CSotD: Friday Funnies, Episode IV, A New Hope
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Rex Morgan took a serious step through the fourth wall Sunday, wrapping up a story that had begun with a singer with a bad cough, written in part before bad coughs were a thing, and now to be followed by a storyline that wouldn’t be overshadowed by current events.
So now l’il Grundoon has asked a question and over the past week, we’ve fiddled around in order, I suspect, to kick off the actual start of Rex’s explanation on Sunday.
Since Terry Beatty has, as seen in that larger episode, gone back to 1948, let’s either provide a sneak peek or make his effort harder, with the first six strips, as collected on Sunday, May 16, 1948, by the Pittsburgh Press in order to let their readers catch up and start paying more attention to the weekday editions:
Given that first impression, I have to give Rex and June credit for containing their mutual hots and operating on a purely professional level for 47 years before they finally got married.
We’ll see how he explains it all to Sarah.
(UPDATE: Terry says it’s a retcon and he’s changing the story, which is good because “She came with the furniture” seems kind of boring.)
And as long as we’re poking around in the archives, here’s an ad I found in a newspaper from 1903, in which Buster Brown sells clothes, though the text of the illustration isn’t terribly clear on what he is shilling for, suggesting that anyone who wanted to license the artwork was free to sell whatever they had on hand.
I note, however, that Outcault not only signed the work but included a trademark icon, though Buster was trademarked by the NY Herald and not the artist, which is how the ball bounced in those days. Whatever kids may have learned from Buster (or the Yellow Kid), cartoonists learned a lesson from Outcault’s adventures in copyright and trademark law.
A year after this ad ran, the Brown Shoe Company licensed Buster and began selling Buster Brown Shoes, which still exist, though I don’t think they have their own stores anymore.
Two other notes: Buster’s girlfriend, Mary Jane, gave her name to a particular type of girls’ shoe, and, in a course on business law, we were told that you couldn’t copyright the term “brown shoes” because it was too generic and anyone could claim to make shoes that were brown, as opposed to “wonderfully magical” shoes.
I’m going to assume the professor had chosen the example without considering what might happen when someone named Brown decided to make shoes.
And a third note, which is that, if you like this vintage stuff, you should be following Tom Heintjes over on Twitter.
He runs fun stuff like this regularly on his Twitter feed, and you should probably also subscribe to his magazine, Hogan’s Alley, which is up for an Eisner, but, in the meantime, pull your harpoon out of your dirty old bandana and audition for your high school’s harmonica band.
Though, strange as it sounds now, in 1950, the Harmonicats had a Number One hit with “Peg O’ My Heart,” played on Hohner harmonicas.
Still on the nostalgia watch, Pooch Cafe hearkens back to the days when Henry seemed to find pies cooling on windowsills two or three times a week, which mystified me even in the 1950s.
Their theft of the refrigerator is appropriate, though, because back in the days of pies on windowsills, people put other perishables out there, like milk or meat, because they didn’t have refrigerators or even ice boxes.
They also went to the store every couple of days, rather than stocking up for a week at a supermarket, and food obviously wouldn’t keep out there in the middle of summer, but, then again, you wouldn’t fire up a wood stove and bake pies when it was 90 degrees out, either.
Nostalgic Juxtaposition of the Week:
Red and Rover takes place in the mid-Sixties, but this week saw some substantial hearkening-back.
Star Trek debuted Thursday, September 8, 1966, at 8:30, which suggests that Red was allowed to stay up until 9:30 on a school night, which is doubly unlikely given that he had a paper route.
Leave us not pick nits: Accept that he watched it during vacation breaks, and he delivered an afternoon paper.
I’m more intrigued by TV scheduling that would start a one-hour program at the bottom of the hour rather than the top.
And, if you visit the Lucy/Desi museum in Jamestown, NY, you’ll find a section about how Lucy championed the show when others were dubious.
Goldfish crackers hit the US market in 1962, and here’s more than you wanted to know about that.
And I don’t have background on toys in cereal, but my poor mother had to manage the phenomenon in a family of six kids, which involved a rule that we could only have one sugared and one plain cereal open at a time, but I have no idea how she kept track of whose turn it was to get the prize.
I do remember that we couldn’t have it until the cereal it came in was gone, so it didn’t matter which end you opened or how much you shook the box.
I also remember that some of the toys were disappointing crap but many of them were additions to our collections of plastic animals and people and stuck around for years.
“Collect the whole series” was a worthwhile goal.
And Red and Rover is a worthwhile nostalgia trip for those of us of a certain age, and a bit of trivial history for those who aren’t.
Finally, Tank McNamara explores the problem of reopening colleges.
For my part, if I had to choose between hanging out on campus without classes, or taking classes without being on campus, I’d certainly go for the experience over the academics.
Then again, like Doug in this vintage Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet, I wasn’t the most intense scholar.
Not that I didn’t respect reading as a concept, mind you.
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