{"id":276,"date":"2007-06-20T21:20:12","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T04:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harrymccracken.com\/blog\/?p=276"},"modified":"2007-06-20T21:20:12","modified_gmt":"2007-06-21T04:20:12","slug":"dick-huemer-and-mussolini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/20\/dick-huemer-and-mussolini\/","title":{"rendered":"Dick Huemer and Mussolini"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As long as we&#8217;re talking about animation personages getting ideas from Axis dictators in the 1930s&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Richard Huemer, son of Dick Huemer, was nice enough to give me copies of some clippings his father had tucked away. Here&#8217;s one from a Baton Rouge paper (undated, but presumably from 1930 or 1931) about Dick and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Toby_the_Pup\">Toby the Pup<\/a>, the character who&#8217;s most famous for being even more obscure than Scrappy. A few notes:<\/p>\n<p>1) You&#8217;ve gotta love an article with the line &#8220;Dick Heumor, who&#8217;s [sic] real name is Dick Huemer&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>2) The uncredited author of the story wasn&#8217;t all that excited about interviewing the creator of Toby, apparently&#8211;in both his lede and conclusion, he or she makes an ungainly attempt to associate Dick with Mickey Mouse, well before Huemer did join the Disney organization.<\/p>\n<p>3) Scrappy cartoons often have a postmodern, self-referential quality, as if they&#8217;re parodies of 1930s animation. I see something of the same tone in Dick&#8217;s tale of how Toby had been inspired by a dog he&#8217;d owned named Toby, who saved his life. In France.<\/p>\n<p>4) Whether or not the shocking truth about Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler&#8217;s relationship is ever uncovered, at least we&#8217;ve learned this: <em>Il Duce<\/em> had a hand in the creation of Toby. Who knew?<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/www.harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/toby1.jpg' alt='toby1.jpg' \/><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/www.harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/toby2.jpg' alt='toby2.jpg' \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As long as we&#8217;re talking about animation personages getting ideas from Axis dictators in the 1930s&#8230; Dr. Richard Huemer, son of Dick Huemer, was nice enough to give me copies of some clippings his father had tucked away. Here&#8217;s one from a Baton Rouge paper (undated, but presumably from 1930 or 1931) about Dick and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/20\/dick-huemer-and-mussolini\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Dick Huemer and Mussolini&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[47,48,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dick-huemer","category-mussolini","category-toby-the-pup"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}