A Small Scrappy Art Bonanza

Back in 2017, I wrote about Some Scrappy Art I Probably Won’t Be Buying. It consisted of several production drawings that someone was trying to sell on eBay, with a minimum bid of $499 per piece. That was way too rich for even my Scrappy-loving blood.

Fast forward to 2021. Another someone is selling drawings of Scrappy (and other Screen Gems characters) on eBay, clearly from the same stash as the 2017 ones. This time, however, the asking price isn’t just reasonable–it’s dirt cheap for vintage animation art. (In fact, it’s roughly what the sales tax would have been for the 2017 ones.) So I bought some. After all, original Scrappy art of any kind is rare stuff.

Thanks to Jerry Beck, I now know that all of these drawings are from Practice Makes Perfect, a 1940 Screen Gem that was–depending on how you count–either the seventh or sixth next-to-last Scrappy cartoon. I’m not sure who did this art (or if it’s all by one person), but the credited animators on the short are Harry Love and Peter Falk’s pal Lou Lilly. Herewith, highlights of the art I bought, plus (as best I can tell) the corresponding frames from the finished product.

Scrappy looks like at least two different characters in different portions of this film, but in all cases he’s been redesigned to suit the animation industry’s tastes of the late 1930s, which were considerably more ornate and pseudo-realistic than when the Scrappy series started in 1931. The way Scrappy is drawn with a fastidiously ragged cowlick reminds me of how modern computer animators obsess over details like the pores in Mr. Peabody’s nose.

I’m intrigued by the notes on these drawings and wonder what stuff like “UCT BAL” means. Maybe any animators out there reading this can fill me in. Also interesting: The peg holes on all these drawings have been reinforced with bits of heavier paper, seemingly by hand.

Most of the cartoon is devoted to gags involving Oopy interfering with Scrappy’s piano practice. He too has been given a vaguely Fred Moore-esque redesign. This drawing looks like he’s conducting, but he’s actually messing around with Scrappy’s metronome.

Here’s a hammer from inside the piano (inevitably, Oopy has climbed inside it for the sake of a gag) with a note to the BKGRD DEPT on making it match the other ones. What does “CUT OUT” mean, and is it relevant that it’s crossed out?

Scrappy in close up, also with elaborate hair. Whoever drew this started with some construction lines in red pencil.

Like Mickey Mouse–and most good cartoon characters in general–Scrappy is instantly identifiable in silhouette, or would be if people remembered him. Here he’s holding his pup–is he a redesigned Yippy?–by the tail.

Rather than being Scrappy at his best, Practice Makes Perfect is a bland. unfunny remnant of his decline and fall. Still, I’m glad to own these drawings. It’s fun to think about someone sitting at an animation desk making them at 7000 Santa Monica or 861 Seward (or possibly both: the studio moved in 1940, but I’m not sure exactly when).

Here’s the short in its entirety. Don’t you agree that YouTube’s single greatest contribution to society has probably been making it easier to watch long-unwatched Scrappy cartoons?

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The Vaccine Mascot Who Looked Kind of Like Scrappy

There’s only one downside to thinking as much about Scrappy as I do: He may well take over your brain. Or at least I tend to see him–or hints of Scrappyness–in the darndest places.

The most recent instance came when I was reading an article about Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination program. In the background on some signage, a cartoon kid brandished a medicine bottle and beamed. He looked like Scrappy to me.

More specifically, he looked like Scrappy in a familiar stock pose, in which he wears a cap backwards and sticks out his right hand in salutation, often with Yippy by his side. The Mintz studio must have liked it, since it pops up frequently in one form or another.

Israel’s kid turned out to be a mascot for Clalit, the country’s largest healthcare organization. He predates the current pandemic but has turned his attention to promoting vaccines in recent months.

It’s true that he lacks the basketball-head proportions of Scrappy as depicted in the above examples. (Scrappy later developed a slightly more realistic physique himself, but by then he’d stopped wearing a cap regularly.) But the Clalid kid still has a Scrappy vibe to him–if Sony decided to make new Scrappy cartoons in CGI, he might well look like this.

However, when I went in search of other images of Clalid’s mascot, I discovered that he usually doesn’t sport a cap–and without it, he ceases to be Scrappy’s doppelgänger. (Actually, he looks more like Charlie Brown.)

I also found a line drawing of him in which even I would not detect the slightest tinge of Scrappyness.

Even with his hat on, the Clalit kid’s resemblance to Scrappy is presumably a coincidence, unless Israel is more familiar with Scrappy than I’d guess. Bottom line: Stick a cartoon boy with big black eyes and a grin in a red shirt, short pants and cap, and then put him in a jaunty pose, and the odds are pretty good that he’ll look kind of like Scrappy. To me, that is.

Meet Gury, the Oopy of Brazil

We have long known that the French loved Scrappy–or at least grudgingly tolerated him as comic-book filler. The pioneering cartoonists of Japan–maybe even including Tezuka himself–may have been Scrappy fans, too.

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.

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Scrappy Mystery Graffiti

Hello from Scrappyland, where it’s been far too long since our last post. (I promise to do better in 2021, which won’t be tough.)

At least this overdue return features something unusually special: a Scrappy image shared with us by my friend Peter Huemer, grandson of Dick Huemer and son of Dr. Richard Huemer. As you can see, it depicts Scrappy and graffiti he has seemingly just painted involving other cartoons. They’re all items that Dick Huemer worked on, and they include:

Mutt and Jeff, whom Huemer began animating for Raoul Barre circa 1916, at the very start of his long career in animation
Koko the Clown, the Out of the Inkwell protagonist animated by Huemer beginning around 1916
Disney’s Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck
Fantasia (“Fanny” and “Tasia,” which Huemer cowrote
Also referenced are Walt and Lilly Disney as well as Art Davis and Sid Marcus, Huemer’s Mintz studio collaborators

In short, the art is a playful tribute to Dick Huemer’s career from the beginning through the Fleischer and Mintz periods and well into his Disney days. And that’s all I know about it.

The most obvious mystery: Who drew it? Our candidates must logically begin with Dick Huemer himself, and he seems like a good one. After all, he knew where he’d worked off the top of his head, and he could draw Scrappy. (As shown here, he’s ever so slightly off the early-1930s model as established by Huemer, but that wouldn’t be surprising; by the time he would have drawn this, he would have been rusty.) The style isn’t so obviously Huemer’s that it’s clear it’s his, but at worst, it’s in the same Zip Code.

If it wasn’t Dick who drew it, we can reasonably narrow the field of contenders to people intimately familiar with his career, most likely close friends in the animation industry.

Mystery #2 is when this piece was created. There’s a giant hint in the fact that chronologically, the last Huemer work mentioned is Fantasia. That came out in 1940; in December 1941, Dumbo, which Huemer cowrote with Joe Grant, was released. The fact that Fantasia is there and Dumbo isn’t–not to mention even later Huemer efforts such as the Disneyland TV show–strongly suggests that this art dates from the period when Fantasia had been released or was at least in production but Dumbo remained in the future. Though that’s just a guess; maybe our mystery artist just ran out of space for additional Huemer references..

Also mysterious: The precise events that led to this drawing’s existence. Did Dick do it to amuse himself? Was it for publication? Why does it spotlight Scrappy, who was part of Huemer’s distant past at this point? Dick left Mintz in 1933; the last Scrappy cartoon, The Little Theater, was released in February 1941, ending the series after a long decline. It would seem that the drawing might have been done around the time that Scrappy went away and Screen Gems shed the final vestiges of its Mintz-era origins. Whether that means anything, I can’t say.

It’s possible that answers to some or all of these questions lie in some writing next to Scrappy’s left foot. But it’s far too faint to decipher, even in the version Peter provided, which I lightened for publication here.

Anyhow, it would be fun to know the backstory here, and if you happen to know–or just want to guess–I’d love to hear from you. Even if it remains a mystery, it’s a delightful one–and more evidence that we’re nowhere near done rediscovering our lost Scrappy heritage.

[Update: On Facebook, Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden theorizes that Huemer drew this a lot later, for a publication such as Cartoonist Profiles: “The inking matches similar images Huemer created in this era.”]

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Al Kilgore’s Scrappy

Normally, I would not publish a drawing featuring Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Gertie the Dinosaur, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, Willie Whopper, Farmer Alfalfa, and Katharine “Bo Peep” Hepburn on Scrappyland. But this drawing is special–it’s by Al Kilgore.

And hey, you’ve probably already spotted Scrappy in there, too, down in the lower right-hand corner next to fellow Columbia alum Gerald McBoing Boing–a character my wife loves so much she mentions him in her Twitter profile, which is more than I do for Scrappy.

Al Kilgore (1927-1983) was a wonderfully gifted cartoonist who mostly worked on projects that weren’t all that widely seen. In the 1960s, he wrote and drew the syndicated Bullwinkle comic strip, as good a dead-tree interpretation of an animated cartoon as anyone has ever done. He also illustrated book covers (including this one), designed the glorious Sons of the Desert escutcheon, drew a monthly panel for a magazine for the floor-covering trade, created paper-doll books featuring Elvis and the Reagan family, and did some of the world’s kindest, most charming caricatures for a syndicated feature and film-fan magazines.

I’m guessing that the drawing above, which I recently acquired after learning about it from Jerry Beck, may have been a preliminary sketch for a piece in such a magazine–conceivably Alan G. Barbour’s Screen Facts or Leonard Maltin’s Film Fan Monthly. It seems likely that it dates to the 1960s. But I don’t know for sure. Come to think of it, I’m not positive that Kilgore ever turned this rough into an inked drawing, though I can’t imagine why he’d produce something so ambitious and not finish it for publication, unless he had second thoughts about copyright issues. (It’s drawn on the back of a giant piece of illustration board preprinted with blueline panels for some comic-book publisher–perhaps Gold Key.)

Kilgore loved old movies (especially those starring Laurel and Hardy), comics, and related pop-culture artifacts and imbued his work with his passions every chance he got; even the later part of his Bullwinkle run was crowded with allusions and in-jokes that feel deeply personal. So he must have enjoyed the opportunity to draw so many cartoon characters in one place. At least some of the poses are borrowed from elsewhere, but the composition has a Kilgorian feel–he often did crowd scenes of familiar figures–and it would have been even more distinctive in finished form. (Along with everything else, Kilgore was a great inker.)

Kilgore in *Captain Celluloid vs. the Film Pirates*, a 1966 serial parody with a cast of film buffs

At the time Kilgore would have drawn this, Scrappy was even more forgotten by history than he is today. But Kilgore remembered him, and appears to have had enough reference material handy to draw an excellent, on-model version of the character. I’m so glad their paths crossed.

I’ve owned this Kilgore original for years

If you’d like to see more Kilgore–way more Kilgore–you must check out Drew Friedman’s incredible assemblage of his art. Over on eBay, the people I bought my drawing from have scads of other Kilgore originals for sale, all of them fascinating and some costing as little as $20. And if you happen to know where my sketch might have appeared in completed form, do tell me, won’t you?

Two Columbia kid stars, together again for the first time

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Scrappyland is 15

On January 21, 2005 at 9:00am San Francisco time, I sent an email to a few animation-loving friends:

Subject: Scrappyland is live
At long last, the greatest obscure cartoon character of all time has a home on the Web: Scrappyland is up and running.
Tell your friends–at least if they’re Scrappy fans!
— Harry

That makes today the 15th anniversary of this site. (It did have a preview mode, with a smidge of content, that lasted through much of 2004.) I don’t remember wondering what sort of future the site would have when I was launching it. But I do know that 2005 Harry would be pleased to know that 2020 Harry was still at it.

Why has writing for this site been such a rewarding experience? Well, it’s rare to get the opportunity to create the definitive resource on anything. (I hope you won’t think me full of myself for considering Scrappyland to be such a resource.) There are other folks who write about Scrappy from time to time—hello, Paul, Steve, and Uncle John—but nobody else would be silly enough to spend so much time on the topic. (Even my own silliness flagged from mid-2005 through mid-2012, a stretch when I performed no meaningful updates to the site—but then I converted it into a blog and have since published over a hundred posts.)

It’s nice knowing that if people Google for Scrappy, the odds are high they’ll end up here. I can usually answer their questions, and some of the people who land here have stuff of their own to share. I find it therapeutic, after spending my days thinking about the present and future of technology, to devote some of my brain cells to cartoons that are almost ninety years old. I still get a little tingle from every new Scrappy discovery.

The challenge with a site like Scrappyland is that the day might arrive when I have nothing left to say—either because I’ve lost the urge or because I’ve covered every possible aspect of the subject. I’m pretty sure my interest won’t flag anytime soon. And even if all I do is write up stuff that’s still in my queue of Scrappy learnings, I’ll have enough material for the next several years.

Thank you for reading, and please stick around for more. Scrappyland has already had a longer run than Scrappy himself did as a cartoon star, so there’s no reason this can’t go on indefinitely.

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In Search of Scrappy Cels

Want to see some Scrappy cels? You can. Just go to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library in LA and look up the “Donald Gledhill Animation Project Collection.” Gledhill was the first husband of Margaret Herrick, who earned the honor of having a library named after her by being the Academy’s first executive director (and, at least possibly, the person who named the Oscar “Oscar”). He tried to put together a how-to book on animation, and while it never reached publication, he assembled a pretty remarkable-sounding collection of 1930s cartoon artwork for it. It includes a total of nine cels from two Scrappy cartoons, Scrappy’s Rodeo and Scrappy’s Side Show.

Here’s one from the latter short, with a late-model Scrappy:

I haven’t checked out the Gledhill collection myself, but I should—and so should you, especially if you live closer to it than I do. Those nine cels are the only surviving ones from Scrappy cartoons that I know about.

Over the years, I have managed to assemble a small collection of original Scrappy art. Here’s some of it, and here’s some more. And here’s the original art for the Scrappy pull toy. A little more has escaped my grasp. But I’ve never seen a Scrappy cel for sale.

If I’d been around in the late 1930s, however, I might have been able to pick up a Scrappy cel at a reasonable price. Original cels from Hollywood cartoons were widely sold as a fun and affordable form of art, with the most famous and influential example being the Disney pieces offered by San Francisco’s Courvoisier Galleries. Leon Schlesinger also made cels from his cartoons available, and was nice enough to sign them.

And Charles Mintz seized the opportunity as well. Here’s a December 1937 article from a New Jersey paper:

The Mintz cels may have been intended to dress up children’s rooms, but 80 years later, there are a bunch of examples on eBay at prices up to $1200. Here are three of them, all in nice shape:

And here’s the label from one of these cel’s backsides explaining its provenance:

These cels also have stickers on their backs from Cleveland’s Guenther Galleries; presumably it and Bamberger’s, the department store mentioned in the newspaper article participated in an art sale program that may well have involved other merchants around the country.

All of these Mintz cels on eBay are from Happy Tots. Which—you probably already know this—was not a Scrappy cartoon. The Gledhill collection at the Margaret Herrick Library also has some Happy Tots cels, suggesting that it was a cartoon whose cels Mintz dispensed with particularly freely.

So which Scrappy cartoons was that newspaper article referring to? That is a toughie. The newspaper piece specifies that the cels were from Color Rhapsodies, and that some featured Scrappy, Margy, Oopy, and Yippy. But Scrappy only appeared in four Color Rhapsodies. The last of them, Merry Mutineers, was released in August 1936, well before the newspaper announcement. All his other cartoons were in black and white.

It’s certainly possible that the newspaper story’s wording was sloppy and that the Scrappy cels you could buy were in black and white. Many of the surviving cels from the Schlesinger studio’s sales program are from black and white cartoons, so there’s no reason to assume that Mintz would have rejected the idea of selling b&w cels out of hand. Especially since Scrappy, his most recognizable property, was mostly monochromatic.

Still, the fact that it’s cels from Happy Tots that are available in relative abundance makes me uncertain just how many pieces of Mintz art made it to the public. I’m not assuming that any Scrappy cels were sold, let alone that they survived until the present day. But it’s nice to think they may be out there somewhere, perhaps in the possession of some late-1930s child who once had one up in his or her bedroom—and was smart enough to hold onto it.

Scrappy Tie-Ups Galore

Way back when Scrappyland was new–almost fifteen (!) years ago–I published some Columbia publicity photos of a 1930s child actress named Cora Sue Collins using Scrappy products. Then I found some featuring her fellow Columbia kid contract players Edith Fellows and Dickie Walters. And lastly, back in 2012, one of Edith with a costar named Jackie Moran.

Thanks to Jerry Beck, who generously alerted me to some recent eBay auctions, I have finally procured more examples of what Columbia called Scrappy Tie-Ups. They efficiently promoted current Columbia live-action features and Scrappy merchandise … although, come to think of it, I’m not sure where they appeared. (Newspapers, maybe, although I’ve never seen one in print.)

First, here’s Dickie Walters again, showing off his Scrappy necktie, as photographed by William A. “Bud” Fraker (father of the celebrated cinematographer) and approved by the Hays Office on January 29, 1935.

IMDB lists only four movies that Dickie appeared in. The first was Carnival, which premiered on February 15, 1935–a couple of weeks after Columbia readied this photo (and one week before my mother was born). Besides Dickie, who had a fairly meaty role as a little kid named “Poochie”–which sounds like the name of a Scrappy bit-player–it starred Lee Tracy, Sally Eilers, and Jimmy Durante. And it indeed was set at a traveling carnival. (Dickie, incidentally, also appeared in MGM’s 1935 Anna Karenina, along with both Garbo and Cora Sue Collins.)

Scrappy ties (“For He-Boys”) were manufactured by a company called Guiterman Bros., and were popular enough that I’ve assembled a small collection of them and even found a photo of a small boy who was seemingly wearing one because he liked it, not because he was being paid by Columbia to do so. If they came in slightly larger sizes, I might well be wearing one right now.

Next, say hello to Cora Sue Collins, who seems quite pleased with her copy of the Scrappy Big Little Book. (Oddly, hers seems to be in more battered condition than the one currently in the Scrappyland Archive.) This photo was released in conjunction with the May 1936 Columbia picture The Devil’s Squadron, in which Cora Sue costarred with Richard Dix, Karen Morley, and Lloyd Nolan.

The back of this photo credits it to A.L. “Whitey” Schafer, who succeeded Fraker as chief of Columbia’s stills department and later left for a similar gig at Paramount. He took a lot of photos of stars, such as this 1944 portrait of Veronica Lake, which I borrowed from an excellent post on his work at Aenigma. (I’m sorry to report that we lost him in 1951 in a tragic accident involving an exploding stove on a yacht.)

Here we have Edith Fellows and Jackie Moran in a Schafer photo released in conjunction with And So They Were Married, another Columbia release in May 1936. Melvyn Douglas and Mary Astor got top billing, but Edith and Jackie were right behind them and get tons of screen time. (You can watch the movie over at the Internet Archive.)

But the big news about this Scrappy Tie-Up is that young Jackie is brandishing a Scrappy Army Plane from the Scientific Model Airplane Company, an apparently noted maker of toy aircraft. This is a new Scrappy product to me, and it seems like a major one. I’d love to think there’s still a chance I’ll stumble across one someday.

And here’s the weirdest part: Only a day or two before Jerry alerted me to this photo, I’d heard from another Friend of Scrappy, David Welch of Childhood Memorabilia. Over at eBay, where he’s “pezdudewelch,” he’s selling a 1938 photo of a Lionel train setup at a retail store, and he noticed that the background included … an upside-down Scrappy Army Plane box. When he asked about it, I wasn’t even positive that the Scrappy in question was our Scrappy.

Edith also posed for Whitey Schafer with Transogram’s Scrappy Ring Toss, a fine game which we do have in the Scrappy Archive. This photo is undated and bears no Hays stamp, and I’m not sure what Columbia feature it tied into.

And here’s Edith again in a Schafer photo approved by the Hays Office on October 16, 1937–but apparently produced with the Christmas season in mind. It features the Great Lake Novelty Co.’s Scrappy doll, which I believe had been around for a couple of years by then.

Just so you can get a taste of what the back of these photos looked like, here’s the flip side of the one above, with the Hays stamp, another stamp for the Advertising Advisory Council, Whitey Schafer’s credit, and a caption plugging a Columbia feature called Wonder Child.

That confused me, since I couldn’t find evidence of Edith or Leo Carillo appearing in anything called Wonder Child. It turned out that the movie, when Columbia released it in January 1938, had a much better name: Little Miss Roughneck. And it was a genuine Edith Fellows starring vehicle.

This photo features Edith and her Columbia colleagues the Three Stooges promoting a 1937 Pillsbury giveaway–a successor to the Scrappy Puppet Theater–and I include it here mostly because Edith seems to be wearing the same dress as in the photo above, suggesting that they were part of the same Schafer shoot.

Speaking of the Scrappy Puppet Theater, I lied when I said I’d never seen a Scrappy Tie-Up photo in print. While I was working on this post, I found several papers that published this photo of Edith with her Scrappy theater in December 1936. The caption talks about it as if she just happened to be a fan of cartoon-related puppetry–and I hope that was true, even if was a contractual obligation.

At this point, it doesn’t seem the least bit unreasonable to assume that there are still more Scrappy Tie-Ups out there. I won’t rest until my collection is complete–even if it takes another fifteen or more years, and it probably will.

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The Scrappy Pull Toy Was Everywhere

Eighty-three years ago, the Great Depression still seemed intractable and a dollar was a meaningful amount to spend on a child’s plaything. But what a plaything the Scrappy pull toy was. Manufactured by the Gong Bell Co. of East Hampton, Conn. and officially known as the “Scrappy Band,” it featured Scrappy playing a xylophone and Margy doing the hula in a grass skirt. It’s funny and charming, with great graphics, and deserves a spot high on any list of the best Scrappy products of all time.

Enough examples survive that it’s not tough to find a Scrappy Band on eBay, though their condition is often poor. Margy, for instance, has most often lost her skirt. The one in the Scrappyland Archive is in near-mint condition; maybe it was owned by a kid who didn’t play with it much.

How well did this toy sell back in 1936-1938, which seems to have been the duration of its availability? We’ll probably never know for sure. But here are three 1937 photos of little girls surrounded by toys, and in each case you can spot the Scrappy Band among the goodies.

Here, in a photo originally published in the Milwaukee Journal on February 14, 1937, is Betty Ann Gaudynski posing with toys donated by Milwaukee schoolchildren to be sent to their counterparts affected by the Ohio River’s Great Flood of 1937, which killed hundreds and left a million people homeless. Along with the Scrappy Band in the lower right-hand corner–Scrappy himself is in the shadows–the donations include two Donald Duck pull toys (one with Pluto), which were also products of the Gong Bell Co.

In this photo, published in the Tampa Bay Times on December 18th, 1937, Barbara Jean Williams is flanked by a Scrappy Band and a Shirley Temple doll (apparently in scouting togs). Barbara Jean is using a toy telephone-another popular product from Gong Bell, whose president, the wonderfully-named Mayo Purple, was the subject of an accompanying article.

And in this Christmas picture from 1937, by a photographer for the NEA wire service, boxing legend Jack Dempsey’s daughters Joan and Barbara enjoy their loot, with a Scrappy Band near Joan’s right foot (and a doll spread-eagled on top of it).

It’s tempting to think that Columbia, which was generally intrepid in its Scrappy marketing efforts, had something to do with the Scrappy Band popping up in so many newspaper photos of kids and toys. But unless the studio snuck Scrappy Bands into flood donations and sent one to Jack Dempsey’s daughters, maybe this pull toy was just popular enough to have a decent chance of appearing in any image involving a quorum of playthings. I mean, if you’d been alive in 1937 and had a buck–or as little as 79¢ at a discount house–wouldn’t you have bought one?

(Another piece of evidence for that theory: If Columbia had a hand in the creation of the photos, you’d think the girls would be fawning over Scrappy and Margy rather than ignoring them.)

Coda: If someone was a child in 1937, it’s not unrealistic to think that she might still be alive in late 2019. But I’m sorry to report that Betty Ann Gaudynski, Joan Dempsey, and Barbara Dempsey have all died–in 1986, 1993, and 1994, respectively. (Barbara is not to be confused with a different Dempsey daughter named Barbara, whom he adopted with a later wife; that one ended up being the coauthor of his autobiography.)

Barbara Jean Williams is a common enough name that I can’t research the one in the photo with any confidence. So here’s hoping she is still with us, happy and healthy.

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Scrappy goes to Penney’s

I’d known for years that J.C. Penney had some sort of promotional tie-in with Scrappy. After all, years ago at San Diego Comic-Con, I’d bought what seemed to be a piece of Penney’s back-to-school store signage depicting Margy and Scrappy gallivanting merrily, books in hand, with accompanying text–“This is ‘Scrappy’ and ‘Margy'”–that suggested they needed introducing.

But I had never bothered to investigate the matter further until Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden shared a 1933 Penney’s newspaper advertisement featuring Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy. Remarkably, he’d stumbled across it on Newspapers.com while looking for something else. The ad doesn’t mention Scrappy by name, which means it would be tough to find on purpose. (If you don’t go hunting for Scrappy, Scrappy comes hunting for you.)

Inspired by Mark’s discovery, I turned to Newspapers.com myself and found a bounty of Scrappy-themed back-to-school Penney’s ads, all from August and September 1933.

Here’s just a taste of it.

As you can see, the ads used a few drawings of Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy in various ways with different layouts and text. It seems reasonable to guess that individual stores or regional advertising managers were provided with stock art to use as they saw fit.

You may also have noticed that the ads reference a variety of Scrappy-themed local events: costume contests, parades, and screenings. Here are some more details on these lavish affairs.

The Betty Boopers referenced in that last ad seem to have been members of a Betty Boop club run by a local theater, similar to the original Mickey Mouse Club, and leading to the above bit of unexpected Fleischer-Mintz cross-promotion.

The point of the Penney-sponsored events was to generate publicity that didn’t feel like advertising. The effort paid off handsomely. Newspapers ran announcements about the doings, referencing both Scrappy and J.C. Penney. Then they published follow-up reports once the festivities had taken place.

Sadly, I haven’t run across any photos of the Scrappy parades, lookalike competitions, and theater shindigs—or, for that matter, any of Penney stores during the 1933 back-to-school season, when they must have been bedecked in Scrappyana such as the sign I own. But at 2005’s Scrappyland screening in LA, we unwittingly revived Penney’s tradition by holding a Scrappy masquerade of our own (I think it was Jerry Beck’s idea).

We had one entrant, Raven Loc, who came dressed as a brilliantly monochromatic Margy—and I do have a photo of her in costume.

Other than being pleased by the intensity of the Scrappy angle, the thing that I find most striking about Penney’s campaign is how evocative they are of the Great Depression that was going on at the time. The U.S. economy had bottomed out the previous year, but times were still awfully tough in 1932–unemployment was at 25%—and some of the ads feel obsessed with penny-pinching and fear of higher prices to come, even as they champion FDR’s plan to get the country back on track:

I mentioned that all the Penney-Scrappy items I found dated from August and September 1933. With a little more Newspapers.com research, I learned that J.C. Penney made a tradition of promoting its back-to-school offerings with different well-known, kid-friendly characters each year,

In 1932, the company had used Hal Roach’s Our Gang. I think that’s Spanky third from the left, with Pete on the far right, obviously; whether the others represent actual members of the Gang, I’m not sure.

After embracing Scrappy in 1933, Penney’s dumped him for Mickey Mouse in 1934. Charles Mintz must have taken that as a stinging rebuke, assuming he was paying attention.

The year after that, Penney’s mascot was Popeye. This was during the period when he was Mickey Mouse’s most serious rival, and the chain may have regarded him as an upgrade.

By 1936, however,Penney’s was apparently tired of shelling out money to license familiar characters. Its back-to-school blitz featured Peggy and Peter, the human, non-cartoon Penney Twins…

And in 1937, Peggy and Peter gave way to the largely similar Sunny and Jim, who seem to have ended this promotional tradition.

These back-to-school drives involved at least some of the same elements as the Scrappy one, such as parades and theater parties. And Penney’s distributed celebratory pins in high enough volume that eBay is fairly awash in them. (I haven’t seen any Scrappy ones.)

JC Penney, of course, is still with us–albeit in battered condition. It still throws annual back-to-school events. And tonight, when I found myself in a mall with a Penney’s, I dropped in just in case it had inexplicably decided to enlist Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy in the cause again, a mere 86 years after the first time

It hadn’t. But the place now has an entire Disney-store-within-the-store. I would not be surprised if it includes even more Mickey Mouse gear than the company sold back in 1934.

Penney’s also sells Popeye and (sexy) Olive Oyl costumes, continuing the tradition it began with its 1935 back-to-school bash. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable or unrealistic to believe that it might revive its relationship with the Mintz organization and add a few Scrappy items to its current line. It wouldn’t hurt the company’s business, and it might help–or at least I’d be way more likely to stop in…

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