Monday, July 23, 2012

June 27-July 2, 1955: More from Davy Crockett

Sunday, June 26 is missing from gocomics' archive.
 
June 27:

From the Wikipedia entry on "Coonskin Cap" (accessed 7/23/2012):

"In the 20th century, the iconic association was in large part due to Disney's television program Disneyland and the first three "Davy Crockett" episodes starring Fess Parker. In the episodes, which once again made Crockett into one of the most popular men in the country, the frontier hero was portrayed wearing a coonskin cap. The show spawned several Disneyland Davy Crockett sequels as well as other similar shows and movies, with many of them featuring Parker as the lead actor. Parker went on to star in a Daniel Boone television series (1964-1970), again wearing a coonskin cap.

"Crockett's new popularity initiated a fad among boys all over the United States as well as a Davy Crockett craze in the United Kingdom. The look of the cap that was marketed to young boys was typically simplified; it was usually a faux fur lined skull cap with a raccoon tail attached. A variation was marketed to young girls as the Polly Crockett hat. It was similar in style to the boys' cap, including the long tail, but was made of all-white fur (faux or possibly rabbit). At the peak of the fad, coonskin caps sold at a rate of 5,000 caps a day.[4] By the end of the 1950s, Crockett's popularity waned and the fad slowly died out. The fad is recalled by numerous cultural references, such as the wearing of coonskin caps as part of The Junior Woodchucks uniform in Disney's Donald Duck comics."

Peanuts was never above making, and making fun of, pop cultural references. The caps feature in this and the next four strips, making for one of Peanuts' earliest sequences.

June 28:

Another version of the previously-described "everybody or everything" style of joke, where the humor comes from watching an animal doing something in a human style. These jokes would lose their impact as Snoopy became humanized.

June 29:

I like Schulz's approach to drawing these caps, which is just different enough from Peanuts' normal art style to add punch to the joke.

June 30:

Good use of motion lines here, it is easy to picture Snoopy's motion in your head. This strip would probably be funnier it it cale before the June 28 strip, which already used the dog-wearing-cap sight gag.

And so Davy Crockett caps leave the strip. But probably not for long.

July 1:

Well, the Davy Crockett fad lasted a good while but it did eventually peter out. Those Davy Crockett shows were kind of like the Star Wars of the age. I don't know myself where that will end, but I hope it comes along soon.

July 2:

I recognize the name Willie Mays, but I guess Duke Snider's name didn't echo across the cultural landscape in the same way.

5 comments:

  1. The missing Sunday strip is an extended Lucy and Schroeder encounter. Lucy imagines how if they were married she would bring him coffee each morning while he practiced the piano, enacting this scene with a toy tea set:

    L. "Wouldn't that be romantic?"

    S. "NO!"

    The coffee pot and crockery are tossed aside as Schroeder thumps his piano lid.

    L. "Musicians aren't real people!"

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  2. "I recognize the name Willie Mays, but I guess Duke Snider's name didn't echo across the cultural landscape in the same way."

    Ever hear the song "Willie, Mickey, and the Duke"?

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  3. I must admit that I have not. I can almost recite Baseball's Sad Lexicon from memory though, "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

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  4. There was another Sunday strip where Charlie Brown and Schroeder were arguing over who was the best, Beethoven or Davy Crockett.

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  5. Ha Ha you cant wait for Star Wars to faze out ha ha you haven't seen anything yet I'm a Star Wars fan and SW7 is the fastest movie to 1 billion dollars 1 movie a year until forever a comic book line a TV show merchandise Disney owns it

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