Also media, Ah, what's raising my children? If you're the subject of today's episode, the answer is no one really. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about terrible parents. We've just finished our Steve Jobs episodes who was a Shitty parent for the history books, And today, folks, we have a horrible, horrible man who was also a horrible horrible parent for you. That is boy howdy, this guy much worse than your guessing he's going to be.
And before I introduce our subject for this week, this is a cartoonist who we're going to be talking about. And whenever I bring on a cartoonist, bastard and there are many, we have our resident official Behind the Bastards podcast cartoonist Randy Millholland Grance.
Thank you so kindly. That was a lovely intro. I really can't wait for this best because you're talking about his property is done by the same syndic that I work for.
Good Well, speaking of that, you are the creator of the webcomics Something Positive and you are currently pop by the sailor Man's uncle. I think is I think so?
I think I'm his adoptive father.
Now this pot Yeah, yeah, his adoptive father. You draw him to this day, and actually we'll be talking a little bit about that, about how comics go on when they're original artist no longer one's tour is able to draw them and stuff. That's part of the story here. But our bastard for this episode is the Dennis the Menace guy. And I know what you're saying. People, The term history's greatest monster gets thrown around a lot, especially
mostly by me. Yeah, mostly by me, But obviously, who could be a better pick for the worst human being in history than the guy who draws Dennis the Menace? I don't know.
I'm actually surprised you didn't try to do the Hitler of comics because you also throw that alout on.
I've done a lot of the Hitler of X titles over the last couple of year, Sophie. I'm not a very creative man. I know, Randy, What can you tell me about the Dennis the Menace creator, Hank Ketch him not spelled like the guy from Pokemon.
Well, I know that he served in the Navy during World War Two. I know the names of a few his ghost artists who worked on the comic and the comic book. I also know that around the time Dennis the Minists launched in America and Britain, a comic also named Dennish the Menace, Completely Unrated launched. I know he was not rumored to be the nicest dad.
Not that we'll be talking a lot about him as.
A dad, not to his first son anyway, not to his first kid. Yeah, ef fact, I would say that there's definitely a lot of like sadness involved with children, because like the TV show, I know there were some sad things happening to Jane Orth as well.
I'm nervous.
I'm not gonna lie.
This is an interesting story obviously, like we're talking about a lower stakes bastard than a lot of our war criminals and genocide airs here. But I think it's interesting both because Hank's career kind of straddles the birth of animation as a field, and he has involved in some of like the early acts of bastardry within animation as it relates to like Disney and labor issues. And he's also just a fascinating case study of like where's the
ethical line about creating art that's inspired by your life? Right? Because most people who do some sort of fictional art, especially for like an audience and an ongoing basis. Their real life experiences play into that somehow. It's like a common joke that like writers and whatnot, you know, takes stuff from their lives and put it into their stories. And is there actually a moral line? There is there
a degree to which that's like wrong? Like what is the extent to which you should do that when it starts to have an effect on the real people that you're inspired by. These are actually some kind of tough questions that I think will be rolling over a little bit. But I will tell you Hank does the wrong thing in every possible instance. So oh no, yeah, oh god, Yeah. So Hank King Ketcham was born on March Fourteen's you say king King is his middle name? Yeah, is a
king of God. And again not like ash Ketchum of the Pokemons, that's k e tchu Wim. Hank is k E tch a m And he was born on March fourteenth, nineteen twenty, in the flooded hellscape of Seattle, Washington. His father's first name was Weaver, which I don't like. I don't think that's a very good name.
It's a weird one.
It's a fine last name if you want to get shot by the FBI, or at least have several members of your family shot by the FBI, but a bad first name. And his mother's first name was Virginia, which I'm neutral on. When he was six years old, he met an illustrator who was a friend of the family. And this is like his inciting incident as a kid who wants to become a cartoonist. And here's how Hank describes that moment. A lot of artists I and I guess basically everyone who becomes an artist has a moment
like this. Hank describes his in his autobiography, which has the most insufferable title of a famous cartoonist attabious, imaginable. Do you know what this autobiography is named? I am dreading this so you know he's the guy who created Dennis the Menace, right, not weird that people might want an autobiography for that. What do you call that? I'm the Dennis the Menace guy, you know, Hank Ketchum a life in cartoons now.
Drawing trouble. That that's why I go drawing trouble.
Sure, all of these are fine titles. He calls it the Merchant of Dennis the Menace, Oh, like the Merchant of Venice for no reason, because there's no similarity, like other than the fact that there's an iss in both that, like, there's no through line between the Merchant and Venice and drawing Dennis the Menace. I'm so angry about this, and I shouldn't be, And like, I don't normally say this, but Hank Ketchum should have been murdered by the government.
What else can you say about that? I'm sorry.
The next National Cartoon Society meeting after this podcast, my next editors meeting, where they're like, hey, heard you were on a podcast about talking about property distribute, But.
Seriously, why would you call it the Merchant of Dennis the Menace.
I'm sure you thought it, and I'm sure he had no one who was willing to say no.
Yeah.
I mean it is a little telling because past a certain point in his career, this is just a property he's marketing, rather than which I mean, I don't actually hold that against him, right, Like, if you draw a doodle of a misbehaving little kid and it makes you a very wealthy man, you kind of ride that ship as long as you can, right, Who wouldn't you know?
It's also really common in comics that a lot of times you'll have cartoonists who will get ghost artists and ghost writers, and you know, once you get big enough, you can like Jim Davis hasn't drawn Carfield probably decades.
God has been, of course not. And we're well on the record of saying there's nothing wrong with Jim Davis.
Really not a lot of my friends. In fact, a lot of cartoonists like Jim Davis Scott their start in this field. Yeah, being ghost artists, it's a very common.
Yeah. Yeah. And of all the ways to get that kind of money, drawing a little a weird little guy is like one of the least problematic ways, right, Like, there's not as much exploitation normally with Hank there kind of is because his child is like the sacrifice he makes for his comic to work. But I've gotten ahead of myself.
Oh God.
Anyway, here's how he describes first getting pilled on the wonders of working as a cartoonist. As I watched him scribble some quick sketches of Barney Google, Moon Mulleins and Andy Gump. I couldn't wait to borrow his magic pencil and try my own hand at drawing these comic strip characters. It looks so easy and such a lot of fun. I couldn't have been more than six years old at the time. Well, the two men sure came up with
a good way to get rid of me. In a hurry, I moved over to the creaky roll top desk, found some thin sheets of paper, and remained there until dinner, slavishly tracing the visitor's sketches. Quite sure the pencil was magic. And uh, yeah, I think that that's not an uncommon kind of story, right, Yeah.
I think it's how a lot of us start off. Either we see it or we just are lucky enough to start doodling one day you just can't stop.
Yeah, yeah, And that's what happens with Hank. He starts doodling. When this guy comes over, he sketches his drawings. He actually has the opposite experience I had his little kid where his teacher finds his cartoons and takes them on in front of the class to be like, look at how good Hank is it drawing, And she has him like draw for the class to like praise him, not as like a to punish him or whatever in.
This garbage you were doing, piece of shit. I had those teachers. I had a lot of those teachers.
Yeah I got. I got in trouble because my cartoons were way too violent and in a post column by in America, you didn't want to your teacher to find your notebook with those drawings.
Oh shit. I didn't realize how lucky I was to graduate in nineteen ninety four.
Yeah. I would have been in so much trouble for so many things. Yeah. I mean it's only gotten worse since, like I was not there and nearly as bad as it would become. But like I did have, I did catch some flak for some of my cartoons. So in
his autobiography, Hank describes himself as lucky. And I find this interesting because he's aware that, like other kids spend years trying to figure out what they're going to be, and like often never really do And he knew from like is, basically as long as he could remember, he knew the only thing I want to be is a cartoonist.
It is interesting he's got that kind of self awareness that is a blessing, right knowing that you have this one very specific thing, and it's the only thing you'll ever want to do.
I can relate. Actually, that's something my earliest memory was bluring. People can draw for a living, and that's why I wanted to do. I God, I hope that is the only similarity between us.
I'm I also hope that's the only similarity between you. In his autobiography, he describes himself as like becoming increasingly obsessed with cartoons as a child. The Wondrous World is inhabited by Barney Google, Harold Teene, Mutt and Jeff, the Tuonerville Folks, and the Gumps, and like I went through those and I was like, I have not heard of any of these fucking people. M Jeff A little bit, A little bit.
Yeah, Andy. The Gumps was actually one of the first comics to have continuity. It started just before Simple Theater did. It was also had like one of the first storylines where a character died. It was a national event.
People freaking wow. Yeah, like America for a while. Oh like wow, that dates it.
Yeah, Like it was like I think it was Spanish flu or some It was something that a woman got sick, and it was a very big deal.
No.
Granted today I would probably get fireball and for doing the same thing. But at the same time.
That is I don't know. I don't know if kids today are having these experience, but I like one of the first things I remember learning about death was from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
So oh the bird or the phone?
No it was it was the raccoon, I think. Sah, yeah, yeah, it really was. And one one of the fun things about cartoons is that they never die, at least if they're successful enough, they never die.
Right.
The reason I bring that up is because some of these comics I hadn't heard of. I looked up and in the case of Bunkie and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which is a cartoon I was not aware of, it was created the year before Hank was born, and it is still in print today under a new cartoonist. Yeah. Oh cool.
Oh, Rose is a sweetheart. He's a wonderful man. Again. It's the King Features And like Bimble Theater, it's a comic that started off about one character, Barney Google. Yeah, eventually they're brought in Snuffy Smith, and Snuffy kind of outshine Barney and he just kind of vanished from the comic.
Yeah, they like killed him or took him away for a while, and he came back back.
Every once in a while the current artist does his best to bring him back and actually bring back a lot of old characters from the old days.
And yeah, I had not heard of this comic at all, but I you know, when I came upon the name, I was immediately like, I wonder if this has anything to do about like Google, the search engine, and you know, the Barney Google comic, I think obviously exists before the concept of computers in most people's mind. But the answer
is probably. As a matter of fact. In the book That Hidden History of Coined Words, published by Oxford University Press, author Ralph Keyes argues that Barney Google was probably the inspiration for the term goggle, which is the term for a very large number, which is what inspired the name for Google. So you know, what does all this mean? Should you burn down Google headquarters and draw and quarter there's c suite in public as vengeance for Barney Google suffering.
Maybe I haven't read the comic. I don't know. Pop Probably I feel like I.
Should say at this point no opinion here expressed as an opinion of King Features Syndicate or their parent company hurst uh want to get fired?
Yeah, none of these are even my opinions usually. So the first animated movie that's going to come out that that Hank is going to be aware of as a kid is the French film Phantasma Gory.
Oh probably, Yeah, I've heard of that. I haven't seen it.
Seen some ancient stuff, and like we're saying probably because like a lot of media from them was lost, so you can't ever say, like for certain nobody tried it before. But if you look at least from the clips I've seen and stuff, it actually kind of reminds me a little bit of Don Hertzfeldt's work, Like a lot of
it's like stick figure style animated art. There were also some pseudo animated movies that kind of predated Phantasmagori, but they were all animated by like putting images on a wheel and projecting light through it and like moving the wheel around to make the images move or some shit, which is like it's not considered like it's not animation in the same way that like traditional animation is done right now, cartoons grew up fast from this point in
nineteen twenty eight, we get Steamboat Willie, a short film by Walt Disney and UBI Works that is generally considered the first Mickey Mouse cartoon recently enter the public domain. As I think we're all aware.
I'm doing a comic based off of it right now too. Yeah, I want to see if I get sued.
Where is that line You're allowed to call him Mickey?
Right?
Uh?
Yeah, I'm also a Mickey. He's not allowed to have read shorts. He's not allted have gloves.
I love copyright law.
It's a little dance we do. And I know there's there's some poor lawyer in the basement of Disney whose job is every day like as he fucked up.
It is fucked up. It is wild, like is like a seven or eight year old Hank's watching Steamboat Willie with no idea that like, in the not too distant future, this mouse will be worth more than most of the nations on Earth, Like he will absolutely change large aspects of how life is lived and creativity functions for a huge percentage of the human population. Yep, it's so fucking crazy where that all goes. But yeah, so he loves this as a little kid. He's enthralled by all animation.
You have to think about animation in the period where Hank is a kid. It's not like we animation today is like, yeah, kids like animated movies, right, and so do adults. Animated movies are a big deal. Animation is kind of like it's close to the Internet than it
is to like a type of entertainment. Yeah, because the idea that you could just like draw pictures and have them move and have that on a screen is like such a wild like it really has this almost hallucinogenic effect on people in the day because it's such a new concept. Like you have to imagine going from like dying of the Spanish flu to seeing Fantasia is quite an experience, you know, Oh my.
God, or seeing the goddamn donkey transformation in Pinocchio.
Yeah, that shit's intense, you know. And I do think that like really or you know, it might be better than compared to the Internet, compared to like how YouTube videos impacted the development of kids who were born like after the two thousands. Right, It's both in some good ways and some bad ways. It's this thing that just like utterly captures a generation. And Hank is right in the center of the blast radius. Hank saw cartoons from a very early age, not just as a method of
self expression, but as a path to money. His first job was when he was ten years old. A classmate with a rich dad offered to pay him twenty five cents cash. He writes it in his book if he drew one hundred cartoon heads, and he describes this as like a nightmare job. It was like the first time he took a horrible gigwork animating piece and was like, Oh, this sucks. Why would anyone do this?
Every cartoonist has that job in their history. I'm glad he got out of the system.
Really back in his day, like that was the equivalent of mid journey is find a kid who's good at sketching and give him a quarter. His childhood was not all cartoons, of course, and they seem to have served as at least a partial escape from his world, you know, And he grows up in a world you might want
to escape. He's kind of comes into being right after the Spanish Flu and shit calms down, and he grows up right in the teeth of the Great Depression, and his own description of his father's discipline style sounds unpleasant to say the least. Quote. My sister Joan is two years younger than I, and we grew up as too normal, well behaved, insecure, terrified kids. Dad served in the Navy during the First World War and was by nature a
stern disciplinarian. I don't know what prompted it, but one evening he brought home a horsewhip, a stiff, tapered thing about three feet long that he solemnly placed in the corner near the front door. My first thought was, oh boy, when is he goin to bring the horse? The rules were quite simple, no whipping above the knees. Now, maybe this is as it should be on horses, but on skinny,
little underfed kids, it's murder. However, it did stimulate the circulation on cold afternoons, and I developed various techniques of fancy footwork that to this day have given me the reputation of being an agile dancer, which is like a very funny and lighthearted way of saying, yeah, like, my dad beat the hell out of us when we were bat Oh my god, love the old times.
I'm sure that's not gonna come back later in any way, that's not the effect anything in the future, is it.
I mean, you know, his kid might have done better if he'd been like there and just smacking him sometimes as opposed to like this is a weird case of like honestly, if he'd just been there at all, it might have been better. Fuck, I don't know. I can't make a conclusive stance.
There still like what a what a fuck of a thing? Like, yeah, we grew up as normal terrified children. That's not fucking normal.
Dad brought a whip and just laid it in the room, so we had to think about it for a while.
Oh my Jesus Christ.
I mean I had I had the healthy version of that as a kid, which was my dungeon Master bought a copy of The Book of Vile Darkness and just like set it out on the table for like five sessions before he ever used anything from it. And the instant we're in a fight and he like grabs it from the middle of the table and opens it up. We're all like, oh fuck, that was my having a switch.
That book, wasn't it.
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, I had a book that was awful, great, great source book. I never used him a player once, couldn't so.
Hank doesn't claim to we have had a bad relationship with his father, who actually supported his ambitions to be an animator. I do think that description of himself as his and his sister as insecure and terrified shouldn't just be read as a joke. We should maybe use that as a little bit of like a oh, yeah, the boomers make a lot of sense, or in their predecessors, like, I'm not surprised they've done some of the things they've done as a generation.
Nope, not remotely.
Hank would later claim that the first animated thing that really had a huge impact on him was The Three Little Pigs. This is a Disney short film that's released in nineteen thirty three, and this is what makes him want to be an animator specifically. He always wants to draw. He's like, because you know, there's a bunch of different
jobs for animations. You could do advertisements, you could do cartoons, Film animation is new, and it's Three Little Pigs that makes him want to become specifically a Walt Disney animator.
Also of the early color ones as well.
Wasn't that Yes, yes it is. It comes out in thirty three, and then four years later is the very first animated film of all time, Snow White and Some Dudes Yes right, which still actually looks great, you know it does.
It has never like they really worked hard, like the work that is core. It was groundbreaking.
Yeah, It's such a cool thing about animation is that like it ages, but not in a way where it like it doesn't look worse with age. Good drawings are always good drawing. You can date them because like, people don't draw the way they did for Snow White anymore, but they don't look bad.
Well. Across town, the Fleischer Studio did their Goalvers Travels movie, which you know, hell lot of rotoscope and actually even the Popeye meets Sindbad thirty minutes short they did it is still one of the most stunning things I've ever seen, as the actual real background that they rotated and it sells over.
Yeah, I love when they I mean, I grew up on a lot of rotoscope stuff, like I'm a big I'm a big like Fritz the Cat Boxhi fan, Yeah, Bakshi y rotoscope Oh yeah yeah. He couldn't get enough of it. And that was when you're nineteen years old and hallucinating every weekend recreationally like rotoscoped movies hit different. He didn't have hallucinogens, probably, but he did have cartoons.
And as he kind of grows into an adolescent, he continues to like love drawing, and he gets what's weird is he describes it as like this is what makes him a cool kid, Like I've never actually I've read a lot of car because I like cartoons. I've heard a lot of cartoonists autobiographies and memoirs. I have never heard of cartoonists say that it got them late, not once. But Hank Ketcham makes that claim. And here's what he says. I accepted most any request for a funny drawing. It
was a splendid ego massage. I received as much attention from the girls as the muscular athletes and was never out of breath.
That sounds like he was getting dates from both, which is the headcanon I want.
Yeah, I don't know if I really believe that, Hank, just because I've never heard of it of a guy drawing cartoons getting that kind of attention from it. But perhaps that happened.
I mean, I did meet my spouse because of my comic, But I.
Still like in high school it was like in high school.
Oh god no, I was like, oh, could you draw this horse? I'm gonna give it to my boyfriend? Okay, here you go.
Yeah, absolutely not. But I don't know, maybe it was a different era. Disney animators were the U. I don't know what's a sexy job? Is any think sexy anymore?
Took your bills?
Yeah, having more money than rent costs.
Yeah, that's pretty hot.
So after he graduates from high school, Hank hitchhike to Hollywood and talked his way into a job at an ad agency. He hitchhiked, Yeah, he hitch set Yeah, yeah, down to It's not that you're not like, no car's gonna go particularly fast and begin with but damn. And he makes the claim that, like, you could never do this today. Everything's too dangerous today. And I don't know, I have I have friends who hitchhike. Now, it's not that much worse. You may just be more scared of
the way would argue dangerous back then got murdered. Yeah, there was nobody to check.
Sometime from Texas that's the same time period. In a hotel, he just threw people to alligators. I mean, it's just he's not lucky.
This is why I keep trying to start an alligator farm in my backyard, and my neighbors on the property keep saying, Robert, you can't just buy. You can't keep alligators alive in the Pacific Northwest by just buying hundreds of them and the body heat works out. That's not the way alligators are. If they love each other, they'll find a way, That's what I say. And that's kind of how Hank feels, because he loves Walt Disney. And he says that as he's hitchhiking down to Los Angeles,
the only thing on his mind is Walt Disney. He gets a job doing like some kind of like you know, scrub work here and there, and this is this shows how easy it is to like break into Hollywood. He like moves to Hollywood with nothing. He gets like a gig doing like a little bit of work for a studio, making twelve dollars a week, and his bedroom, which comes with three cooked meals a day a cost six dollars a week, Like without food, you're lucky if you're doing
that well. Income as a percentage of rent in Los Angeles these days, it is such a different fucking world. It's so different, Oh my god. And it's different also in that like there's just it's opportunity is easier to find because like he has this first job and then that leads him to get a gig at Universal that pays a little bit more as an animator's assists. Because he's working as an animator's assistant based on the strength
of showing up and shaking some guy's hand. He's in the right place at the right time when Disney is like, shit, we've got this movie Pinocchio, and we're trying to finish The Son of a Bitch, and we did not realize Pinocchio was going to be such a complicated endeavor. So we need a fuckload of people really fast, and we'll pay them twenty five bucks a week, which is a lot of money back then. And so that's how he gets his first job with Disney.
Yeah, I mean, like Disney paid better than whe else, but you also worked way more hours than were yes too, sorry.
Call yeah, yeah, and this is I mean, this is going to be a lot of work, but it is like because the industry is so this is a little tip for all you kids out here. Find a thing that people have just started figuring out how to make money on and then walk into the room and say, hey, do you have anything for me to do? That's that's how to get yourself a job. And was Pinocchio before the Big Strike. Yes, we're coming to the Big strike. But first, you know who never strikes.
Would be these fine ads and.
That's right, they have no need to strike because we love them too much. And they shoot strikers, don't they? Well, yes, occasionally allegedly, probably not now with live ammunition.
The Goal people absolutely do.
Yeah, and the Reagan Coin people and look to be entirely honest. We've had the Washington State Highway Patrol on our show and they have definitely shot some strikers in their day. You know, we're not gonna say nobody shoots strikers who advertises on this podcast, but probably not. Sorry, Sophie, we're back and speaking of shooting strikers. A guy who didn't shoot strikers but probably made emotional peace with shooting strikers if he had to, was Hank Ketchum's boss at Disney.
The most legendary animators in all of animation history, Ward Kimball.
Wait, we're kimble' that's your sweet guy.
Yeah, but he was we'll talk. He's not the worst guy in the story, but we're building to that. I was like, oh no, there's some shade on the fella. So Kimball is one of the first professional animators period, Right, he's of the first generation of people who do this ever. Right.
The old Men, Yes, yes, there's a there's a termu'l here when you people talk about Disney this period, Disney's nine Old Men, which is the core animation team that ran the studios projects from the start in the twenties to the really to the beginning of like the Reagan years. A lot of these guys are still in there. And again, when you think about Disney at the start, we're actually talking about the period where Disney changes into the company
that it's going to become. At the in the early days in the twenties, when like Hank is in love with what these guys are making, Disney is kind of closer to like a tech startup than anything. No one's ever done this before. It's hugely profitable, it's really sexy. It's like this thing that people are fascinated by, and it's this like team of self taught weirdos who all come together. There's not really much of a hierarchy for a long time. It's very much not a traditional workplace,
you know. Yeah, yeah, everyone's figuring everything out as they're doing it. How could you have a traditional business structure right, like where you've got like bosses telling.
People being as you go along.
Yeah, and Ward is again like undoubtedly one thing no one can argue. One of the greatest animators who's ever lived. Unfortunately, he was also a strike breaker during the Disney animation revolt of My Team. Dude. Yeah yeah, andre Ward will talk about being sad about this. I don't know how much that should get you. I'm not I'm not here to absolve anyone's soul, but I am going to try to tell the story.
Ass as I guess. I'm a Union kid, so.
Yeah, yeah. So one of the great animators that was central in Disney's early success and in the work that had so inspired Hank was a guy named Art Babbitt. Art worked at Disney through the thirties on productions like Snow White and Fantasia, and Hank Ketchum also worked on some of those. When he's like new to Disney. But as the Great Depression is kind of going on, as it's like hitting its peak and whatnot, workers are unionizing
in the US at a pretty unprecedented rate. And Babbitt is looking around at Disney, which is turning from this kind of small shop where a bunch of weirdo geniuses are making great stuff together into like a real sizable business, and he's like, we should probably have a union, you know, we should probably get this locked down before this place gets much bigger. Right, Yeah, Walt Disney is not gonna like this, right, No, I'm not a union man. You know.
He did a cartoon on his Alice Comedies that literally was making fun of the idea of unions, and the heroes literally start harassing all these chickens are trying to unionize.
Hear that that's such a Walt Disney thing.
This really fucking is. The villain of the cartoon is a communist rooster named little Red hens Key.
Oh my god, oh beautiful, that is actually the story. You have just summarized the story of the Great Disney Revolts, the Disney animation revolt of nineteen forty one. So Art and another other employees are like, hey, let's organize. They're trying to organize their shop. They're talking to their co workers, and eventually there's like a big fight, you know, at the office between Disney and art, and Disney fires art, right, and not just art, he fires a number of employees
who were trying to organize workers. And this sparks a strike. And in a very good book on the subject, The Disney Revolt by Jake Friedman, Jake writes, quote the salaries, and this is him trying to explain, like kind of where the workers are coming from here. The salaries of the Disney artists average less than those of house painters. Read a press bulletin the Disney Girl. Inkers and painters received between sixteen to twenty dollars dollars a week on
snow White. The much publicized bonuses did not even compensate the artists for the two years of overtime they worked. Snow White made the highest box office gross in history, over ten million dollars. All the other major cartoon studios in Hollywood have Screen Cartoon Guild contracts. The Disney studio
is the only non union studio in Hollywood. The union demanded a ten percent wage increase across the board, a twenty five percent wage increase for the lower bracketed artists, and the reinstatement of the nineteen animators who they argued were fired for union activity. So what's happening here shouldn't be surprising is Disney artists are making bank. They have
just had the highest, the most success. This is snow White is the fucking Avatar of its day, except unlike Avatar, it's deeply influential and people will not shut up about it for years, right, Like it is in every conversation.
People forget they saw Avatar.
Yeah, yeah, nothing against it or for it particularly, but like snow White Gully, it's just fucking Ferngully. Yeah, we've kind of forgotten because it's been so long. How much of a pop culture bomb in like the successful way, not like yeah, I shouldn't use the term bomb, Like there's nothing, very little that is Like The Matrix is actually probably the movie in our lifetimes that's most like Snow White in terms of like everyone is obsessed with this.
It completely changes the way movies are made. It's copied a million times, Like that's probably the closest thing you could have And none of these animators who Disney is keeping nights and weekends for months while they're working for years, while they're working on this thing, get any kind of like profit sharing or any additional wages for the fact that this movie that they break their backs on makes
a bunch of money. So it's not hard to see why these guys are like, well, we probably should have to strike if we want to get any kind of better deal. Now. Hank Ketchum is just another Disney animator during this period of time, and he's one of the guys who all of his coworkers around him are unionizing, and so he's going to be pressured directly to participate in this. And this is what he says about the
strike in his autobiography. A handful of dissident artists organized a group of unhappy employees, and, with the gleeful assistance of the Teamsters union, Disney was presented a list of grievances. To no one's surprise, a general strike was called. Most of the men in my unit were recently married, just starting a family, and scratching to make monthly mortgage payments, barely making ends meet. They had every reason to join the picket line at the gate. Now that's a promising start, right.
There's that little weird thing about like the teamsters unions were so happy to do this. But he's like, I understand why all my coworkers wanted this. They had a good reason to need to unionize. They had families to support, right. Yeah, And for a few days, Hank joins the picket line, right for a little while, he does what you should do when your coworkers unionize, right, And this is the thing what he's kind of insinuating there by saying I get why my coworkers wanted to is like, well, I
didn't really benefit from this for me. This was good paying work for me. I was exactly where I wanted to be, so I didn't want to strike. And like, yeah, man, that's a strike. Don't always do it for you, you are in any time you're striking, it's never just for you or even just for your co workers. It's for like, especially in a creative discipline the field, like the art.
Form, you will benefit from it eventually, if you're not benefiting from now, years down the road, when you have health benefits, when you are getting paid over time, when you have like something, you will benefit from it. Yeah, And honestly, the pictures I've seen of the Disney strike line cross God, Sam, guillotine.
Yes, these guys are so fucking radical. And part of why they're so radical is they're very young. The average Disney employee is under twenty five, right, So these guys
number one, they all grew up during the Depression. This is a time when socialism is in a very different place in American public consciousness, Like it is a lot more people are openly calling themselves socialists as a percentage of the population back then than tend to today, right, And a lot of these are very radical young men who are also talented artists, And so there's a lot of cool shit that gets made for the Disney. There's some yeah, yeah, the worst people to like have drawing
posters for a strike if you're the boss. It's a bunch of fucking Disney's.
Pissed off Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse posters. And then the guillotine. They brought a goddamn guillotine.
Yeah, yeah, fucking if only they'd used it. So, because strikes b the way strikes do. A bunch of people who worked for Disney and other outside of animation who were unionized joined the strike. Disney carpenters, machinists, teamsters, and food service workers all refused to cross the picket line. And this is along with most editors and cameramen, right because those are all unionized positions too, And everybody's like, no,
you know, we're not going to fucking scab. And this is the Disney strike again, is super organized and very militant. One of the things they do is this is a
twenty four hour a day's strike. There are never not animators out in front of the Disney building doing a picket, and one of them is always kind of around the side where like the scabs are driving through to like go work at Disney offices while the strike is going on, and they take pictures of every single person who scabs, like they have like a spy unit there so that they can shame them.
Yeah.
On the line itself, workers took full advantage of the fact that they were the best animators on the planet. Here's how Friedman describes the picket. About five hundred men and women were on their feet walking in a large circle in front of the entrance. Nearly one in ten carried a wooden picket sign all painted with cartoon characters. It's not cricket to pass a picket, warned Jimminy cricket.
I'd rather be a.
Dog than a scab, chided Pluto. I sign your drawings, you sign your lives, taunted a caricature of Walt, Michaelangelo, Rafael Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens Rimbrandt all belonged to gilts. That what I like a little bit less than the I sign your drawings, you sign your lives, Walt Disney cart did they tried? They tried, like I like that. I mean, most of those are pretty good, you know, yeah, no, no, yeah,
it's really good ones in there. But yeah, and the number six hundred shows up a lot, because that's how many artists are striking. One of their handouts reads one Genius against six hundred guinea pigs, and then another reads snow White and the six hundred Dwarves. I guess they're they're comparing Walt to snow White there, which.
He did, and what was going on around I'm sure.
Sure probably hit a lot of poisoned apples. So I think this is all kind of cool. Like everything I read about the Disney Animators revolt is like pretty dope. Hank is really pissed off about this.
He considers all of.
These signs and cartoons that his coworkers are drawing and repurposing for the strike to be He calls it quote infantile behavior, and he grows and enraged at his coworkers and specifically the teamsters, who he considered quote a bunch of heavy handed spoil sports interrupting my life of Riley. He is very clear about, like, I am angry about this because my life was good. Well, don't workers, bro, like you know, they have a problem. You should care
about that. Yeah, he decides to betray his colleagues and returns to work. So this is the thing that he does that is like his first bastard move is he joins the strike initially, and then he decides to scap Like he leaves the picket line and crosses and goes to work drawing for the company. Okay, not remotely, Okay, not remotely Okay. He rides to the office with his roommate who's the brother of a Disney manager and is
on the side of management. And this, for whatever reason, this actually kind of says a lot about the man. You don't get much about his experiences during the depression, other than he talks about what a bad time it was. But he notes at this point in the book that kind of the straw that broke the camel's back was when some of the wives of his fellow animators started cooking meals for everybody in a big communal kitchen. It
reminded him of a soup kitchen. And the line he says is like, well, that was in the past, and I'm only a guy who wants to move forward, right, so I didn't. That's made me decide to scab on the union as seeing a soup kitchen. I don't want to do stuff from the past. You know, that's such a weird justification for betraying your colleagues.
That, Like my dad was a union president. I remember like a lot of union stuff, and it was this common thing. You know, you have a large catherine, there's food, You've got to make sure everyone's fed. It's just life. And what a weird fucking thing. Oh no, we're taking care of each other. I can't handle have this.
Yeah, whenever you have like you've got like a coal mine strike, right, and you've got it's especially in this period it's like white workers striking the minds won't hire black people normally, and then suddenly they get a chance to work at the mine and make more money than they otherwise would by scabbing. I got nothing against those people, right like they're in an impossible This is the opposite of that. Yeah, you saw you saw free food and got angry, so you scapped? Is so weird to me, Yeah,
it's it's weird to the other Disney animators. This is the kind of thing they take very seriously. And Hank recalls being screamed at as he drives through the picket line. I scrunched myself down between Kenny and Albertino, two protective linebackers, hoping to be invisible as the Mercury convertible ease through the mass of chanting, wild eyed revolutionaries. But they spotted me, and I instantly became king of the pinx and the
target of other creative terms of outrage and venom. The loudest insults seemed to come from those who I once considered very good pals. It was a shattering experience for many, as in any civil war, the house was divided and close friendships evaporated. Years later, the stigma remained. I'm like, well, yeah, of course your good pals are pissed. They're striking because they need to pay their mortgage and they just found out you don't care about them.
Man, I'm going to try to hide bet between these looks of larger men. Yeah, what a fucking worm.
Such a worm. Oh my god. So, as a result of his craven nature, Hank is going to miss one of the defining moments payment labor history. Now, Walt Disney, one thing you got to say for him, The man was a formidable foe, right, this is this is not an incompetent guy to go up against as a union. But again, the Disney animators, among other things, had youth on their side. They split the whole crew into two or three hour shifts, and so they keep a twenty
four hour picket line. They never give up on like protesting. And this is because, yeah, we'll get into that. So because a lot of these guys become famous later, you get some quotes from the ones who broke trying to explain their behavior. And this brings me back to Ward Kimball. Right Ward is Hank's boss. He is one of the guys who scabs, and he says of it quote, I felt terrible. Friends on the inside waving to me to come in, friends on the outside pleading with me to
stay out. Jesus I was on the spot. I won't forgive, like, you know, his decision to scab here, but at least he provides more of like a description of like why this would be complicated. Some people you care about a lot are in management. They don't, you know, you feel torn as opposed to who's just like well, I saw a soup kitchen and got pissed, But it is.
It has to be like a hard thing to decide on. And like you said earlier, he's been there since almost the start. Yeah, it was his friend.
Yeah, And like I get how that's I'm not like saying it was okay, But I get that more than I get what Hank is describing as his reasoning.
Yeah, everything about what what Ketchum was saying is just kind of weasley. Yeah.
Yeah. So the union issues a warning that animators who stayed would be fined five dollars a day plus one hundred dollars penalty once shit resumed normality inside Disney. One of the Disney executives Norm Ferguson told Hank and everyone else who crossed the picket line that any deal that was signed would protect them and like cover that amount of money if they stayed loyal. The thing that was important, the thing that everyone had to do who was scabbing,
was finish Dumbo. So this is the movie they're working on at the time, and when this the strike interrupts finishing Dumbo, and this comes at a critical moment for Disney. One of the reasons people are pissed is Disney had prior to about this moment basically been like set up in a series of just like kind of shacks, right, And after they make all this money from snow White, Walt decides, rather than paying a lot of that money to his employees, decides to reinvest it into building an
elaborate new campus. And he's still he can't fund it with the money they have. He has to get a loan from Bank of America. And Bank of America is willing to invest in this weird new upstart company because they're looking at the money that's coming in. But Bank of America doesn't have enough faith in Animation that like if they miss getting Dumbo out on time, right, the bank could foreclose theoretically, right, that's at least I don't know how realistic that was as an actual possibility, But
that's what Ferguson is warning everybody. That's what Walt is obsessed over, right, if they miss this release date. It's one of those things where like I don't find I don't have any sympathy for Disney for that because like his workers on the outside who are striking, are in the same position with their actual houses, not with it, like the fucking offices that he decided to build, and it was like a ten million dollar campus. It was a lot of money, which is like what snow White made.
Yeah, well, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong in this. At the same time, I don't think they really got most of the European money from snow White because when World War two broke out, Yeah, not to Jermy's like we're not sending you anything.
Yeah, they get hurt, I mean and just in general, like they get hurt because like there's not a European market for a while, effectively for cartoonist.
Well, honestly, Walt Disney was not a good businessman, like Disney's company was always kind of hurting. Yeah, it's not what it was. It's not. It wasn't then what it is now. Yeah.
Yeah, and it it like it was not not even all that similar. And like, I think these workers have a good point of like, well, why are we spending all this money on a new campus instead of taking care of our people? Like, obviously, I think the workers have a point. Walt himself is like kind of dumbfounded when the strike begins. He had been the one to fire Babbitt, but he never expected his animators would betray him.
The company had up to this point been run more like an extended family or friend group than a traditional employer, right, because it's the scrappy startup. And this is what really starts the process of changing Disney, because as soon as Walt is challenged by the union, he starts to get deranged and he increasingly begins blaming the whole thing on communism. He would later after the employees win their strike, he's going to inform on a bunch of them to the
House on American Activities community for being Communists. But this is an act of callo vengeance because again Disney loses the fight as the Washington post summarizes the picketers marched on bad publicity for Disney's company mounted, as did pressure from its creditors. In late July, the government stepped in and in federal arbitration, the studio agreed to various demands, including paid increases, back pays, sick leave, and Babbitt's returned.
The cash strapped Disney studio shut down for two weeks in late August during a battle with the newly recognized guild about fresh layoffs. Walt Disney escaped the ordeal, embarking on a government sponsored South American tour. Three months later, the attack on Pearl har Arbor drew the company into World War Two.
He was going to South America. They're preparing to make the movie Saludas and Eagles and kind of one. It was basically to kind of get South America into the war effort.
Yeah, and he's going to like that's how he's going to kind of like destress from this. And then thankfully, we need a bunch of propaganda for the war. And that's kind of what saves Disney is making wartime propaganda in this period. Now the strike is going to be the end of the friendly camaraderie that had been central to Disney's early image. What's interesting to me is you get very different pictures of how that looked depending on
who is telling the story. Friedman says, it's the returning workers who suffered because they were treated like pariah's by people who were scared that Walt would see them being friendly with like someone who had gone on strike. Right, Yeah, and I'm sure that's true. Hank, for his part, is like basically says, those of us who scabbed got treated differently, and that was what was unfair. Also, he complains a lot about the ping pong tables being taken away in
the office, which he blads on strike. Oh, I don't know, No, I don't know. Man. He's gonna have bigger concerns though, because the US enters the big Dub Dub dose not long after the strike comes to an end, and Hank is right at that sweet sweet draft in age. So he joins the Navy. He's going to serve for the duration of the war, and he kind of lucks gets really lucky here. His status as a Disney animator benefits him a lot because people find out when his superiors
find out, like Oh, you can draw cartoons. We're not sending you over to get shot at by a crowd, Like you're going to stay here and you're going to try to convince Americans to buy war bonts by drawing stuff.
Yeah. They use a lot of animators in the World War two. Yeah, he saved a lot of the room going overseas.
Yeah, this is why we need to have another war. It's the only thing that could save our animation industry for a I. Oh god, all the poor laid off Rooster Chief animators. Yeah, ah, that is a bummer.
Yeah.
So Walt writes him a letter while he's he's working for the army, which is nice canidering. Walt probably wished we'd enter the war on a different side, but that's a story for another day. It was in nineteen forty two, after moving to d c to serve in the Navy, that Hank married Alice mahar His autobiography says nothing about how they met or her personality at all. He provides
one picture that describes her as his Massachusetts mate. The two would have a boy together, Dennis Ketchum in nineteen forty six, And yes, that is the inspiration and namesake for Dennis the Menace. Now, despite the central role that Dennis would play in his later success, his own son scarcely merits more mentioned than Alice in this book. And we're going to get in all of that. But first, you know who does merit mention?
I would say, the progus and services of these fine advertisers.
Yeah, I'm going to tell you right now, folks, forget the name and face of your parents, you know, just remember these advertisers. If you have children, delete them from your memory, and just remember the people who sponsor this show.
Done and done. I don't have a father more. I only have Chumbu Casino.
That's right, That's right, chump, but casino is everything. We're back. People online talk about those Chumba ads. I've actually never heard one yet.
I haven't heard it either.
It is every time I listen to the show, every time, at least three of them.
One of my favorite things is, like we get a lot of if it's not like us reading an ad, we often don't really know what's because because they're different for like geographical areas, right, Like they're not going to want to serve the same ad to somebody in like Australia as they are to somebody in Michigan.
Yeah.
So a lot of times people are like, wow, it's wild these people are sponsoring you, and I'm like, I didn't know, man, Like it's it's just a random ad. We had one recently which I do feel bad about. You know. We get asked like, what's kind of stuff are you're okay with? And a while ago I filled out a thing being like, yeah, you know what I hunt, I shoot, Like there are certain kinds of like hunting and shooting products that might theoretically endorse I'd want to
like know what they were. And then they we kind of started running random ads for like a local gun shop in like Kansas or something that like, oh, I don't want to be doing that. I don't know that gun shop. I don't know who those people are, like I have. We need to fix that right away.
It could be a good gun shopper, it could be real bad, it.
Could be a very bad gunshop. Certainly don't want to sponsor that shit at random, So we we should have fixed that. And a lot of the like really.
Really bad ones that have already been like removed come in on like secret categories and oh yeah, and then it's like you you're coming in as usiness. No.
So back to Dennis the Menaces. As we get to this story, it is nineteen forty six Dennis and his new wife Alice. Hank and his new wife Alice had their son, Dennis Jesus real mess here I am. And despite the central role that Dennis playing, his success his own son scarcely merits more of a mention than like the mother of his child. And Hank's autobiography, Hank does provide a loving description of how he came up with the idea for the comic. And this happens once he's
out of the Navy. He moves back west and he establishes a home in Carmel Woods near Monterey that cost him again this like Bay area house he buys costs twelve thousand dollars. Damn it, that's like a twelve million dollar home today.
At least.
He picks up a handful of gigs drawing cartoons for newspapers and magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, and he
starts putting together ideas for a comic strip. In most news articles about the manual, here what comes next described as like he's working one day and his little kid is His wife Alice tries to put Dennis down, and Dennis doesn't want to go to bed, and he like tears up his room, and when his mom walks in and sees the mess, Dennis Maid, she cries out to Hank, your son is a menace, and that inspires Dennis the Menace as a title and both the premise also of
this cartoon. That's kind of accurate, but it leaves out the ugliness of Hank's own description of this moment, which I'm in a quote from now. At four years of age, Dennis Lloyd Ketchaim was a thirty six pound handful, too young for school, too big for his playpen, and too small to hit, not old enough for jail, and one
hundred percent anti establishment. One October afternoon in nineteen fifty, I was at home in my tiny studio finishing a drawing for the Saturday Evening Post when I was startled by a sudden outburst of mother noises coming from the bedroom area of our new home and car mother noises. There's in these two paragraphs, there's so many moments that like I need to stop and be like, wait a second, what is a mother noise does? How is that different
from a father noise? And why are you so sad your child is too small to When are they big enough to hit hank? When are they big enough for jail? What are your opinions on these things?
Jesus right?
The little darling was supposed to be taking a nap. Instead, he had spent the better part of one hour quietly dismantling his room, bed, mattress springs, dresser drapes, and curtain rods, when the accidental load he carried in his underpants was added to his collection of plastic toys, cookie crumbs, and left over peanut butter sandwhich it formed an unusual mix enough to drive an Irish mother to the brink. Now
he was my son. Her rich expletives, most of them coined in Boston, were spliced with suggestions of abandonment and threats of bodily harm. After informing me that I could jolly well clean up his room, her parting shot was, your son is a menace, Dennis a menace?
I mused.
Now, I don't know if I believe that that's exactly how it happened, But interesting things from those two paragraphs that he really make what she to know she's Irish, and when you know she's Irish.
Because there's some strong opinions on Irish people.
He does. Their marriage does not work out, and he blames it on her being an alcoholic. And she's an alcoholic because she's Irish. Is that is Hank's attitude? Right?
And he basically used her in the comic, didn't he? Yes?
Yes, the mother, the dad is based on him, The mother is based on her, the kid is based on their son. The whole cartoon is based on the family. That he will be very shortly now abandoning fuck it
now for reasons that will become very clear. Hankaty vested interest in making his wife look bad, but even his description provides some hints that he was not a present or engaged father, because he states that, rather than actually cleaning up the room like his wife had asked him to, or parenting their son cleaning up their kid, right, he instead ignores his family to draw the first Dennis the Menace cartoons. This does work out financially, the concept sells
out within weeks to the post syndicate. Dennis the Menace launched in March nineteen fifty one on sixteen newspapers as a weird aside, and you mentioned this a little earlier. His cartoon debuts at like the exact same time as a British cartoon named Dennis the Menace with a similar plot. They're both about like kind of misbehaving kids. Both creators agree, neither plage the other. This does. This is just a weird coincidence. I think the same day, wasn't that. Yeah,
it's like the same day. But both of them, neither of them tries to claim this is plagiarism. They're all like, nah, man, this is just a weird thing that happened.
It's amazing, honestly. Yeah.
I guess the universe needed there to be to Dennis the Menace comics in the same way it needed us to have World War One, Like it was just it was going to make sure that happened.
I'm imagining Dennis the Mena is assassinating.
That No, no, no, the Archduke of a Yeah no, I I you know what. That's the cartoon that we need from these episodes is Dennis the Menace with a sandwich in his hand, pumping a bunch of bullets into Franz Ferdinand, mister, mister Wilson, just Dennis stop starting. He's so angry he's gonna have to go in act the Schleefen Plan. Now, I do imagine mister Wilson in this as like the military commander of Germany. So the cartoon
is a wild success. It takes off very quickly, and it expands in short order into one of the most successful comics in history. This much people know. What has been lost in the intervening years is a sense of how nasty the original cartoon would be. I don't even mean this as a criticism. It's just surprising because like today's Dennis the Menace, I would not call controversial, no, right,
it's it's pretty tame humor for like all ages. Right, nothing against that, but it's not something You would be surprised if someone said there's a really offensive Dennis the Menace cartoon this week, right, you would think, like something must have gone wrong. They must have switched up their captions with the far side, Like what happened that one time. That's an actual moment from cartoon history. Folks. Look it up.
There's like a cartoon where Dennis is talking about like taking people's skin off of their skulls and preserving them because it got swapped with a far side caption.
Oh god, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, A couple of times too.
Yeah yeah, there's a few times that happened with the far side. I found a few of these early Dennis the Menace cartoons chronicled in an article by Seattle Times reporter Mark Raymer or Rainer in two thousand and five, and oh boy, I did not expect this quote. Walking out of an elevator with his concerned looking mom malicious side, Dennis says, did you see that? I pinched that fat dame to make her give me room and she slugged
a guy in back of her Jesus fat dame. Huh wow, I will say, like, that's at least a little it's a lot more colorful than I expected from Dennis the Menace.
A lot of those early cart comics they got a lot more, even some early Family Circus or.
Blue Yeah, yeah, you could. You could definitely work Bluer back then. Quote. A swan with its neck tighten and not warns its mate stay away from that kid with the black pants armed a slingshot on a park bench, Dennis asks his mom, Hey, do you know how to cook a pigeon? A teacher tells Dennis's mom, your Dennis is a happy child. He hits Sammy with a sand shovel and I thought he'd die laughing. There's another cartoon where Dennis constructs a crude sap filling a sock with
sand to beat people with. Again, this is kind of based.
This is actually great. I'm not gonna lie, he's pretty good.
It does get creepier, especially when you think of the real world dimensions here, because here's the description of another cartoon. Holding his embarrassed mom's hand, Dennis stops a friend on the sidewalk, Billy, this is my mother. Some looker, eh. He walks in in another cartoon on his mother while she bathes, and she covers her nude body in horrified modesty. He tells another friend, this is my mom, Tommy, isn't
she pretty? There are a bunch of comics like this of Dennis walking in on his mom when she's like indecent and talking about how hot she is to his friend's weird joke to make about your wife and kid, hanky, weird joke to make about your wife and kid.
That is uncomfortable as like a cartoonist and a parent.
I just don't think I could do that. Look, any kid would be glad to be portrayed as making a crude sap to beat people within the street. No kid wants to be in a cartoon calling their mom hot. That's not okay, Hank, you shouldn't do that to the cartoon founded in the image of your son. A little odd yeah, like I know she was your wife, but not his. That's a therapy session, he will say later. I think Dennis was more based on me than my son. But still, man, a little little fucked up buddy. So
that's good. As soon as he starts making a fortune off of this cartoon, you know, this cartoon that is inspired by his son and his wife, he grows to resent them. In one interview, he described how he empathized with the put upon father in his cartoon. He comes I'm tired, full of other thoughts, and it's hard to come back and relax enough to enjoy your family, he says. The young Ketchum saw children, in particular his son Dennis, as part of the problem. They always seem to be
in the way of what you wanted to do. He remembers, I.
Just wondered, this is when his ghost artists and ghost writers start taking over.
Right, this is right at the start. They haven't done this yet. Yeah, this is fifty nine, so.
Wisra's not drawing and I can't know the name of the art the writer.
Yeah, no, no, not quite yet. This is like, this is I think him being like sad in retrospect, because at the time I think he was just happy to ignore his family to make a bunch of money, and as a result, his marriage deteriorates quickly for reasons that should be obvious. In the winter of nineteen fifty nine, Alice leaves him, and he simply writes, it was a bummer. We had been on a collision course and nobody cared.
Jesus.
We're going to talk about what happens to his wife, and more importantly, what he does to his son in the wake of the very sad thing that's going to happen to her, And we're getting into, you know, the real, the very worst bastardury of the Han Catchum story. But first, that's the episode we're done for right now, So that no, no, no, no, no no, I caused this to be a two parter because I wrote twenty pages on the Dennis the Menace guy says that no one, no one will ever be
able to explain. This was not my initial intention. I did not oh my chanese, well, you know, obviously not like compared to you, I'm not knowledgeable or nerdy about animation, but like I really love cartoons.
I'm only wanting to be just a rage to happen. That's why.
Just there's so much to talk, like the Disney animator strike and ship, the story of animation, like I just couldn't. I couldn't help myself.
You could do a whole episode on on Disney the forties, especially the strike.
I think we will at some point, but first, let's do an episode on your pluggables.
Oh uh oh, Well, my name is a Randy mill Holland, and I do an online comic called Something Positive. I've been doing it since the year two thousand and one. Let's see what else do I do?
I do a few things now, Randy. Two thousand and one, the War on Terror started and it hasn't really ended. Is it possible that your cartoon caused the War on terror?
Technically my comics started after the war on Terror began. Okay, okay, I have a few months grace period. Thankfully I can tell you where I was when all that started.
I guess it will remain a mystery why the war on terror started that at.
Least until you do about the behind the Bastards episode on me.
Next year holland the fourteenth hijacker. I forget how many hijackers they were.
Folks, I did live in Boston, you know, well, I live not far from that from logan that to happen, So I do something pause that something positive dot net. I also draw the Sunday pop Ey strips Kingdom dot com slash Popeye. I also do a Tuesday Thursday comic with a woman sorry being named uh, Emmy Burke. That's all of them. Popeye Tuesdays are focused on all of uh, That's what Emmy draws. I do the Thursday strips that focus on Popeye and his family. And I started a
couple of months ago a comic called mouse Trapped. It is my sequel to the comic or the cartoon in the sting about Willie. But I bring in other public domain comic characters from like Universal and Walter Lance.
Hell yeah, So it's.
Basically a lot my excuse to pull out really old, forgotten cartoon characters. I forget how they would fit together.
Well that sounds fucking dope, thank you. Yeah, I uh don't have a cartoon, but I do have a podcast and you're listening to it. So would novels. I have written a novel. It's called After the Revolution, and you can find it on the internet at atrbook dot com or any place that lets you buy books.
You know, would you have one of the stacked things that raters have a subst.
And I don't really do that anymore. Oh okay, sorry, I mean I want to get some sort of regular writing thing up again. But substack. There's this whole thing over Nazis, and like, I'm mixed because where aren't there Nazis on social media? Why would we get bent out of shape about one or the other. But also, like, I don't know, I don't want to go to bat for substack over whatever all of this. So I'm just not doing anything right now aside from these podcasts.
Fair enough. Yeah, well, don't forget cool Zone media and the app.
Yeah, yeah, don't forget that, but forget everything else you've ever heard in your life. Remember only us.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.