Him Johnny, Her Maureen

This 1934 New Yorker cartoon appeared shortly before the release of the movie Tarzan And His Mate, the second in the series with Johnny Weissmuller and Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan.

William Crawford Galbraith, The New Yorker, 3/3/1934
The New Yorker, 1934

Tarzan And His Mate caused quite a stir, and it contributed to the Hays Office enforcing the Production Code that it had written in 1930. What, exactly, was objectionable? For starters, although Jane taught Tarzan to call her his wife, they weren’t actually married. The video player has eight minutes of the movie that I’ve spliced together.
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Josephine McKimThe nude swim had been censored from prints of this movie for nearly 60 years. Weissmuller was an undefeated Olympic gold medal swimmer, so he did his own swimming for this scene. The woman with him underwater was another Olympic swimmer, Josephine McKim.

Yet another Olympic swimmer, Buster Crabbe, played Tarzan in a 1933 serial, between Weissmuller’s first and second Tarzan movies. I don’t know why swimmers, rather than gymnasts, were favored to play the Ape Man.

Jonny Questioning

Previously on Dog Rat, I featured a Marvel Super Heroes cartoon with Captain America. The low-budget cartoons in this series went into production thanks in large part to the relatively successful and ambitious Jonny Quest, a half-hour primetime cartoon from two years earlier.

Jonny Quest was developed by cartoonist-animator-comic book artist Doug Wildey, who had worked for Alex Toth on an earlier cartoon called Space Angel, which shouldn’t be confused with Toth’s Space Ghost. We’ll be seeing some of both those spacey guys later.

The premiere episode of Jonny Quest, “Mystery of the Lizard Men”, originally aired on ABC-TV at 7:30 pm, Friday, September 18, 1964. I had just turned nine, and I thought this was one very cool cartoon — except for Bandit!
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Hey, Bulldogs

If you saw this past Sunday’s Parade magazine, you saw the ad (click to enlarge) for “the irresistibly cute… Bulldog Christmas Tree.”

Eric spotted this and stared in stunned disbelief, as did we, his humble parents. What possible connection could bulldogs have to Christmas? Then we realized. Of course. The three wise men, bearing gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. And their bulldogs, bearing hot dogs. Added spice for me is the fact this never-to-be forgotten — or even gotten — treasure of a collectible is from the Danbury Mint in Norwalk, CT.