Here’s a Scrappy paint set–they came in several sizes, and included crayons and a storybook (and pictures to color, at least sometimes) as well as paint. The cover art shows Scrappy apparently having just finished a portrait of Margy. One of the inexplicable things about these characters is that they rarely look quite the same in any two illustrations, yet they never quite lose their character. And this is one of our favorite pieces of merchandising art that shows them.
Below are pages from one of the little storybooks that came with Scrappy paint sets (and perhaps was distributed through other means as well). The stories were serialized–here we have “Scrappy Eats Breakfast,” which is chapter five of book one. The booklet speaks of a “Special FREE PRIZE to be given to every Boy and Girl,” and says details will be given in chapter 10. Unfortunately, the gallery’s holdings don’t include that chapter. (If you know what the prize was, we’d love to hear about it…even though we’re assuming that “every Boy and Girl” did not mean “every Boy and Girl on the planet Earth” but rather some unspecified subset thereof.)
The book refers to “Columbia’s Motion Picture Cartoon Series by Charles Mintz,” even though Mintz probably never drew a line in his life. It also credits one F. Heath Cobb with the story. The spelling of Dick Huemer’s name as Dick Heumor is, amazingly, not a typo: See the Scrappy FAQ.
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