Here, swiped from a recent Hake’s auction, is a spread from the 1932-1933 Columbia Yearbook–an amazing, amazingly-illustrated book promoting the studio’s releases. Right behind Columbia herself is an alarmingly fuzzy, spats-wearing Mickey Mouse; Scrappy, Yippy, and Krazy Kat are trailing behind. Which was logical enough given that the mouse was unquestionably the biggest cartoon star [...]

So it’s come to this: I’m no longer the most enterprising Scrappy scholar in my own family. Once again, my sister–with the able assistance of my brother-in-law–has made an astonishing discovery. Namely, an appearance by Scrappy (and Margy, and Yippy) in a Humphrey Bogart picture.

The film in question is 1942’s All Through the Night, and [...]

This I know: My sister is the best gift giver in the world. At least when it comes to the most important gifts of all–those being, of course, ones given to me.

I received the latest evidence of this eternal verity on Christmas, when I opened a package which turned out to contain a French comic [...]

As this 1943 ad shows, if I had lived in San Francisco back then, and had been interested in animation, and had been well-heeled enough to have a few hundred dollars to spare, I could have probably put together a truly amazing collection of Disney cels. (One wonders which examples were impressive enough to rate [...]

I’m in Boston for the holidays, and today I did one of the few things you can do in New England that you just can’t do in California–I went candlepin bowling. While I waited for my friend Deb to arrive at the alley, I checked out its video games–and found that one of them [...]

When a major animation figure who was involved with a lot of wonderful cartoons dies, is it inappropriate to dwell on the dark side of his career? If anyone’s reading this, I may find out.

At MGM in the 1940s, Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna made some of the funniest, most expressive, most alive short films–of [...]

When I celebrated Friz Freleng’s birthday here back in August, I really didn’t intend to go for close to three months without blogging. Actually, I’ve been blogging up a storm–I’ve just been doing it over at my PC World technology blog. But I’ve neglected this site–mostly because things have been busy at work–and feel bad [...]

As you may know, blogs everywhere are participating in a great Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon today, in honor of the great man’s 100th (maybe) birthday. So here’s a Friz tribute I wrote a long, long time ago–it appared in Animato #18, which cover-featured Jerry Beck’s Friz interview, back in 1989. (Amazing in retrospect to think that [...]

I haven’t had much time lately to work on this site or Scrappyland, although I did just fix (I think) a nagging problem that was hobbling the ability to leave comments here.

But I have a good excuse, and it’s not that I haven’t been investing time in Web stuff. It’s just that most of my [...]

Almost everything of note that I bought at this year’s San Diego Con used to belong to Pete Burness, apparently. Besides the Scrappy art, I picked up a promotional booklet for The Bullwinkle Show–Sing Along With Bullwinkle Meets Santa Claus:

For me at least, the whole Jay Ward sensibility has a profoundly Cold War-era feel to [...]