I’ve mentioned Percy Crosby’s comic strip Skippy in the past. It’s one of the all-time great comic strips. It’s also deeply influential. It was one of the first “thoughtful child” comic strips. It was a model for Charles Schulz, and through Schulz, every other comic strip that tries to be about kids since then. It’s also a rather modern comic strip. It’s funny in the ways that comic strips made after 1950 are funny. It’s curiously like Robert Benchley, whose essays are a touch dated but come from a style of humor that’s still current. It was ripped off by a renowned manufacturer of buttered peanuts.
Why mention all this? Besides that the strip is available and rerunning on gocomics.com, I mention because Turner Classic Movies (United States feed) is scheduled to run it this weekend. Saturday at 7:45 am, Eastern Time, it’s to run the 1931 movie Skippy. The movie stars Jackie Cooper. And in a fair trade, the movie made a star of Cooper. It was directed by Norman Taurog, who’s also renowned for directing The Adventures of Young Tom Sawyer, Boys Town, Young Tom Edison, It Happened At The World’s Fair, and Doctor Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine, because it was 1965 and who even knows from movies anymore.
I can’t say much about the movie’s quality; I’ve never seen it. According to the (sad; meanness to animals involved) article TCM.com has on the making of the movie, it was successful at the time, though the sequel was not. That I could never find a copy to watch before doesn’t necessarily mean much. Early-sound-era films are almost as hard to find as they are to listen to. I mean, there’s bits of The Cocoanuts where it seems sure Groucho Marx and company are saying funny stuff, but who could guess what?
TCM does have a couple of scenes from the movie — three to four minutes each! — online, and I do like what I’ve seen. So, if you read this in time, I recommend setting the video recorder. There’s no guessing when the chance to see this will come again.
As if there wasn’t enough confusion between Jackie”Perry White”Cooper and Jackie “Uncle Fester”Coogan, I see Cooper’s costar in Skippy is a relative of Coogan’s
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Yeah, that’s more confusion than I can really take, myself.
It happens I haven’t yet seen the movie, because our cathode-ray TV died right after I recorded this and before I could watch it. And when we got the HDTV to replace the old, we had to get a new HDTV-compatible DVR. And then a replacement, because that one didn’t work, and then another replacement because that one rattled with the noise of a jet engine. (We’ve since had to replace it again because the thing started not recording segments of shows.)
We still have the older DVR with Skippy and two whole seasons of Doctor Who on it, since the satellite TV people didn’t want the old unit back, but to hook that back up to the TV and show the old stuff takes, literally, like a minute and plugging in two things so who has the time?
But I’m really looking forward to watching it sometime.
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