The film in question is 1942’s All Through the Night, and [...]]]> 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 it’s got an all-star cast: Bogie is joined by Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, William “You kids get out of my kitchen” Demarest, Phil Silvers, Jane Darwell, Jackie Gleason, and others. The plot involves Damon Runyonesque types and Nazis; Bogie, playing “Gloves Donahue,” has suffered the assassination of the baker of his favorite cheesecake and has been framed for (another) murder himself. Amazing stills after the jump….

A dame may be able to clear him, and Bogie has reason to think she may be at a warehouse on East 61st. He goes there with Demarest…

They break into the warehouse, which is chockablock with toys…

Including a SCRAPPY, MARGY, AND YIPPY PULL TOY (!!!)…

Attempting to sneak around the warehouse, Demarest accidentally gives the pull toy a kick…

And it goes careening, causing Scrappy to energetically play his xylophone whilst Margy does the hula…

A nonplussed Bogie tells Demarest to can the noisy tomfoolery…

And it turns out the whole thing is the setup for a gag in which Demarest gets buried in a veritable avalanche of toys.

What to make of this? If this had been a 1930s Columbia flick, I’d accuse Harry Cohn of product placement. (I don’t know of any Scrappy appearances in live-action Columbia pictures, but the studio sure tried every other avenue to promote the guy.) But All Through the Night was a Warner film, made the year after the Scrappy series ended. So maybe the use of the Scrappy toy was random rather than an intentional promotional effort.

In any event, I’m pleased to say that The National Scrappy Gallery’s collection includes an example of the toy in question, in absolutely wonderful condition.

I received the latest evidence of this eternal verity on Christmas, when I opened a package which turned out to contain a French comic [...]]]> 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 album. One published in 1938. Which, she later told me, she bought at a flea market in Bordeaux.

Here’s its cover:

Hmmm, that’s interesting–there’s Major Hoople, and his name in France was Captain Bilboqu–HEY! THAT’S SCRAPPY!

Bilboquet, about which I know nothing other than what I can divine from this album (which compiles the first 25 weekly issues) consisted mostly or entirely of American comics (and other features from the U.S., such as Frank Merriwell text stories). Its name means “ball and cup,” and yes, its mascot was Scrappy, as evidenced by the fact that he appeared as part of its logo.

Inside, Scrappy starred in an adventure story–”Scrappy Et Les Contrebandiers”–that was serialized one page at a time. I haven’t yet tried to apply my rusty French to translating it in full. But I can tell that it’s set on the Rio Grande, and that it stars his Scrappiness, Margy (called Betty in France), Yippy, a Monopoly Man-like tycoon, an evil Mexican guy, and a Phantom Blot-like mystery villain.

Here are a few representative pages:

When I looked at these, the first thought that popped into my mind? Plucky kid with an improbable cowlick. Fuzzy little dog. Serialized crime-busting adventures. Could it be that Scrappy was Bilboquet’s weird, imported answer to Tintin?

These are, I think it’s fair to say, incredibly rare comics. But not so rare that I didn’t blog about them last year, when I hadn’t seen them and didn’t know if they’d ever actually been published anywhere. In that post, I explained that in 1937, the tiny comics syndicate run by Jerry Iger and a very young Will Eisner had advertised a Scrappy strip as being available. These French Scrappy comics are pretty clearly the Iger-Eisner ones, since Bilboquet also features Hawks of the Seas, Eisner’s primitive-but-promising pirate saga.

So Will Eisner apparenly had a hand–at least businesswise–in these Scrappy comics. That leads to one inevitable question: Are they his work? Jerry Bails’ Who Who of American Comic Books does credit Eisner with having written, drawn, and inked Scrappy comics. But that brief reference is the only thing I’ve been able to find associating the great cartoonist with Scrappy–more extensive discussions of Eisner’s early work, such as this excellent piece, make no mention of the strip. (I checked in with the article’s author, Ken Quattro; he doesn’t have any information on an Eisner-Scrappy connection.)

(Bilboquet, by the way, runs the strips with a French copyright, no credits, and no mention of Scrappy’s American, animated origins; I don’t know if anyone in France even knew that he appeared in movie cartoons.)

Will Eisner was, of course, one of the most distinctive cartoonists of all time; in theory, you might be able to identify Scrappy as his work, or reject it as being such, simply by eyeballing it. But in the 1930s, his style was still a work in progress, and I’ve never seen any true bigfoot cartooning by the man. The best conclusion I can come to by examining the art is that while I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s his, there’s no obvious Eisneresque element to any of it, with the exception of the fact that one character (seen above) looks a bit like a more cartoony Inspector Dolan.

Actually, there’s one other exception, and it’s signficant. Dig the atmospheric first panel in this sequence, which looks like it could have come from a 1940s Spirit story:

That’s the only panel in all of Bilboquet’s Scrappy material that does look like Eisner, and perhaps that’s evidence that the rest of the material isn’t his. Although, looking at it, I see that the style wavers a lot from strip to strip–I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one member of the Iger-Eisner shop had a hand in it. (Actually, now that I look at the pages above, it looks like the first one, at least, might be the work of an entirely different cartoonist than whoever did the later ones.)

Incidentally, it doesn’t look much like the work of two Iger-Eisner cartoonists who did have a background in cartoony comics–Jerry Iger himself and the pre-Batman Bob Kane. But I can’t rule out the possibility that the strip was done by someone who worked on Scrappy cartoons. (To my eye, though, it looks like it was done by a newspaper cartoonist, with the aid of old Scrappy model sheets–by 1937/38, the animated Scrappy had been modernized and cutened up somewhat.)

Another possibility: Could at least some of this work have been done specifically for the French market, either in the U.S. or in France? (Note that the first strip above looks like it might consist of daily strips pasted up into a one-page chapter, while the later pages are a bit more free-form in structure.)

I hope it goes without saying that I’d love to hear any information you might have on these comics–be it solid evidence or informed speculation.

But wait, there’s more…

The day after Christmas, I got an e-mail from comics scholar D.D. Degg. He pointed me towards an online archive of 1937 issues of a newspaper called the Grosse Pointe Review which featured a different Scrappy comic strip, Scrappy Sayings. (It apparently appeared in some papers as early as 1935.) Yup–in 24 hours, I’d gone from never having seen any Scrappy newspaper comics to having seen two different Scrappy features.

Scrappy Sayings is nowhere near as tantalizing as the French stuff. But being Scrappy-related, it’s decidedly odd–kinda like a 1930s version of Love Is, except with bad puns and (thank God) clothing.

Here’s a sample:

As far as I know, I’ve now seen examples of all the Scrappy newspaper comics that were ever done. I’m probably wrong, though–with Scrappy, the only safe assumption is that there are no safe assumptions…

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 [...]]]>

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 was The Act, an “interactive romantic comedy” which I’d read about on Cartoon Brew earlier this year.

The Act is tough to describe, but virtually every reference I’ve seen to it brings up Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair, and that’s as good a frame of reference as any, although this new game is vastly more interesting than the Bluth one. It’s an arcade game done in full character animation–amazingly, maybe the first since those Bluth laserdisc games of the 1980s, even though the technology is far more practical these days. But while the Bluth games’ themes were pretty much exactly the same as other early arcade games, The Act is indeed a romantic comedy, involving a klutzy window washer, a sexy nurse, an unpleasant boss, and other characters. I’m not sure if the parallels are intentional, but it reminds me a lot of a Harold Lloyd film. (In part because there’s no dialog–or at least I didn’t hear any during the section of the game I was able to get through before losing.)

Dragon’s Lair was a game with a simple input device (a joystick) and game play that was almost beside the point (you thrashed the joystick around, but it didn’t seem to have that much impact on what happened). The Act has an even simpler input device (a rotating knob, not unlike the one from Pong), but the game play is surprisingly subtle. Basically, you rotate the knob to control the hero’s behavior, and the idea is to keep him active without forcing him to go over the top. So in the first bit of game play, in which he’s flirting with the nurse in a Casablanca parody, you’ve got to turn the knob with a lot of finesse–rather slowly, precisely, and sporadically–to avoid scaring her off.

Between the nicely-done animation, unusual premise, and unique game play, I found the game pretty absorbing, and was playing when Deb arrived. She was intrigued, but when I asked her if she wanted to have a go, she said “No!” I should have asked her why, but didn’t.

Back at my folks’ house, I looked into the story behind The Act, and found that I’d lucked into being one of the first people to play it. It’s the product of a Boston-area company called Cecropia, and is in a test rollout at seven Massachusetts and New Hampshire locations through January, including the bowling alley we’d gone to. The animation, directed by Broose Johnson, was done by laid-off veterans of Disney’s Orlando studio, and it’s good, funny stuff; even the backgrounds are well done.

(The Cecropia site has more background on the game.)

The Act has almost nothing to do with the barely-alive industry that arcade gaming has become–it’s low-key, free of violence other than the slapstick kind, and rewards restraint on the part of the game player. Most players of arcade games–who seem to be a pretty lonely bunch of pre-teen boys these days–probably wouldn’t like it; most people who might like it probably haven’t played an arcade game in years.

I have no idea whether it stands a chance as a business enterprise, but I hope so–it’s a new idea, and one which makes excellent use of hand-drawn animation. If you find yourself near any of the test locations in the next few weeks, check it out. And if you don’t find yourself near them, stay tuned: Apparently, Cecropia has plans to release a home version at some point.

I hope it’s a success, one way or another–I’d like to see its makers get a shot at continuing this experiment with further games…

At MGM in the 1940s, Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna made some of the funniest, most expressive, most alive short films–of [...]]]> 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 any sort–ever produced anywhere. If they’d left the business when the studio’s cartoon arm closed in 1957, I’m convinced, their reputation today would be pretty simple to summarize: Everyone would know that they were grand masters of the American animated short, period.

But Bill and Joe went on to found their own studio, one whose yearly output dwarfed their entire MGM career. And it produced…well, mostly cynical crud. (For years, my attitude towards the early Huck Hound and Yogi Bear shorts was almost entirely dispassionate, perhaps because we got them on Portland TV only when I was about nine and had already been soured on HB from watching too much of its later output; recently, I’ve come to appreciate them for their voicework, design, and, in some cases, writing. But I’d still rather watch almost any Jay Ward cartoon from the same era.)

From the start, the HB studio’s work was derivative–Ruff and Reddy being clones of Crusader Rabbit and Rags–and by the mid-1960s, most of it was derivative junk without the saving graces of the early stuff. HB has been called the studio that saved the animation business, but to borrow a phrase from a war of that era, it had to destroy the artform in order to save it. I still wonder if TV animation would have gotten so bad so quickly if Hanna-Barbera hadn’t defined schlockiness down a little more each season for so long.

And it was all doubly depressing because Hanna and Barbera had proved themselves capable of making wonderful cartoons. For all we know, Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott were capable only of swill; Bill and Joe didn’t have that excuse. I remain convinced that they could have done better. Even with the budgets they had. Even in an era in which the networks made it almost impossible to produce a good TV cartoon.

(Question: Is it pure coincidence that when HB utterly dominated the industry, nearly all television animation was abysmal–and when the company’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, in the late 1980s or so, the quality of the average TV cartoon improved sharply? Discuss…)

(Another question: If Daws Butler had never lived, would anyone remember the earliest HB cartoons with even a small fraction of the fondness they generate today?)

Pardon me–I think I’ll go off now and watch The Zoot Cat…

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 [...]]]> 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 energy has gone into the total redesign that PCWorld.com has launched. We started work on this in early 2005; we’re still ironing out some kinks, but I’m really pleased with it overall.

For me at least, the whole Jay Ward sensibility has a profoundly Cold War-era feel to [...]]]> 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 it, so I was tickled to see this art, with Bullwinkle, Boris, and Dudley on a sleigh ride along with JFK, Jackie, Bobby (I think), Castro (in back, to the left of Bullwinkle), and Jay Ward (Right?). I’m not sure who the dapper guy in the middle with the moustache is, though. And I feel I should be able to identify who drew this, but I can’t.

Inside are a bunch of satiric Christmas carols that don’t mention any Jay Ward characters, but do make reference to Caroline and other Kennedy kin, the Peace Corps, Green Stamps, the New York Mets, Nielsen ratings, the Beverly Hillbillies, Dean Rusk, and other hot topics of the early 60s.(From the references to Christmas, JFK, and the Hillbillies, I deduce that the booklet dates from 1962–unless, and this is sadly possible–it was published for Christmas 1963 and released before November 22nd.)

Here’s one page from the interior, with a song by Bill Scott (most of the ones in the book are by Allan Burns, and all of them are sort of faux-Tom Lehrer):

I bought one other Ward-related item–yep, also from the Burness archive–and I’ll try to remember to post it, too.