Posted on 12/10/2002 6:32:55 AM PST by PJ-Comix
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Have you ever heard of the Shmoo? You can be forgiven your ignorance on this subject since the Shmoo made its brief appearance in the newspaper comics pages over fifty years ago.
The Shmoo was the creation of cartoonist Al Capp in his popular Li'l Abner strip. With much fanfare Capp introduced the Shmoo in August 1948 and for the rest of the year the world went Shmoo crazy.
This creature inspired hundreds of Shmoo clubs all over North America as well as the "Society for the Advancement of the Shmoo." There were dozens of Shmoo products including Shmoo greeting cards, balloons, dolls, toys, jai-alai paddles, belts, suspenders, dairy goods, fountain pens, earrings, neckties, ashtrays, plant holders, soap, and curtains to name just a few. A garment factory in Baltimore turned out a line of Shmoo clothes including Shmooveralls.
The people of 1948 danced to the Shmoo Rhumba and the Shmoo Polka. The Shmoo entered our everyday language through such phrases as "What's Shmoo?" and "Happy Shmoo Year!" The best selling book, "The Life and Times of the Shmoo," was devoured by the reading public. Al Capp was even invited to go on a radio show to debate socialist Norman Thomas on the effect of the Shmoo on modern capitalism. Meanwhile in Germany, the commanders of the Berlin Airlift cabled Capp requesting a dozen inflatible Shmoos to be dropped from transport planes into Berlin as part of "Operation Little Vittles."
By now you are probably wondering why all the fuss over the Shmoo. Well, let me describe the Shmoo. It was a lovable bowling pin-shaped whiskered creature. The Shmoo yielded milk, eggs, cheesecake, and just about anything else you might desire. Shmoo meat when roasted was pork, when broiled it was steak, and when fried it was chicken. The eyes of a Shmoo made good suspender buttons and its whiskers made fine toothpicks. The skin when cut thin served as high quality cloth, cut thick it was leather, and cut in strips it became boards for housing.
Since the Shmoo was fast breeding and lived on practically nothing, it provided for almost all of society's needs. It turned out to be too much of a good thing. The Shmoos gave people all that they desired so the characters of Capp's comic strip quit their jobs. As a result of their indolence, civilization declined. Capp, himself sick of the Shmoo, finally dropped it from his strip early in 1949.
I actually had a high school chemstry teacher, Mr. Roth, just like that character. Bad luck followed him everywhere. Once, Mr. Roth was reading a newspaper at his desk and the bottom of the paper got too close to the bunsen burner and set the newspaper on fire....but not before it had gone so far as to burn Mr. Roth's hands. Another time Mr. Roth thought he spilled hydrochloric acid on his hands so he grabbed the emergency beaker of water and poured it on his hands to wash off the acid. Problem was he did just the reverse. He first spilled harmless water on his hands and then poured the acid on the hands to wash it off.
The most hilarious bad luck incident came once when Mr. Roth was showing us a chemistry movie. The projector got stuck and the film started melting in the projector. A frantic Mr. Roth tried to turn on the classroom lights but they wouldn't turn on even though he was madly clicking the light switch rapidly up and down. The whole chemistry class roared with laughter at this scene. The noise attracted the attention of Mr. Cook, another chemistry teacher in the classroom next to us. Mr. Cook entered our classroom and saw Mr. Roth madly clicking the switch up and down in a desperate attempt to turn on the lights. Mr. Cook then brushed Mr. Roth aside, reached out, and with one quick click turned the classroom lights on.
There wasn't a student in that class that wasn't rolling in laughter on the floor at that point. I truly thought I would suffocate from lack of air due to all that laughing. It was the single funniest thing that I ever witnessed.
So don't think that bad luck character exists only in cartoons. They also exist in real life.
(Why not the news? Why do I need to read my Leftist scandal-sheet when I have FR? I get the newspaper for the sports and comics, in that order!)
Oh, and I read nearly every comic (which is saying a lot because Houston Chronicle runs three and a half pages of comics daily). The only ones I DON'T read are one called "Sylvia," some Leftist FemiNazi strip, and one or two others.
I even read the serializations like "Apartment 3G," "Mary Worth," "Gil Thorpe," etc.
Yep, I'm a REAL throwback!
N.B. I also read "Prince Valiant," one of the oldest strips still in existence (probably older than "Li'l Abner") and which only runs on Sunday because it is several large panels.
It's STILL a great strip, and chock-full of historical trivia (and significa).
(From the Broadway show "Li'l Abner").
I liked the one (can't remember the name of it) about the guy whose head was open, like a coffee mug, and instead of a brain he had a chicken roosting up there.
There's an incident attributed to Al Capp which, if true, illustrates his quick wit:
At the end of a speech by Al Capp at a university campus (this was when conservatives were still allowed to speak there) there came a question/answer session. A typical, "long-haired, maggot-infested, dope smoking, FM listening type" (as Limbaugh would say) stood up and proceeded to hurl a bunch of expletives Capp's way.
When he was done, Capp simply replied:
"Now that you've stated your name, what is your question?
Who could have know then that one of their evil twins would go on to serve 2 terms as POTUS ('92-'00)
Am I the only one to notice the resemblance?
I do. (Was it in "They'll Do It Every Time"?)
Anybody remember "Abbie an' Slats"? "Smokey Stover"?
I remember reading "the funny papers" (in color!) in the Chicago Tribune on Sundays during the '50s and '60s.
That's MR. Geezer to you kid!
I do. (Was it in "They'll Do It Every Time"?)
Yep. It went to anyone who sent in a "They'll do it everytime" suggestion that got printed.
And not to forget Fearless Fosdick.
My favorite American strip cartoonist is Milton Caniff. All three of his syndicated strips (Dickie Dare, Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) were absolutely top-drawer: timely tales, grippingly told, and superbly researched and drawn. My favorite is Steve Canyon -- no better chronicle of the Cold War exists, either in words or pictures.
Strip cartooning today is a pale shadow of the way it was during my youth. TV soap-opera programming has absorbed the audience for the dramatic series, which in general were far better written than any TV soap (Stan Drake's The Heart of Juliet Jones was especially well presented), and fans of the sci-fi, Western, and historical genres now get their fix from films, computer games, and TV as well. Only the humor strip remains -- and I use the term "humor" loosely; besides Mort Walker, Dik Browne, and the other greats from the Golden Age, newspaper comics put the gag back in gag strip. With the '70s came a decline in the quality of newspaper humor strips (the slow fall of Peanuts began then), bottoming out with the advent of the Age of Garfield in the 1980s. Gone are most of the truly witty cartoonists of yore, who got the yuks using wordplay, subtlety, and caricature, all drowned in a sea of smartass kids, sarcastic animals, and sexless, poorly-drawn couples (I speak of Sally Forth, not Love Is...).
The comic strip, along with jazz and motion pictures, is our only native American artform. Now, the best cartoons come from Japan and Europe, and no one remembers Al Capp. What a shame.
But looked more like Barbra Streisand...
I believe Capp brought the Shmoo back around 1958 but they just didn't have the same popularity the second time around.
An Al Capp Parody of Dick Tracy. If you ever saw the Capp parody of Ham Fisher you wouldn't believe it. Makes him look like the sleaziest person on the planet. That parody ran for a few weeks in the Sunday section around 1950 (or maybe 1949).
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