TCM showing “Skippy” tomorrow night
Turner Classic Movies (United States feed) has scheduled the 1931 movie Skippy for this Wednesday, February 27th, at 10:15 pm. The movie is based on Percy Crosby’s comic strip Skippy, one of the comics that Charles Schulz had in mind when making Peanuts. Joseph Nebus tells you exactly why it’s so important to comics history:
Crosby supposed that kids had feelings and desires and interests that they took seriously, and that good stories would come from taking them seriously. Every comic strip that follows the child’s point of view owes something to it. It’s not only influential, though. It’s good. I mean, a lot of early comic strips are good, but you have to work a bit to understand them. Like, I enjoy George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, but if take any given day’s strip and ask me what the joke is I’ll often be in trouble. Not Skippy, though. Crosby’s sensibility is close enough to the modern one. There are exceptions, but you can look at the comic and understand what’s supposed to be funny. Clean up the dialogue and redraw it for modern comic strip art sizes and you could run it on a modern newspaper page.
