrappy write-ups and embedded cartoons that have been part of Steve Stanchfield’s Thunderbean Thursdays column at Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Research site for years. Steve, a true friend of all of us who love old cartoons, is one of the world’s leading Scrappy aficionados. I always enjoy reading his commentaries and watching the prints he shares from his own collection. The comments from other animation buffs are also extremely worthwhile.
Rather than telling you to go over to the links page to find the list of Steve’s Scrappy posts I compiled, I’ll share it right here. The first one happens to be his look at the first Scrappy cartoon, but these are actually in reverse chronological order beginning with his most recent post. Go read. And thanks for all the great stuff, Steve.
Are you excited by the image above? You would have been, if you ran a TV station in 1955. And maybe even if you were just a kid at home glued to the tube.
As we discussed back in 2013, the state of animation of TV in the early 1950s was pretty darn abysmal. Not counting made-for-TV rarities such as Jay Ward and Alex Anderson’s Crusader Rabbit, it consisted entirely of 800 old theatrical shorts, 90% of which were so long in the tooth that they were silent cartoons. So when a company called Hygo acquired rights to Screen Gems’ Scrappy and Krazy Kat series—which had ended in 1941 and 1940, respectively—TV viewers didn’t regard them as a throwback. Instead, they felt downright fresh.
The fact that Hygo’s ad specifies that the cartoons in question have sound is evidence of just how ancient the competition was. For a moment, I wondered if anyone had a problem with them being in black and white, until I remembered that color TV didn’t exist yet.
After Scrappy ended his theatrical run, there wasn’t much reason for anyone to create new artwork of him, so his depiction in this ad is a rare reappearance. (Here’s another.) Whoever drew him seems to have had fun with the assignment, though I can’t quite tell whether Scrappy is turning on the TV he’s already appearing on. Or changing the channel. Or maybe controlling the horizontal or the vertical. (I won’t dwell on the fact that he has four fingers on one hand but only three on the other.)
Scrappy’s reign as a TV kingpin did not last long—newer cartoons starring more popular characters arrived soon after he did. In 1956 and 1957, for instance, a company called AAP acquired TV rights to Warner Bros.’ pre-1950 cartoons and all the Popeye cartoons. By the late 1950s, lots of new animation was being produced specifically for broadcast.
Scrappy stuck around for awhile: The “Mr. Cartoon” and “Happy Hal” ads shown here are from 1961. But the onslaught of new cartoons—in color, even!—eventually left him seeming as out of date as the silent shorts he had displaced. I don’t remember him still being around by the time I started my TV cartoon-watching days in the late 1960s, and a quick search of TV listings Newspapers.com does not indicate that he was.
Anyhow, Scrappy has been so obscure for so long that it’s invigorating to remember a moment when he was hailed as a hero. It probably won’t happen again. But it would be nice if he at least got the chance.
Meanwhile, here’s an only vaguely related oddity I came across when researching this article. It’s from an Algona, Iowa newspaper, and reports the winners of a Scrappy cartoon contest at a local theater…
If this was from a 1930s newspaper, I would not have been that intrigued: Holding a Scrappy cartoon contest would have been a totally normal thing to do. But this was from a 1964 paper. Scrappy was still the subject of drawing competitions held at theaters then?
Well, no. More careful inspection revealed that the item was in a section of the paper devoted to republishing old news stories—in this case from 1934. That made sense.
And here’s the kicker: The paper was recapping the Scrappy contest in its edition for April 2, 1964, the day I was born. Scrappy, bless him, managed to welcome me by being in the news, at least sort of, if only in Algona. It might not have been an omen, but I for one find it to be an entertaining coincidence,
But I’ll bet you didn’t know that Oopy led a secret second life in Brazil. Or at least I didn’t until I stumbled across these examples on Facebook, right after I pressed Publish on my last post.
According to Luigi Rocco’s blog about the history of Brazilian comics, the venerable newspaper Diário de Pernambuco–now the world’s oldest Portuguese-language paper–began publishing a children’s supplement called O Gury in January 1936. Among its features was As Aventuras do Gury, a comic by a cartoonist named Corrêa. Despite its “Original de Corrêa” billing, the strip starred a character who looked uncannily like a slightly older Oopy–or, if you prefer, a hybrid of Scrappy and Oopy. He had a wiry little dog who could have served as an adequate substitute for Yippy in a pinch.
(It just occurred to me, however, that Oopy’s cowlick is at least vaguely Tintin-esque, and Gury’s dog looks resembles Snowy almost as much as he does Yippy. Perhaps Corrêa drew artistic inspiration from both Charles Mintz and Herge.)
Rocco’s post about As Aventuras do Gury includes two examples of the strip, and I found another one online shown in a spread from a book of Diário de Pernambuco cartoons. Here they are:
I’m not sure how long the Gury strip ran. There was a later standalone Brazilian comic book, also called O Gury, which reprinted American strips such as Batman and Mary Marvel. It was revived on occasion, as recently as 1968. What its connection was to the O Gury that featured Gury, I can’t say.
In any event, Brazilian comics blogger Rocco caught As Aventuras do Gury‘s Scrappy influence–“Corrêa’s drawings showed a strong influence of the characters of the American animator Charles Mintz”–and included an example of the Scrappy comic strip produced by the Eisner-Iger shop, translated into Portuguese recently enough that it uses digital lettering:
I don’t know if Corrêa was specifically influenced by the Scrappy strip. For one thing, I’m not positive when the Scrappy one first appeared anywhere: The earliest reference to it I know is its listing in the 1937 Editor & Publisher yearbook. If O Gury debuted in January 1936 and Corrêa had indeed seen the Scrappy strip before creating his, that suggests that dead-tree Scrappy had made his way to Brazil by the end of 1935. Which is not inconceivable: We know that Eisner and Iger sold their strip to publishers in France and Australia.
But wait: Gury looks even more like Oopy than he does like Scrappy, and Oopy never appeared in the Scrappy strip. That would seem to be evidence that Corrêa had seen Scrappy in animated form. So perhaps the Gury strip’s stylistic similarity to printed Scrappy is a coincidence. Unless the artist simply removed Scrappy’s hair coloring, resulting in a purely coincidental resemblance to Oopy.
In any event, we can now properly honor Gury–like Shorty Shortcake–as a proud resident of one of the many alternate-reality Mintzverses that are clearly out there.
Dick Huemer had left Fleischer before the creation of Betty Boop, but when we came across this statue in San Francisco, his son Richard saw it as a good omen and was more than happy to pose for photos.
Of all the nice things that I’ve experienced as a result of starting Scrappyland, nothing else came close to the joy of getting to know Dr. Richard Huemer, the son of Dick Huemer, Scrappy’s creator. I’m very sorry to report that Richard passed away today, and I offer my condolences to his wife Kay, his son Peter, and the rest of his family.
When I was first putting together Scrappyland and contacted Richard, he told me that his father did not consider Scrappy among his proudest achievements. That’s entirely understandable given that he went on to a long tenure at Disney, where he co-wrote Dumbo and Fantasia. (The elder Huemer’s pre-Mintz animation career, which began in 1916 and included work on silent “Out of the Inkwell” cartoons, is also notable.) Despite that proviso, Richard went on to be a great supporter of Scrappyland—he supplied some great Mintz staff photos, for instance—and he spoke at the Scrappyland event in Hollywood in 2005.
Richard and I ended up corresponding and getting together on a number of occasions when he visited San Francisco, usually to attend medical conferences with his delightful wife Kay. We’d talk for hours, and he had so many interests that animation came up only occasionally. We were more likely to discuss gadgets and tech, or (especially after I co-wrote an article for TIME on Google’s research into human longevity) advances in medicine. He was funny, thoughtful, and infectiously curious about the world, and I rarely gave thought to the fact that he was born only a couple of years after Scrappy was.
Many things about Richard will stick in my mind forever, like the time we went to a semi-professional musical in a tiny San Francisco theater on the spur of the moment. And his silly/sincere theory that he may have met Dr. Edwin Land’s daughter in Santa Fe circa the early 1940s and accidentally inspired her to accidentally inspire her father to invent the Polaroid camera. And—to bring this post back to animation—the fact that he gave the benefit of the doubt to Charles Mintz, a man much maligned by cartoon history. (Richard noted that his father never had a bad word to say about Mintz, and that Mintz brother-in-law George Winkler was a close family friend.)
I’m also happy that Richard got to attend Dick Huemer’s posthumous induction as a Disney Legend, go to the gala opening of the Disney Family Museum here in San Francisco, and generally see his father be rightfully appreciated for his contributions to cartooning. Richard contributed to that process by coediting a collection of Buck O’Rue, an enjoyable comic strip written by his dad which had been largely forgotten. Getting it back in print was a long-time passion project.
I loved Dick Huemer’s wry Funnyworld columns in the 1970s, and am sorry I never had the chance to meet him. But I got a sizable dose of the Huemeresque experience by knowing Richard—who bore a striking physical resemblance to his father, and inherited his sense of whimsy—and I feel so lucky that I did.
Back in 2013, I rounded up 18 examples of Scrappy Sayings, a single-panel comic feature run by small newspapers beginning in 1935. I said that it looked “a little like Love Is, if Love Is starred a fully-dressed Scrappy and Margy, used terrible jokes which made no sense in a feature about small children, and took place during the depression. And was drawn by someone who didn’t know how to draw Scrappy.”
Scrappyologist Jason Fiore has scoured the archives of Michigan’s Grosse Pointe Review newspaper, where I found the panels I posted, and uncovered 11 more examples. As with the others, Jason’s discoveries feature painful wordplay, a usually-off model Scrappy–is he an Orthodox Jew in that first one?–and an odd emphasis on themes such as courtship and dentistry.
Thanks for sharing these, Jason.
Inspired by Jason’s research, I dug around myself and found 14 additional examples of Scrappy Sayings in 1935 and 1936 issues of the Post-Democrat of Muncie, Indiana.
That last one is the only Scrappy’s Sayings I’ve seen with an appearance by Oopy (or a rough approximation thereof), albeit in diapers and under the name Toots.
I’m still not sure who drew or was otherwise responsible for Scrappy Sayings. I did find yet another example in Eisner-Iger’s Wow What a Magazine, which might be a hint that Jerry Iger had something to do with it. Or maybe not.
Along with Scrappy’s Sayings, the Post-Democrat ran another comic feature from the Columbia Feature Service, a Believe It or Not-esque panel called Unusual Facts Revealed. I briefly took that as evidence that the Columbia Feature Service wasn’t owned by Columbia Pictures–until I noticed that the unusual facts happened to involve Columbia movies and stars.
A final note, at least for now: The most entertaining thing in the Post-Democrat isn’t a comic feature. Instead, it’s the headlines–which seem to have been crafted by someone who was having a lot more fun than the person or persons responsible for Scrappy Sayings.
I’m just back from the San Diego Comic-Con, where I didn’t find any Scrappy-related items. But I did attend a panel about Will Eisner and the Spirit, one of several at the con in 2017, Eisner’s centennial year. During it, one of the panelists (Denis Kitchen?) mentioned that some thoughtful soul had made Wow What a Magazine–a 1936 proto-comic edited by Jerry Iger, with extremely early Will Eisner art–available for downloading. It occurred to me that the publication might provide some clues about the vital question of who drew the Scrappy newspaper strip.
It turns out that the excellent Digital Comic Museum site recently made one issue of Wow available–issue #2–along with a write-up about the series and its historical significance. Having even one Wow available as a free download is quite a development, since all four issues of the short-lived publication are rare and will cost you thousands if you can find them.
When I skimmed issue #2, I did a little double-take when I found some Scrappy in it. Specifically, a panel of Scrappy Sayings, the odd feature which apparently debuted in 1935, ran in small papers, and seemed to exist purely to promote Scrappy. It’s one I hadn’t previously seen.
This is the first evidence I’ve seen that Iger/Eisner had any connection with Scrappy Sayings. The discovery merits more contemplation, but for now, I wonder whether Iger had some association with its creation and if there’s any chance he drew it. (It’s also possible that he just picked up an existing comic for publication–it’s filler, not mentioned in an otherwise detailed table of contents.)
Wow What a Magazine #2 is also chock-full of cartoony art, giving us lots of examples of work we can compare to the Scrappy strip in hopes of guessing the latter’s artist or artists. (The first Scrappy strip looks like it might be by a different person than later installments.)
Here’s Iger:
And Bob Kane, or someone else he convinced to draw this for him:
And Bob Smart, if he was a real person:
And George Brenner:
And someone who didn’t sign this strip:
And Will Eisner, with more art of Harry Karry, one of his earliest characters:
Well…this stuff is fun to look at, but none of it strikes me as close enough in style to the Scrappy strip to put anyone on a list of likely Scrappy artists.
But…
A while back, ace comics historian Steven Rowe had suggested Dick Briefer as another possible Scrappy artist. I was familiar with Briefer’s later Frankenstein comics, in both their scary and funny variants, and knew of the adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame which he did for Eisner/Iger. But I hadn’t seen any Briefer art that was both early and cartoony.
Well, thinking about Wow led me to track down the covers of the other issues–they’re available online, even though their insides aren’t–and it turns out that Briefer drew cartoony covers for issues #1 and #4.
These are not obviously by a person who drew the Scrappy strip. But you know what? It’s at least conceivable that Briefer is our guy. Or at least they don’t provide evidence that we should rule him out. I’d like to find strip work in a humorous vein that Briefer did in this era. For now, the search continues…
It’s been nearly five years since I revamped Scrappyland into a blog. In that time, I’ve written nearly a hundred posts. But I’ve never made it that easy to look back at all those items, which now greatly outnumber the articles from the site’s early incarnation.
To help rectify that, here are links to all the posts, all on one page. (You can also reach it from the “Blog Archive” link to the left.)
