Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Dennis the Menace Creator was a Shockingly Bad Man
Aired: 2024-03-19
Duration: 01:13:58


=== Behind The Bastards Intro (02:10) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:00:15]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:00:21]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:00:30]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:00:36]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:00:46]  Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
[00:00:51]  So I'm Leanne.
[00:00:52]  This is my best friend Janet.
[00:00:53]  Hey.
[00:00:53]  And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
[00:00:55]  Absolutely.
[00:00:56]  A redacted amount of years later.
[00:00:58]  We're still joined at the hip.
[00:01:00]  Just a little bit bigger hips.
[00:01:01]  This is a podcast.
[00:01:02]  We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[00:01:09]  Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
[00:01:11]  Oh, they hit a BOGO.
[00:01:12]  Well, then you done.
[00:01:13]  Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:18]  I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
[00:01:28]  Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
[00:01:35]  Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
[00:01:40]  I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
[00:01:46]  The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
[00:01:53]  Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:01]  Calls Media.
[00:02:06]  Ah, what's raising my children?

=== Barney Google Animation Trouble (15:42) ===

[00:02:10]  If you're the subject of today's episode, the answer is no one really.
[00:02:15]  I'm Robert Evans.
[00:02:16]  This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about terrible parents.
[00:02:19]  We've just finished our Steve Jobs episodes, who was a shitty parent for the history books.
[00:02:24]  And today, folks, we have a horrible, horrible man who was also a horrible, horrible parent for you.
[00:02:30]  That is Boy Howdy, this guy, much worse than you're guessing he's going to be.
[00:02:36]  And before I introduce our subject for this week, this is a cartoonist who we're going to be talking about.
[00:02:42]  And whenever I bring on a cartoonist bastard, and there are many, we have our resident official behind the bastards podcast cartoonist, Randy Milholland.
[00:02:54]  Randy, thank you so kindly.
[00:02:56]  That was a lovely intro.
[00:02:58]  I really can't wait for this, especially because the person you're talking about, his property is done by the same syndicate I work for.
[00:03:05]  Good.
[00:03:05]  Well, speaking of that, you are the creator of the webcomic Something Positive, and you are currently Popeye the Sailor Man's uncle, I think, is the adoptive father now at this point.
[00:03:17]  Yeah, his adoptive father.
[00:03:18]  You draw him to this day.
[00:03:19]  And actually, we'll be talking a little bit about that, about how comics go on when their original artist no longer wants to or is able to draw them and stuff.
[00:03:27]  That's part of the story here.
[00:03:28]  But our bastard for this episode is the Dennis the Menace guy.
[00:03:34]  And I know what you're saying, people.
[00:03:36]  The term history's greatest monster gets thrown around a lot.
[00:03:40]  Especially by me.
[00:03:40]  Mostly by me.
[00:03:41]  Yeah, mostly by me.
[00:03:43]  But obviously, who could be a better pick for the worst human being in history than the guy who draws Dennis the Menace?
[00:03:49]  I don't know.
[00:03:49]  I'm actually surprised you didn't try to do the Hitler of comics because you also threw that all out in the audience.
[00:03:56]  I've done a lot of the Hitler of X titles over the last couple of years, Sophie.
[00:04:00]  I'm not a very creative man.
[00:04:01]  I know.
[00:04:02]  Randy, what can you tell me about the Dennis the Menace creator, Hank Ketchum?
[00:04:07]  Not spelled like the guy from Pokemon.
[00:04:10]  Well, I know that he served in the Navy during World War II.
[00:04:15]  I know the names of a few of his ghost artists who worked on the comic and the comic book.
[00:04:21]  I also know that around the time Dennis the Menace launched in America in Britain, a comic also named Dennis the Menace, completely unrelated, launched.
[00:04:30]  I know he was not rumored to be the nicest dad.
[00:04:34]  Not that we'll be talking a lot about him as a dad.
[00:04:37]  Not to his first son anyway, not to his first kid.
[00:04:40]  Yeah.
[00:04:40]  In 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.
[00:04:50]  I'm nervous.
[00:04:50]  I'm not going to lie.
[00:04:52]  This is an interesting story.
[00:04:53]  Obviously, like we're talking about a lower stakes bastard than a lot of our war criminals and genocide heirs here.
[00:04:59]  But I think it's interesting both because Hank's career kind of straddles the birth of animation as a field, and he is involved in some of like the early acts of bastardry within animation as it relates to like Disney and labor issues.
[00:05:14]  And he's also just the fascinating case study of like, where is the ethical line about creating art that's inspired by your life, right?
[00:05:22]  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.
[00:05:31]  It's like a common joke that like writers and whatnot, you know, take stuff from their lives and put it into their stories.
[00:05:37]  And is there actually a moral line there?
[00:05:39]  Is there a degree to which that's like wrong?
[00:05:42]  Like what is 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?
[00:05:49]  These are actually some kind of tough questions that I think we'll be mulling over a little bit.
[00:05:52]  But I will tell you, Hank does the wrong thing in every possible instance.
[00:05:58]  Oh, no.
[00:05:59]  Yeah.
[00:06:00]  Oh, God.
[00:06:01]  Yeah.
[00:06:02]  So Hank King Ketchum was born on March 14th.
[00:06:06]  I'm sorry.
[00:06:06]  Did you say King?
[00:06:07]  King is his middle name.
[00:06:08]  Yeah.
[00:06:09]  Okay.
[00:06:09]  I think he's a king.
[00:06:10]  I was like, oh my God.
[00:06:11]  And again, not like Ash Ketchum of the Pokemons.
[00:06:15]  That's K-E-T-C-H-U-M.
[00:06:17]  Hank is K-E-T-C-H-A-M.
[00:06:20]  And he was born on March 14th, 1920 in the flooded hellscape of Seattle, Washington.
[00:06:26]  His father's first name was Weaver, which I don't like.
[00:06:29]  I don't think that's a very good name.
[00:06:31]  That's a weird one.
[00:06:32]  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.
[00:06:39]  And his mother's first name was Virginia, which I'm neutral on.
[00:06:43]  When he was six years old, he met an illustrator who was a friend of the family.
[00:06:47]  And this is like his inciting incident as a kid who wants to become a cartoonist.
[00:06:52]  And here's how Hank describes that moment.
[00:06:55]  A lot of artists, I'm going to guess basically everyone who becomes an artist has a moment like this.
[00:07:00]  Hank describes his in his autobiography, which has the most insufferable title of a famous cartoonist autobiography imaginable.
[00:07:06]  Do you know what this autobiography is named?
[00:07:09]  I am dreading this.
[00:07:11]  So, you know, he's the guy who created Dennis the Menace, right?
[00:07:14]  Not weird that people might want an autobiography for that.
[00:07:17]  What do you call that?
[00:07:18]  I'm the Dennis the Menace guy, you know, Hank Ketchum, a life in cartoons.
[00:07:23]  Drawing trouble.
[00:07:23]  That's what I go for.
[00:07:24]  Drawing Trouble.
[00:07:25]  Sure.
[00:07:26]  All of these are fine titles.
[00:07:27]  He calls it the Merchant of Dennis the Menace.
[00:07:30]  Oh.
[00:07:31]  Like the Merchant of Venice for no reason?
[00:07:34]  Because there's no similarity.
[00:07:35]  Like, other than the fact that there's an iss in both that, like, there's no through line between the merchant in Venice and drawing Dennis the Menace.
[00:07:43]  Like, I'm so angry about this, and I shouldn't be.
[00:07:46]  And like, I don't normally say this, but Hank Ketchum should have been murdered by the government.
[00:07:52]  What else can you say about that?
[00:07:53]  I'm sorry.
[00:07:54]  I cannot wait till the next National Cartoonist Society meeting after this podcast.
[00:07:59]  I can't wait to my next editor's meeting where they're like, hey, heard you were on a podcast talking about a property we distribute.
[00:08:06]  But seriously, why would you call it the merchant of Dennis the Menace?
[00:08:10]  I'm sure he wasn't clever.
[00:08:12]  And I'm sure he had no one who was willing to say no.
[00:08:18]  I mean, it is a little telling because past a certain point in his career, if this is just a property he's marketing rather than a, which I, I mean, I don't actually hold that against him, right?
[00:08:27]  Like if you draw a doodle of a misbehaving little kid and it makes you a very wealthy man, you kind of ride that shit as long as you can, right?
[00:08:34]  Who wouldn't, you know?
[00:08:36]  It's also real common in comics that a lot of times you'll have cartoonists who will get ghost artists and ghost writers.
[00:08:42]  And, you know, once you get big enough, you can be like, I mean, Jim Davis hasn't drawn Carfill probably in decades.
[00:08:47]  God knows.
[00:08:48]  No, of course not.
[00:08:49]  And we're well on the record of saying there's nothing wrong with Jim Davis.
[00:08:53]  No, I mean, really, no, a lot of my friends have gotten this.
[00:08:56]  In fact, a lot of cartoonists like Jim Davis got their start in this field being ghost artists.
[00:09:01]  It's very common.
[00:09:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:02]  And of all the ways to like get that kind of money, drawing a weird little guy is like one of the least problematic ways, right?
[00:09:10]  Like there's not as much exploitation.
[00:09:13]  Normally, with Hank, there kind of is, because his child is like the sacrifice he makes for this comic to work.
[00:09:19]  But I've gotten ahead of myself.
[00:09:20]  Oh, God.
[00:09:21]  Anyway, here's how he describes first getting pilled on the wonders of working as a cartoonist.
[00:09:27]  As I watched him scribble some quick sketches of Barney Google, Moon Mullins, and Andy Gump, I couldn't wait to borrow his magic pencil and try my own hand at drawing these comic strip characters.
[00:09:37]  It looks so easy and such a lot of fun.
[00:09:39]  I couldn't have been more than six years old at the time.
[00:09:41]  Well, the two men sure came up with a good way to get rid of me in a hurry.
[00:09:44]  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.
[00:09:54]  And yeah, I think that that's not an uncommon kind of story, right?
[00:09:59]  Yeah.
[00:09:59]  Like, yeah.
[00:10:00]  I think that's how a lot of us start off.
[00:10:01]  Either we see it or we just are lucky enough to start doodling one day and you just can't stop.
[00:10:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:07]  And that's what happens with Hank.
[00:10:08]  He starts doodling when this guy comes over.
[00:10:10]  He sketches his drawings.
[00:10:11]  He actually has the opposite experience I had as a little kid where his teacher finds his cartoons and takes them up in front of the class to be like, look at how good Hank is at drawing.
[00:10:20]  And she has him like draw for the class to like praise him, not as like a, to punish him or whatever.
[00:10:26]  Look at this garbage you were doing with a piece of shit.
[00:10:30]  I had those teachers.
[00:10:31]  I love those teachers.
[00:10:32]  Yeah, I got, I got in trouble because my cartoons were way too violent.
[00:10:37]  And in a post-Columbian America, you didn't want your teacher to find your notebook with those drawings.
[00:10:42]  Oh, shit.
[00:10:43]  I didn't realize how lucky I was to graduate in 1994.
[00:10:46]  Yeah.
[00:10:47]  I would have been in so much trouble for so many things.
[00:10:50]  Yeah.
[00:10:50]  I mean, it's only gotten worse since.
[00:10:52]  Like, I was not there nearly as bad as it would become, but like, I did have, I did catch some flack for some of my cartoons.
[00:10:59]  So in his autobiography, Hank describes himself as lucky.
[00:11:02]  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.
[00:11:11]  And he knew from like basically as long as he could remember, he knew the only thing I want to be is a cartoonist.
[00:11:17]  It is interesting.
[00:11:18]  He's got that kind of self-awareness.
[00:11:19]  That is a blessing, right?
[00:11:21]  Knowing that you have this one very specific thing and it's the only thing you'll ever want to do.
[00:11:26]  I can relate.
[00:11:26]  Actually, that's something my earliest memory was learning people who can draw for a living and that's what I wanted to do.
[00:11:33]  God, I hope that is the only similarity between us.
[00:11:37]  I also hope that's the only similarity between you.
[00:11:40]  In his autobiography, he describes himself as like becoming increasingly obsessed with cartoons as a child.
[00:11:46]  The wondrous world is inhabited by Barney Google, Harold Teen, Mutton Jeff, the Tunerville folks, and the Gumps.
[00:11:52]  And like, I went through those and I was like, I have not heard of any of these fucking people.
[00:11:56]  Mutton Jeff a little bit, a little bit.
[00:11:58]  Yeah.
[00:11:58]  Andy, like, The Guns was actually one of the first comics to have continuity.
[00:12:02]  It started just before Thimble Theater did.
[00:12:07]  It was also had like one of the first storylines where a character died.
[00:12:11]  It was a national event.
[00:12:12]  People freaking out.
[00:12:13]  Oh, wow.
[00:12:14]  Yeah, that like destroyed America for a while.
[00:12:16]  Oh, like that.
[00:12:17]  Wow, that dates it.
[00:12:19]  Yeah, like it was like a...
[00:12:20]  I think it was Spanish flu or some, it was something that a woman got sick and it was a very big deal.
[00:12:27]  Now, granted, today I would probably get fireballed for doing the same thing.
[00:12:30]  No.
[00:12:31]  But at the same time.
[00:12:33]  That is, I don't know.
[00:12:34]  I don't know if kids today are having these experiences, but I like one of the first things I remember learning about death was from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.
[00:12:40]  Oh, the bird?
[00:12:41]  What would they find the bird?
[00:12:41]  Or the funny?
[00:12:42]  No, no, it was the raccoon, I think.
[00:12:44]  That was so sad.
[00:12:45]  Yeah, yeah, it really was.
[00:12:47]  And one of the fun things about cartoons is that they never die.
[00:12:51]  At least if they're successful enough, they never die, right?
[00:12:54]  The reason I bring that up is because some of these comics I hadn't heard of, I looked up.
[00:12:59]  And in the case of Bunky 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.
[00:13:09]  Under a new cartoonist.
[00:13:11]  Yeah, oh, cool.
[00:13:11]  Oh, Rose is a sweetheart.
[00:13:14]  He's a wonderful man.
[00:13:16]  Again, it's a King Features.
[00:13:17]  And like Thimble Theater, it's a comic that started off one character, Barney Google.
[00:13:23]  Eventually they brought in Snuffy Smith and Snuffy kind of outshined Barney and he just kind of vanished from the comic.
[00:13:28]  Yeah, they like killed him or took him away for a while and he came back.
[00:13:31]  He comes back every once in a while.
[00:13:33]  The current artist does his best to bring him back and actually bring back a lot of old characters from the old days.
[00:13:38]  And yeah, I had not heard of this comic at all.
[00:13:41]  What 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.
[00:13:48]  And, you know, the Barney Google comic, I think, obviously exists before the concept of computers in most people's mind.
[00:13:55]  But the answer is probably, as a matter of fact, in the book, The Hidden History of Coined Words, published by Oxford University Press, author Ralph Keys argues that Barney Google was probably the inspiration for the term Google, which is the term for a very large number, which is what inspired the name for Google.
[00:14:13]  So, you know, what does all this mean?
[00:14:16]  Should you burn down Google headquarters and draw and quarter their C-suite in public as vengeance for Barney Google suffering?
[00:14:22]  Maybe.
[00:14:23]  I haven't read the comic.
[00:14:24]  I don't know.
[00:14:25]  Probably.
[00:14:26]  I feel like I should say at this point, no opinion here expressed as an opinion of King Features Syndicate or their parent company Hearst.
[00:14:34]  Don't want to get fired.
[00:14:36]  Yeah, none of these are even my opinions usually.
[00:14:38]  So the first animated movie that's going to come out that Hank is going to be aware of as a kid is the French film Phantasmagori.
[00:14:48]  Oh, probably.
[00:14:48]  That's a boring.
[00:14:49]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  I've heard of that.
[00:14:50]  I haven't seen it.
[00:14:51]  I've seen some pictures.
[00:14:52]  Ancient stuff.
[00:14:53]  And like, we're saying probably because like a lot of media from them was lost.
[00:14:56]  So you can never say like for certain nobody tried it before.
[00:14:59]  But if you look at, at least from the clips I've seen and stuff, it actually kind of reminds me a little bit of Don Hertzfeld's work.
[00:15:04]  Like a lot of it's like stick figure style animated art.
[00:15:08]  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 has done, right?
[00:15:27]  No.
[00:15:28]  Cartoons grew up fast from this point.
[00:15:30]  In 1928, we get Steamboat Willie, a short film by Walt Disney and Ubi Works that is generally considered the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.
[00:15:39]  Recently entered the public domain, as I think we're all aware.
[00:15:42]  I'm doing a comic based off of it right now.
[00:15:45]  Yeah.
[00:15:45]  I want to see if I can get sued.
[00:15:48]  Where is that line?
[00:15:50]  You're allowed to call him Mickey, right?
[00:15:52]  Yeah, I'm allowed to call him Mickey.
[00:15:55]  He's not allowed to have red shorts.
[00:15:56]  He's not allowed to have gloves.
[00:15:58]  I love copyright law.
[00:16:01]  It's a little dance we do.
[00:16:02]  And I know there's some poor lawyer in the basement of Disney whose job is every day.
[00:16:07]  Like, has he fucked up?
[00:16:09]  It is.
[00:16:10]  It is wild that is like a seven or eight year old, Hank's watching Steamboat Willie with no idea that like.
[00:16:16]  In the not too distant future, this mouse will be worth more than most of the nations on earth.
[00:16:21]  Like he will absolutely change large aspects of how life is lived and creativity functions for a huge percentage of the human population.
[00:16:31]  Yep.
[00:16:32]  It's so fucking crazy where that all goes.
[00:16:36]  But yeah, so he loves this as a little kid.
[00:16:38]  He's enthralled by all animation.
[00:16:40]  You have to think about animation in the period where Hank is a kid.
[00:16:44]  It's not like we, animation today is like, yeah, kids like animated movies, right?
[00:16:48]  And so do adults.
[00:16:49]  Animated movies are a big deal.
[00:16:51]  Animation is kind of like, it's closer to the internet than it is to like a type of entertainment.
[00:16:57]  Yeah.
[00:16:58]  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 thing.
[00:17:05]  Like it really has this almost hallucinogenic effect on people in the day because it's such a new concept.
[00:17:11]  Like you have to imagine going from like dying of the Spanish flu to seeing Fantasia is quite an experience, you know?
[00:17:19]  Oh my God.
[00:17:20]  Or seeing the goddamn donkey transformation in Pinocchio.
[00:17:24]  Yeah, that shit's intense, you know?
[00:17:26]  And I do think that like really, or, you know, it might be better than compare it to the internet.
[00:17:30]  Compare it to like how YouTube videos impacted the development of kids who were born like after the 2000s, right?
[00:17:37]  It's, it's both in some good ways and some bad ways.
[00:17:40]  It's this thing that just like utterly captures a generation.
[00:17:43]  And Hank is right in the center of the blast radius.
[00:17:47]  Hank saw cartoons from a very early age, not just as a method of self-expression, but as a path to money.

=== Pinocchio And Dangerous Scrub Work (11:50) ===

[00:17:53]  His first job was when he was 10 years old.
[00:17:55]  A classmate with a rich dad offered to pay him 25 cents cash is how he writes it in his book if he drew 100 cartoon heads.
[00:18:03]  And he describes this as like a nightmare job.
[00:18:05]  It was like the first time he took a horrible gig work animating piece and was like, oh, this sucks.
[00:18:11]  Why would anyone do this?
[00:18:14]  Every cartoonist has that job in their history.
[00:18:16]  I'm glad he got out of the system early.
[00:18:18]  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.
[00:18:25]  His childhood was not all cartoons, of course, and they seem to have served as at least a partial escape from his world.
[00:18:31]  You know, and he grows up in a world you might want to escape.
[00:18:34]  He's kind of comes into being right after the Spanish flu and shit calms down.
[00:18:38]  And he grows up right in the teeth of the Great Depression.
[00:18:41]  And his own description of his father's discipline style sounds unpleasant, to say the least.
[00:18:47]  Quote, my sister Joan is two years younger than I, and we grew up as two normal, well-behaved, insecure, terrified kids.
[00:18:53]  Dad served in the Navy during the First World War and was by nature a stern disciplinarian.
[00:18:57]  I don't know what prompted it, but one evening he brought home a horse whip, a stiff tapered thing about three feet long that he solemnly placed in the corner near the front door.
[00:19:05]  My first thought was, oh boy, when is he going to bring the horse?
[00:19:09]  The rules were quite simple.
[00:19:10]  No whipping above the knees.
[00:19:11]  Now, maybe this is as it should be on horses, but on skinny little underfed kids, it's murder.
[00:19:16]  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.
[00:19:25]  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.
[00:19:30]  Oh my God.
[00:19:33]  I love the old times.
[00:19:34]  I'm sure that's not going to come back later.
[00:19:36]  And anyway, that's not going to affect anything in the future, is it?
[00:19:39]  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.
[00:19:50]  Oh, fuck.
[00:19:51]  I don't know.
[00:19:51]  I can't make a conclusive stance there.
[00:19:53]  Still, like, what a, what a fuck of a thing.
[00:19:56]  Like, yeah.
[00:19:57]  We grew up as normal, terrified children.
[00:19:59]  That's not fucking normal.
[00:20:01]  Dad brought a whip and just laid it in the room.
[00:20:03]  So we had to think about it for a while.
[00:20:05]  Oh, my.
[00:20:06]  Jesus Christ.
[00:20:08]  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.
[00:20:18]  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.
[00:20:24]  Oh, no.
[00:20:26]  That was my having a switch on.
[00:20:30]  Yeah.
[00:20:30]  Yeah.
[00:20:30]  That's what I'm a fucking idiot.
[00:20:31]  Yeah, I had that book.
[00:20:32]  It was awful.
[00:20:33]  Great, great source book.
[00:20:34]  I never used them on a player once.
[00:20:36]  Couldn't.
[00:20:37]  Jesus.
[00:20:37]  So Hank doesn't claim to have had a bad relationship with his father, who actually supported his ambitions to be an animator.
[00:20:44]  I do think that description of himself and his sister as insecure and terrified shouldn't just be read as a joke.
[00:20:51]  We should maybe use that as a little bit of like a, oh, yeah, the boomers make a lot of sense and their predecessors.
[00:20:58]  Like, I'm not surprised they've done some of the things they've done as a generation.
[00:21:02]  Nope, not remotely.
[00:21:03]  Hank would later claim that the first animated thing that really had a huge impact on him was the three little pigs.
[00:21:11]  This is a Disney short film that's released in 1933.
[00:21:14]  And this is what makes him want to be an animator specifically.
[00:21:18]  He always wants to draw.
[00:21:19]  He's like, because, you know, there's a bunch of different jobs for animes.
[00:21:22]  You could do advertisements.
[00:21:23]  You could do cartoons.
[00:21:24]  Film animation is new.
[00:21:25]  And it's three little pigs that makes him want to become specifically a Walt Disney animator.
[00:21:30]  That was one of the early color ones as well, wasn't it?
[00:21:32]  Yes.
[00:21:32]  Yes, it is.
[00:21:33]  It comes out in 33.
[00:21:34]  And then four years later is the very first animated film of all time, Snow White and some dudes.
[00:21:41]  Yes.
[00:21:41]  Like, right?
[00:21:41]  Which still actually looks great.
[00:21:43]  You know, it does.
[00:21:45]  It has never, like, they really worked hard.
[00:21:47]  Like the work that is court, it was groundbreaking.
[00:21:50]  Yeah.
[00:21:50]  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.
[00:21:58]  Good drawings are always good drawings.
[00:22:00]  You can date them because like people don't draw the way they did for Snow White anymore, but they don't look bad.
[00:22:04]  Well, across town, the Fleischer studio did their Gulliver's Travels movie, which, you know, hello, Rotoscope.
[00:22:10]  And actually, even the Popeye Meet Sinbad 30 Minute short they did is still one of the most stunning things I've ever seen because of the actual real background that they rotated and it's sells over.
[00:22:24]  Yeah, I love when they, I mean, I grew up on a lot of rotoscoped stuff.
[00:22:28]  Like I'm a big, I'm a big like Fritz the Cat fan.
[00:22:33]  Yeah, Bakshi.
[00:22:34]  Yeah, Bakshi loved Rotoscope.
[00:22:36]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:36]  Yeah.
[00:22:36]  He couldn't get enough of it.
[00:22:38]  And that was when you're 19 years old and hallucinating every weekend recreationally, like rotoscoped movies hit different.
[00:22:45]  He didn't have hallucinogens, probably, but he did have cartoons.
[00:22:49]  And as he kind of grows into an adolescent, he continues to like love drawing.
[00:22:56]  And he gets, what's weird is he describes it as like, this is what makes him a cool kid.
[00:23:00]  Like I've never actually, I've read a lot of, because I like cartoons.
[00:23:04]  I've read a lot of cartoonists' autobiographies and memoirs.
[00:23:07]  I have never heard a cartoonist say that it got them laid.
[00:23:10]  Not once.
[00:23:11]  But Hank Ketchum makes that claim.
[00:23:14]  And here's what he says.
[00:23:16]  I accepted most any request for a funny drawing.
[00:23:18]  It was a splendid ego massage.
[00:23:19]  I received as much attention from the girls as the muscular athletes and was never out of breath.
[00:23:25]  That sounds like he was getting dates from both, which is the headcanon I want.
[00:23:29]  Yeah.
[00:23:30]  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.
[00:23:40]  I mean, I did tend to meet my spouse because of my comic, but I still like in high school.
[00:23:45]  It wasn't like.
[00:23:46]  Not in high school.
[00:23:47]  Oh, God, no.
[00:23:48]  It was like, oh, could you draw this horse?
[00:23:49]  I'm going to give it to my boyfriend.
[00:23:50]  Okay, here you go.
[00:23:52]  Yeah, absolutely not.
[00:23:54]  But I don't know.
[00:23:54]  Maybe it was a different era.
[00:23:56]  Disney animators were the, I don't know, what's a sexy job?
[00:23:59]  Is anything sexy anymore?
[00:24:01]  TikTok.
[00:24:01]  Being able to pay your bills.
[00:24:03]  Yeah.
[00:24:04]  Having more money than rent costs.
[00:24:06]  Yeah, that's pretty hot.
[00:24:08]  So after he graduates from high school, Hank hitchhiked to Hollywood and talked his way into a job at an ad agency.
[00:24:14]  Wait, he hitchhiked?
[00:24:15]  Yeah, he hitchhiked.
[00:24:15]  From Seattle?
[00:24:16]  Yeah, yeah, down to, it's not that.
[00:24:18]  I mean, I guess no car is going to go particularly fast to begin with, but damn.
[00:24:23]  And he makes the claim that like you could never do this today.
[00:24:25]  Everything's too dangerous today.
[00:24:27]  And I don't know.
[00:24:28]  I have friends who hitchhike now.
[00:24:29]  It's not that much worse.
[00:24:31]  You may just be more scared of the water.
[00:24:32]  I would argue it was probably dangerous back then.
[00:24:36]  Yeah.
[00:24:37]  There was nobody to check.
[00:24:38]  Look if you went sometime from Texas.
[00:24:40]  That's the same time period.
[00:24:42]  We're in a hotel.
[00:24:43]  He just threw people to alligators.
[00:24:44]  I mean, it's just lucky.
[00:24:47]  This is why I keep trying to start an alligator farm in my backyard.
[00:24:50]  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 hoping the body heat works out.
[00:25:01]  That's not the way alligators are.
[00:25:03]  If they love each other, they'll find a way.
[00:25:05]  That's what I say.
[00:25:07]  And that's kind of how Hank feels because he loves Walt Disney.
[00:25:10]  And he says that as he's hitchhiking down to Los Angeles, the only thing on his mind is Walt Disney.
[00:25:15]  He gets a job doing like some kind of like, you know, scrub work here and there.
[00:25:21]  And this is, this shows how easy it is to like break into Hollywood.
[00:25:24]  He like moves to Hollywood with nothing.
[00:25:25]  He gets like a gig doing like a little bit of work for a studio, making $12 a week.
[00:25:31]  And his bedroom, which comes with three cooked meals a day, costs $6 a week.
[00:25:35]  Like without food, you're lucky if you're doing that well.
[00:25:39]  Income is a percentage of rent in Los Angeles these days.
[00:25:43]  It is such a different fucking world.
[00:25:45]  It's so different.
[00:25:46]  Oh my God.
[00:25:47]  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 assistant.
[00:25:59]  And because he's working as an animators 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.
[00:26:13]  And we did not realize Pinocchio was going to be such a complicated endeavor.
[00:26:17]  So we need a fuckload of people really fast.
[00:26:20]  And we'll pay them 25 bucks a week, which is a lot of money back then.
[00:26:24]  And so that's how he gets his first job with Disney.
[00:26:27]  Yeah.
[00:26:27]  I mean, like Disney paid better than everyone else, but you also worked way more hours than everyone else, I recall.
[00:26:32]  Yeah.
[00:26:32]  Yeah.
[00:26:33]  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.
[00:26:39]  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?
[00:26:47]  That's that's how to get yourself a job.
[00:26:50]  And was Pinocchio before the big strike?
[00:26:53]  Yes, we're coming to the big strike.
[00:26:56]  But first, you know, who never strikes?
[00:26:58]  It would be these fine ads and products and services.
[00:27:03]  That's right.
[00:27:04]  They have no need to strike because we love them too much.
[00:27:07]  And they shoot strikers, don't they?
[00:27:10]  Well, yes, occasionally, allegedly, probably not.
[00:27:15]  Not with live ammunition.
[00:27:17]  The gold people absolutely do.
[00:27:18]  Yeah, and the Reagan coin people.
[00:27:21]  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.
[00:27:28]  You know, we're not going to say nobody shoots strikers who advertises on this podcast, but probably not.
[00:27:34]  I'm so sorry, Sophie.
[00:27:40]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
[00:27:45]  It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:27:53]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:28:02]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
[00:28:07]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:28:10]  They believe everything.
[00:28:11]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:28:15]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:28:18]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:28:22]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:28:24]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:28:26]  They do not have homes.
[00:28:26]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:28:30]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:28:39]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:28:50]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:28:56]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[00:29:06]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:29:10]  That's great.
[00:29:11]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:29:20]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:29:26]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:29:37]  Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
[00:29:41]  So I'm Leanne.
[00:29:42]  This is my best friend Janet.

=== Disney Strike Revolt And Guillotine (15:24) ===

[00:29:43]  Hey.
[00:29:44]  And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
[00:29:46]  Absolutely.
[00:29:46]  Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger hips, wider.
[00:29:52]  This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[00:30:00]  Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
[00:30:03]  Oh, they had a BOGO.
[00:30:04]  Well, then you got it.
[00:30:05]  You want a white collar stuff here?
[00:30:06]  Just hang on.
[00:30:07]  What are y'all doing?
[00:30:08]  Microphones?
[00:30:09]  Are you making a rap album?
[00:30:13]  I would buy it.
[00:30:14]  Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
[00:30:19]  That sounds delicious.
[00:30:20]  Oh, you're lucky.
[00:30:21]  I'm not a drug addict.
[00:30:23]  You're lucky.
[00:30:23]  I'm not an alcoholic.
[00:30:24]  You're lucky.
[00:30:25]  I'm not a killer.
[00:30:26]  I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
[00:30:31]  Oh.
[00:30:35]  Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:30:45]  We're back.
[00:30:46]  And speaking of shooting strikers, a guy who didn't shoot strikers, but probably my fault, Sophie.
[00:30:54]  Who made emotional peace with shooting strikers if he had to?
[00:30:58]  Was Hank Ketchum's boss at Disney.
[00:31:00]  Oh, yeah.
[00:31:01]  Most legendary animators in all of animation history, Ward Kimball.
[00:31:06]  Oh, Ward has, wait, Ward Kimball is actually a sweet guy.
[00:31:10]  Yeah, but he was, we'll talk.
[00:31:11]  He's not the worst guy in the story.
[00:31:14]  We're building to that.
[00:31:14]  I was like, oh, no, that was a bad horse.
[00:31:17]  There's some shade on the fella.
[00:31:18]  Oh, no.
[00:31:19]  So Kimball is one of the first professional animators, period.
[00:31:22]  Right.
[00:31:22]  He's of the first generation of people who do this ever, right?
[00:31:26]  He's one of those old men.
[00:31:27]  I think they call him.
[00:31:28]  Yes, yes.
[00:31:29]  There's a term you'll hear when people talk about Disney in this period, Disney's Nine Old Men, which is the core animation team that ran the studio's projects from the start in the 20s to the, really to the beginning of like the Reagan years.
[00:31:39]  A lot of these guys are still in there.
[00:31:41]  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.
[00:31:49]  In the early days, in the 20s, when like Hank is in love with what these guys are making, Disney is kind of closer to like a tech startup than anything.
[00:31:59]  No one's ever done this before.
[00:32:00]  It's hugely profitable.
[00:32:01]  It's really sexy.
[00:32:03]  It's like this thing that people are fascinated by.
[00:32:05]  And it's this like team of self-taught weirdos who all come together.
[00:32:10]  There's not really much of a hierarchy for a long time.
[00:32:12]  It's very much not a traditional workplace.
[00:32:15]  It was no anti-school at this point either, was it?
[00:32:17]  Yeah.
[00:32:18]  Yeah.
[00:32:18]  Everyone's figuring everything out as they're doing it.
[00:32:20]  How could you have a traditional business structure, right?
[00:32:23]  Like where you've got like bosses telling people what to do.
[00:32:25]  They don't know how to do it.
[00:32:25]  It's being invented as you go along.
[00:32:28]  Yeah.
[00:32:29]  And Ward is, again, like undoubtedly, one thing no one can argue, one of the greatest animators who's ever lived.
[00:32:35]  Unfortunately, he was also a strike breaker during the Disney animation revolt of 1940.
[00:32:40]  You broke my heart, dude.
[00:32:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:42]  And Ward will talk about being sad about this.
[00:32:46]  I don't know how much that should get you.
[00:32:48]  I'm not here to absolve anyone's soul, but I am going to try to tell this story as best as I can.
[00:32:54]  I'm a union kid, so break my heart.
[00:32:56]  Get it over with.
[00:32:57]  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.
[00:33:05]  Art worked at Disney through the 30s on productions like Snow White and Fantasia.
[00:33:10]  And Hank Ketchum also worked on some of those when he's like new to Disney.
[00:33:13]  But as the Great Depression is kind of going on, as it's like hitting its peak and whatnot, workers are unionizing in the U.S. at a pretty unprecedented rate.
[00:33:22]  And Babbitt is looking around at Disney, which is turning from this kind of small shop where a bunch of weirdo geniuses are making like great stuff together into like a real sizable business.
[00:33:34]  And he's like, we should probably have a union.
[00:33:35]  You know, we should probably get this locked down before this place gets much bigger, right?
[00:33:40]  Yeah.
[00:33:40]  Walt Disney is not going to like this, right?
[00:33:44]  No, he will not.
[00:33:45]  He's not a union man.
[00:33:47]  You know, he did a cartoon on his Alice Comedies that literally was making fun of the idea of unions.
[00:33:56]  And the heroes literally start harassing all these chickens who are trying to unionize.
[00:34:01]  How dare they?
[00:34:02]  That's such a Walt Disney thing to say.
[00:34:05]  It really fucking is.
[00:34:07]  The villain of the cartoon is a communist rooster named Little Red Hensky.
[00:34:13]  Oh my God.
[00:34:14]  Oh, Walt Disney.
[00:34:15]  Beautiful.
[00:34:16]  That is actually the story.
[00:34:17]  You have just summarized the story of the great Disney Revolt, the Disney animation revolt of 1941.
[00:34:23]  So Art and a number of other employees are like, hey, let's organize.
[00:34:27]  They're trying to organize their shop.
[00:34:28]  They're talking to their coworkers.
[00:34:30]  And eventually there's like a big fight, you know, at the office between Disney and art.
[00:34:35]  And Disney fires art, right?
[00:34:37]  And not just art.
[00:34:39]  He fires a number of employees who are trying to organize workers.
[00:34:41]  And this sparks a strike.
[00:34:43]  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.
[00:34:54]  The salaries of the Disney artists average less than those of house painters, read a press bulletin.
[00:34:58]  The Disney girl inkers and painters received between $16 and $20 a week.
[00:35:02]  On Snow White, the much publicized bonuses did not even compensate the artists for the two years of overtime they worked.
[00:35:08]  Snow White made the highest box office gross in history, over $10 million.
[00:35:12]  All the other major cartoon studios in Hollywood have screen cartoon guild contracts.
[00:35:16]  The Disney studio is the only non-studio union studio in Hollywood.
[00:35:20]  The union demanded a 10% wage increase across the board, a 25% wage increase for the lower bracketed artists, and the reinstatement of the 19 animators who they argued were fired for union activity.
[00:35:31]  So, what's happening here shouldn't be surprising is Disney artists are making bank.
[00:35:36]  They have just had the highest, the most successful.
[00:35:39]  This is Snow White is the fucking avatar of its day.
[00:35:42]  Except, unlike Avatar, it's deeply influential and people will not shut up about it for years, right?
[00:35:46]  Like, it is in every conversation.
[00:35:48]  People kind of forget they saw Avatar.
[00:35:50]  Yeah, yeah, nothing against it or for it particularly, but like fern gully, it's just fucking fern gully.
[00:35:57]  Yeah, we've kind of forgotten because it's been so long how much of a pop culture bomb in a good, in like the successful way, not in like, yeah, I shouldn't use the term bomb.
[00:36:07]  Like, there's nothing very little that has 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.
[00:36:20]  Like, that's probably the closest like thing you could have.
[00:36:24]  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.
[00:36:39]  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.
[00:36:45]  Now, Hank Ketchum is a 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.
[00:36:55]  And so, he's going to be pressured directly to participate in this.
[00:36:58]  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.
[00:37:10]  To no one's surprise, a general strike was called.
[00:37:13]  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.
[00:37:19]  They had every reason to join the picket line at the gate.
[00:37:22]  Now, that's a promising start, right?
[00:37:25]  He's 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.
[00:37:33]  They had a good reason to need to unionize, they had families to support, right?
[00:37:36]  Yeah, and for a few days, Hank joins the picket line, right?
[00:37:42]  For a little while, he does what you should do when your coworkers unionize, right?
[00:37:46]  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.
[00:37:53]  For me, this was good paying work.
[00:37:55]  For me, I was exactly where I wanted to be, so I didn't want to strike.
[00:37:59]  And like, yeah, man, that's a strike.
[00:38:01]  You don't always do it for you.
[00:38:03]  You are, and anytime you're striking, it's never just for you or even just for your coworkers, it's for like, especially in a creative discipline, the field, like the art form.
[00:38:13]  You will benefit from it eventually.
[00:38:15]  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.
[00:38:26]  Yeah, and honestly, the pictures I've seen of the Disney strike line.
[00:38:30]  Oh, it sounds cross-sounding.
[00:38:32]  It's a goddamn guillotine.
[00:38:33]  Yes, these guys are so fucking radical.
[00:38:37]  And part of why they're so radical is they're very young.
[00:38:40]  The average Disney employee is under 25, right?
[00:38:43]  So, these guys, number one, they all grew up during the Depression.
[00:38:45]  This is a time when socialism is in a very different place in American public consciousness.
[00:38:50]  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?
[00:38:58]  And a lot of these are very radical young men who are also talented artists.
[00:39:02]  Um, and so there's a lot of cool shit that gets made for the Disney.
[00:39:06]  These posters were amazing, they're really well drawn.
[00:39:08]  There's some, yeah, yeah, the worst people to like have drawing posters for a strike if you're the boss is a bunch of fucking Disney animals.
[00:39:16]  It's like pissed off Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse posters.
[00:39:19]  And then the guillotine.
[00:39:21]  They brought a goddamn guillotine.
[00:39:22]  Yeah.
[00:39:23]  Yeah.
[00:39:23]  Fucking, if only they'd used it.
[00:39:25]  So because strikes be the way strikes do, a bunch of people who worked for Disney and other outside of animation who were unionized joined the strike.
[00:39:35]  Disney carpenters, machinists, teamsters, and food service workers all refused to cross the picket line.
[00:39:41]  And this is along with most editors and cameramen, right?
[00:39:44]  Because those are all unionized positions too.
[00:39:46]  And everybody's like, no, you know.
[00:39:48]  We're not going to fucking scab.
[00:39:50]  And this is the Disney strike, again, is super organized and very militant.
[00:39:56]  One of the things they do is this is a 24-hour a day strike.
[00:40:00]  There are never not animators out in front of the Disney building doing a picket.
[00:40:04]  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.
[00:40:13]  And they take pictures of every single person who scabs.
[00:40:16]  Like they have like a spy unit there so that they can shame them.
[00:40:20]  Yeah.
[00:40:20]  On the line itself, workers took full advantage of the fact that they were the best animators on the planet.
[00:40:25]  Here's how Friedman describes the picket.
[00:40:27]  About 500 men and women were on their feet walking in a large circle in front of the entrance.
[00:40:31]  Nearly one in 10 carried a wooden picket sign, all painted with cartoon characters.
[00:40:35]  It's not cricket to pass a picket, warned Jiminy Cricket.
[00:40:38]  I'd rather be a dog than a scab, chided Pluto.
[00:40:41]  I sign your drawings.
[00:40:42]  You sign your lives, taunted a caricature of Walt.
[00:40:45]  Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, Rembrandt, all belong to guilds.
[00:40:51]  That would I like a little bit less than the I sign your drawings, you sign your lives, Walt Disney cartoon.
[00:40:57]  They tried.
[00:40:58]  They tried.
[00:40:59]  I like that.
[00:41:00]  I mean, most of those are pretty good, you know?
[00:41:02]  Yeah, no, there's some really good ones in there.
[00:41:04]  Yeah.
[00:41:05]  And the number 600 shows up a lot because that's how many artists are striking.
[00:41:09]  One of their handouts reads one genius against 600 guinea pigs.
[00:41:13]  And then another reads Snow White and the 600 dwarves.
[00:41:17]  I guess they're comparing Walt to Snow White there, which is all asleep and not picked into what was going on around him.
[00:41:24]  Sure, sure.
[00:41:25]  Probably ate a lot of poisoned apples.
[00:41:26]  Why not?
[00:41:28]  So I think this is all kind of cool.
[00:41:30]  Like everything I read about the Disney animators revolt is like pretty dope.
[00:41:35]  Hank is really pissed off about this.
[00:41:38]  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.
[00:41:46]  Oh, and he grows enraged at his co-workers and specifically the Teamsters, who he considered, quote, a bunch of heavy-handed spoil sports interrupting my life of Riley.
[00:41:56]  He is very clear about like, I am angry about this because my life was good.
[00:42:00]  Well, don't you care about your co-workers, bro?
[00:42:02]  Like, you know, they have a problem.
[00:42:06]  You should care about that.
[00:42:08]  Yeah.
[00:42:09]  He decides to betray his colleagues and returns to work.
[00:42:12]  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 scab.
[00:42:20]  Like he leaves the picket line and crosses and goes to work drawing for the company.
[00:42:25]  Okay.
[00:42:26]  Not remotely okay.
[00:42:27]  Not remotely okay.
[00:42:30]  He rides to the office with his roommate, who's the brother of a Disney manager and is on the side of management.
[00:42:35]  And this, this, for whatever reason, this actually kind of says a lot about the man.
[00:42:40]  You don't get much about his experiences during the Depression other than he talks about what a bad time it was.
[00:42:45]  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.
[00:42:56]  It reminded him of a soup kitchen.
[00:42:58]  And the line he says is like, well, that was in the past.
[00:43:01]  And I'm only a guy who wants to move forward.
[00:43:04]  Right.
[00:43:04]  So I didn't, that's made me decide to scab on the union is seeing a soup kitchen.
[00:43:08]  I don't want to do stuff from the past, you know?
[00:43:11]  That's such a weird justification for betraying your colleagues.
[00:43:16]  Like my dad was a union president.
[00:43:18]  Remember, like a lot of union stuff, and it was this common thing.
[00:43:21]  You know, we you have a large gathering, there's food.
[00:43:23]  You got to make sure everyone's fed.
[00:43:26]  It's just life.
[00:43:27]  And what a weird fucking thing.
[00:43:29]  Oh, no, we're taking care of each other.
[00:43:31]  I can't have this.
[00:43:32]  Yeah, whenever you have, like, you've got like a coal mine strike, right?
[00:43:36]  And you've got, it's, especially in this period, it's like white workers striking.
[00:43:40]  The mines won't hire black people normally.
[00:43:42]  And then suddenly they get a chance to work at the mine and make more money than they otherwise would by scabbing.
[00:43:46]  I got nothing against those people, right?
[00:43:48]  Like they're, they're in an impossible.
[00:43:50]  This is the opposite of that.
[00:43:51]  Yeah.
[00:43:52]  You saw, you saw free food and got angry.
[00:43:55]  So you scabbed.
[00:43:56]  Like so weird to me.
[00:43:58]  Yeah.
[00:44:01]  It's and it's weird to the other Disney animators.
[00:44:03]  This is the kind of thing they take very seriously.
[00:44:05]  And Hank recalls being screamed at as he drives through the picket line.
[00:44:10]  I scrunched myself down between Kenny and Albertino, two protective linebackers, hoping to be invisible as the Mercury convertible eased through the mass of chanting wild-eyed revolutionaries.
[00:44:19]  But they spotted me and I instantly became king of the Finks and the target of other creative terms of outrage and venom.
[00:44:25]  The loudest insults seem to come from those who I once considered very good pals.
[00:44:29]  It was a shattering experience for many, as in any civil war.
[00:44:32]  The house was divided and close friendships evaporated.
[00:44:35]  Years later, the stigma remained.
[00:44:37]  I'm like, well, yeah, of course your good pals are pissed.
[00:44:41]  They're striking because they need to pay their mortgage and they just found out you don't care about them.
[00:44:47]  Man, I'm going to try to hide between these larger men.
[00:44:50]  Yeah.
[00:44:51]  Just such a fucking worm.
[00:44:54]  Such a worm.
[00:44:55]  Oh my God.
[00:44:56]  So as a result of his craven nature, Hank is going to miss one of the defining moments in entertainment labor history.
[00:45:03]  Now, Walt Disney, one thing you got to say for him, the man was a formidable foe, right?

=== Scabs Interrupting Dumbo Finishing (07:32) ===

[00:45:08]  This is not an incompetent guy to go up against as a union.
[00:45:12]  But again, the Disney animators, among other things, had youth on their side.
[00:45:16]  They split the whole crew into two or three hour shifts.
[00:45:18]  And so they keep a 24-hour picket line.
[00:45:20]  They never give up on like protesting.
[00:45:24]  And this is because, yeah, we'll get into that.
[00:45:26]  So because a lot of these guys become famous later, you get some quotes from the ones who broke trying to explain their behavior.
[00:45:32]  And this brings me back to Ward Kimball, right?
[00:45:34]  Ward is Hank's boss.
[00:45:35]  He is one of the guys who scabs.
[00:45:37]  And he says of it, quote, I felt terrible.
[00:45:39]  Friends on the inside waving to me to come in, friends on the outside pleading with me to stay out.
[00:45:44]  Jesus, I was on the spot.
[00:45:46]  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.
[00:45:56]  You, some people you care about a lot are in management.
[00:45:58]  They don't, you know, you feel torn as opposed to Hank, who's just like, well, I saw a soup kitchen and got pissed.
[00:46:05]  It is, it has to be like a hard thing to decide on.
[00:46:08]  And like we said earlier, he's been there since almost the start.
[00:46:12]  Yeah.
[00:46:13]  And Walt was his friend.
[00:46:15]  Yeah.
[00:46:15]  And like, I get how that's, I'm not like, like saying it was okay, but I get that more than I get what Hank is describing as his reasoning.
[00:46:22]  Yeah, everything about what Ketchum is saying is just kind of weasly.
[00:46:26]  Yeah.
[00:46:27]  Yeah.
[00:46:27]  So the union issues a warning that animators who stayed would be fined $5 a day plus a $100 penalty once shit resumed normality.
[00:46:36]  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.
[00:46:47]  The thing that was important, the thing that everyone had to do who was scabbing was finish Dumbo.
[00:46:53]  So this is the movie they're working on at the time.
[00:46:56]  And when this 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?
[00:47:12]  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.
[00:47:20]  And he's still, he can't fund it with the money they have.
[00:47:23]  He has to get a loan from Bank of America.
[00:47:25]  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.
[00:47:31]  But Bank of America doesn't have enough faith in animation that like if they miss getting Dumbo out on time, right?
[00:47:39]  The bank could foreclose theoretically, right?
[00:47:41]  That's at least, I don't know how realistic that was as an actual possibility, but that's what Ferguson is warning everybody.
[00:47:47]  That's what Walt is obsessed over, right?
[00:47:49]  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 like the fucking offices that he decided to build.
[00:48:04]  And it was like a $10 million campus asleep at the time.
[00:48:07]  It was a lot of money.
[00:48:08]  Which is like what Snow White made.
[00:48:10]  Yeah.
[00:48:10]  Well, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong in this.
[00:48:13]  At all the same time, I don't think they really got most of their European money from Snow White because when World War II broke out, Nazi Germany is like, we're not sending you anything.
[00:48:22]  Yeah.
[00:48:24]  They get hurt.
[00:48:25]  I mean, and just in general, like they get hurt because like there's not a European market for a while, effectively, for cartoons.
[00:48:31]  Honestly, Walt Disney was not a good businessman.
[00:48:33]  Like Disney's company was always kind of hurting.
[00:48:36]  Yeah.
[00:48:37]  Like it's not what it was.
[00:48:38]  It's not, it wasn't then what it is now.
[00:48:40]  Yeah.
[00:48:41]  Yeah.
[00:48:42]  And it like, it was not even all that similar.
[00:48:44]  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?
[00:48:51]  Like, obviously, I think the workers have a point.
[00:48:54]  Walt himself is like kind of dumbfounded when the strike begins.
[00:48:57]  He had been the one to fire Babbitt, but he never expected his animators would betray him.
[00:49:02]  The company had up to this point been run more like an extended family or friend group than a traditional employer, right?
[00:49:08]  Because it's this scrappy startup.
[00:49:09]  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.
[00:49:20]  He would later, after the employees win their strike, he's going to inform on a bunch of them to the House Un-American activities community for being communists.
[00:49:29]  But this is an act of callo vengeance because again, Disney loses the fight.
[00:49:33]  As the Washington Post summarizes, the Picketers marched on.
[00:49:36]  Bad publicity for Disney's company mounted, as did pressure from its creditors.
[00:49:40]  In late July, the government stepped in.
[00:49:42]  And in federal arbitration, the studio agreed to various demands, including pay increases, back pay, sick leave, and Babbitt's returned.
[00:49:49]  The cash-strapped Disney studio shut down for two weeks in late August during a battle with the newly recognized guild about fresh layoffs.
[00:49:55]  Walt Disney escaped the ordeal, embarking on a government-sponsored South American tour.
[00:49:59]  Three months later, the attack on Pearl Harbor drew the company into World War II.
[00:50:04]  He was going to South America.
[00:50:05]  They're preparing to make the movie Saludos Amigos.
[00:50:08]  And it was kind of.
[00:50:09]  It was basically to kind of get South America into the war effort.
[00:50:12]  Yeah.
[00:50:13]  And he's going to like, that's how he's going to kind of like de-stress from this.
[00:50:18]  And then thankfully, we need a bunch of propaganda for the war.
[00:50:21]  And that's kind of what saves Disney is making wartime propaganda in this period.
[00:50:26]  Now, the strike is going to be the end of the friendly camaraderie that had been central to Disney's early image.
[00:50:32]  What's interesting to me is you get very different pictures of how that looked depending on who is telling the story.
[00:50:37]  Friedman says it's the returning workers who suffered because they were treated like pariahs by people who were scared that Walt would see them being friendly with like someone who had gone on strike, right?
[00:50:48]  And I'm sure that's true.
[00:50:50]  Hank, for his part, is like, basically says those of us who scabbed got treated differently and that was what was unfair.
[00:50:56]  Also, he complains a lot about the ping pong tables being taken away in the office, which he blames on the strike.
[00:51:03]  I don't know.
[00:51:04]  I don't know, man.
[00:51:05]  He's going to have bigger concerns, though, because the U.S. enters the big dub-w dose not long after the strike comes to an end.
[00:51:12]  And Hank is right at that sweet, sweet draft in age.
[00:51:14]  So he joins the Navy.
[00:51:16]  He's going to serve for the duration of the war.
[00:51:19]  And he kind of lucks, gets really lucky here.
[00:51:23]  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.
[00:51:30]  We're not sending you over to get shot at by a crowd.
[00:51:33]  Like, you're going to stay here and you're going to try to convince Americans to buy war bonds by drawing stuff.
[00:51:38]  Yeah, they used a lot of animators in World War II.
[00:51:40]  Yeah.
[00:51:41]  They saved a lot of them from going overseas.
[00:51:43]  Yeah.
[00:51:44]  This is why we need to have another war.
[00:51:46]  It's the only thing that could save our animation industry from AI.
[00:51:50]  Oh, God.
[00:51:52]  All the poor laid-off rooster teeth animators.
[00:51:54]  Yeah.
[00:51:54]  Oh, that is a bummer.
[00:51:56]  Yeah.
[00:51:56]  So Walt writes him a letter while he's working for the Army, which is nice considering Walt probably wished we'd entered the war on a different side, but that's a story for another day.
[00:52:08]  It was in 1942 after moving to D.C. to serve in the Navy that Hank married Alice Mahar.
[00:52:15]  His autobiography says nothing about how they met or her personality at all.
[00:52:19]  He provides one picture that describes her as his Massachusetts mate.
[00:52:24]  The two would have a boy together, Dennis Ketchum, in 1946.
[00:52:28]  And yes, that is the inspiration and namesake for Dennis the Menace.
[00:52:32]  Now, despite the central role that Dennis would play in his later success, his own son scarcely merits more mention than Alice in this book.

=== Chumba Casino Sponsorship Confusion (03:40) ===

[00:52:40]  And we're going to get into all of that.
[00:52:42]  But first, you know who does merit mention?
[00:52:45]  I would say the products and services of these fine advertisers.
[00:52:49]  Yeah.
[00:52:50]  I'm going to tell you right now, folks, forget the name and face of your parents.
[00:52:54]  You know, just remember these advertisers.
[00:52:56]  If you have children, delete them from your memory and just remember the people who sponsor this show.
[00:53:02]  Done and done.
[00:53:02]  I don't have a father anymore.
[00:53:03]  I only have Chumba Casino.
[00:53:05]  That's right.
[00:53:05]  That's right.
[00:53:06]  Chumba Casino is everything.
[00:53:11]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:53:16]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wild Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:53:24]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:53:33]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:53:38]  Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:53:42]  They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:53:46]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:53:49]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:53:53]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:53:56]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:53:57]  They do not have homes.
[00:53:58]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:54:01]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:54:10]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:54:21]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:54:27]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:54:37]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:54:41]  That's great.
[00:54:42]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:54:52]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:54:58]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:55:08]  I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro.
[00:55:12]  I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
[00:55:17]  Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
[00:55:25]  I'm talking to people like Julie Kay Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
[00:55:31]  These victims have been let down time and time again for decades and decades and decades by local law enforcement, by federal law enforcement, by administration after administration.
[00:55:45]  The Justice Department, through I think we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
[00:55:53]  Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network.
[00:55:57]  Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:56:10]  We're back.
[00:56:11]  People online talk about those Chumba ads.
[00:56:13]  I've actually never heard one yet.
[00:56:16]  I haven't heard it either.
[00:56:17]  It is every time I listen to the show.
[00:56:19]  Every time.
[00:56:20]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  At least three of them.

=== Dennis The Menace Comic Origins (14:15) ===

[00:56:21]  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 they're different for like geographical areas, right?
[00:56:30]  Like they're not going to want to serve the same ad to somebody in like Australia as they are to somebody in Michigan.
[00:56:36]  Yeah.
[00:56:36]  So a lot of times people are like, wow, it's wild these people are sponsoring you.
[00:56:40]  And I'm like, I didn't know, man.
[00:56:41]  Like it's just, it's just a random ad.
[00:56:44]  We had one recently, which I do feel bad about.
[00:56:47]  You know, we get asked, like, what kind of stuff are you okay with?
[00:56:50]  And a while ago, I filled out a thing being like, yeah, you know what?
[00:56:53]  I hunt, I shoot.
[00:56:54]  Like there are certain kinds of like hunting and shooting products I might theoretically endorse.
[00:56:58]  I'd want to like know what they were.
[00:57:00]  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.
[00:57:09]  I don't know that gun shop.
[00:57:10]  I don't know who those people are.
[00:57:12]  Like I have, we need to fix that right away.
[00:57:16]  It could be a good gun shop or it could be a real bad shop.
[00:57:18]  It could be a very bad gun shop.
[00:57:21]  Certainly don't want to sponsor that shit at random.
[00:57:23]  So we should have fixed that.
[00:57:25]  And a lot of the like really, really bad ones that have already been like removed come in on like secret categories.
[00:57:34]  Oh, yeah.
[00:57:35]  And then it's like, you're coming in as business.
[00:57:39]  No.
[00:57:40]  So back to Dennis the Menace.
[00:57:43]  As we get to this story, it is 1946.
[00:57:46]  Dennis and his new wife, Alice.
[00:57:49]  You mean Hank and his new wife?
[00:57:50]  Hank and his new wife, Alice.
[00:57:52]  They had their son Dennis.
[00:57:53]  Jesus, real mess here, I am.
[00:57:56]  And despite the central role that Dennis would play in his success, his own son scarcely merits more of a mention than like the mother of his child in Hank's autobiography.
[00:58:05]  Hank does provide a loving description of how he came up with the idea for the comic.
[00:58:10]  And this happens once he's out of the Navy.
[00:58:13]  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 $12,000.
[00:58:22]  God damn it.
[00:58:24]  That's like a $12 million home today.
[00:58:27]  At least.
[00:58:28]  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.
[00:58:37]  In most news articles about the man, you'll hear 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.
[00:58:49]  And when his mom walks in and sees the mess Dennis made, she cries out to Hank, your son is a menace.
[00:58:55]  And that inspires Dennis the Menace as a title and both the premise also of this cartoon.
[00:59:01]  That's kind of accurate, but it leaves out the ugliness of Hank's own description of this moment, which I'm going to quote from now.
[00:59:09]  At four years of age, Dennis Lloyd Ketchum was a 36-pound handful, too young for school, too big for his playpen, and too small to hit, not old enough for jail, and 100% anti-establishment.
[00:59:20]  One October afternoon in 1950, 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 in Carmela.
[00:59:32]  Mother noises?
[00:59:33]  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?
[00:59:40]  How is that different from a father noise?
[00:59:42]  And why are you so sad your child is too small to hit?
[00:59:45]  When are they big enough to hit, Hank?
[00:59:48]  When are they big enough for jail?
[00:59:50]  What are your opinions on these things?
[00:59:53]  Jesus Christ.
[00:59:55]  The little darling was supposed to be taking a nap.
[00:59:57]  Instead, he had spent the better part of one hour quietly dismantling his room, bed, mattress, springs, dresser, drapes, and curtain rods.
[01:00:04]  When the accidental load he carried in his underpants was added to his collection of plastic toys, cookie crumbs, and leftover peanut butter sandwich, it formed an unusual mix, enough to drive an Irish mother to the brink.
[01:00:15]  Now he was my son.
[01:00:16]  Her rich expletives, most of them coined in Boston, were spliced with suggestions of abandonment and threats of bodily harm.
[01:00:22]  After informing me that I could jolly well clean up his room, her parting shot was, your son is a menace.
[01:00:29]  Dennis?
[01:00:30]  A menace?
[01:00:32]  I mused.
[01:00:33]  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 wants you to know she's Irish.
[01:00:42]  And he wants you to know she's Irish because he does.
[01:00:47]  Their marriage does not work out, and he blames it on her being an alcoholic, and she's an alcoholic because she's Irish.
[01:00:53]  That is Hank.
[01:00:54]  That is Hank's attitude, right?
[01:00:56]  And he basically used her in the comic too, didn't he?
[01:00:59]  Yes.
[01:01:00]  Yes.
[01:01:01]  The dad is based on him.
[01:01:02]  The mother is based on her.
[01:01:03]  The kid is based on their son.
[01:01:05]  The whole cartoon is based on the family that he will be very shortly now abandoning.
[01:01:10]  God fucking damn.
[01:01:12]  Now, for reasons that will become very clear, Hank had a vested interest in making his wife look bad.
[01:01:16]  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?
[01:01:29]  He instead ignores his family to draw the first Dennis the Menace cartoons.
[01:01:34]  This does work out financially.
[01:01:36]  The concept sells out within weeks to the post-syndicate.
[01:01:39]  Dennis the Menace launched in March 1951 on 16 newspapers.
[01:01:44]  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.
[01:01:54]  They're both about like kind of misbehaving kids.
[01:01:57]  Both creators agree neither plagued the other.
[01:02:01]  This is just a weird coincidence.
[01:02:03]  It's probably the same day, wasn't it?
[01:02:05]  Yeah, it's like the same day, but both of them, neither of them tries to claim this is plagiarism.
[01:02:09]  They're both like, nah, man, this is just a weird thing that happened.
[01:02:13]  It's amazing, honestly.
[01:02:14]  Yeah.
[01:02:15]  I guess the universe needed there to be two Dennis the Menace comics in the same way it needed us to have World War I. Like it was just, it was going to make sure that happened.
[01:02:25]  I'm imagining Dennis the Menace assassinating the slaughter German.
[01:02:33]  No, no, no, the Archduke of Austria, Hungary.
[01:02:35]  Yeah, no, you know what?
[01:02:37]  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.
[01:02:46]  Mr. Wilson just, Dennis!
[01:02:49]  Stop starting!
[01:02:50]  He's so angry.
[01:02:52]  He's going to have to go enact the Schlieffen plan now.
[01:02:56]  I do imagine Mr. Wilson in this as like the military commander of Germany.
[01:03:01]  Yeah.
[01:03:02]  So the cartoon is a wild success.
[01:03:05]  It takes off very quickly and it expands in short order into one of the most successful comics in history.
[01:03:10]  This much people know what has been lost in the intervening years is a sense of how nasty the original cartoon would be.
[01:03:17]  I don't even mean this as a criticism.
[01:03:19]  It's just surprising because like today's Dennis the Menace, I would not call controversial.
[01:03:24]  No, right?
[01:03:25]  It's pretty tame humor for like all ages, right?
[01:03:30]  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?
[01:03:38]  Like you, you would think like something must have gone wrong.
[01:03:41]  They must have switched up their captions with the far side, like what happened that one time.
[01:03:45]  That's an actual moment from cartoon history, folks.
[01:03:48]  Look it up.
[01:03:49]  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.
[01:03:57]  Oh God, yes.
[01:03:58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:59]  That's an episode.
[01:03:59]  It really pisses people off.
[01:04:01]  Oh, God.
[01:04:02]  It happened a couple times, too.
[01:04:03]  Yeah.
[01:04:03]  Yeah.
[01:04:04]  There's a few times that happened with the far side.
[01:04:06]  I found a few of these early Dennis the Menace cartoons chronicled in an article by Seattle Times reporter Mark Raymer or Rayner in 2005.
[01:04:15]  And oh boy, I did not expect this.
[01:04:18]  Quote, walking out of an elevator with his concerned-looking mom, malicious-eyed Dennis says, Did you see that?
[01:04:24]  I pinched that fat dame to make her give me room, and she slugged a guy in back of her.
[01:04:30]  Dennis, Jesus Christ, fat dame, huh?
[01:04:33]  Wow.
[01:04:34]  I will say, like, that's at least a little, that's a lot more colorful than I expected from Dennis the Menace.
[01:04:40]  Well, a lot of those early comics dialogues a lot more.
[01:04:44]  Even some of the early family circus were like a blue.
[01:04:48]  Yeah.
[01:04:49]  Yeah.
[01:04:49]  You could, uh, you could definitely work bluer back then.
[01:04:52]  Quote, a swan with its neck tied in a knot warns its mate, stay away from that kid with the black pants.
[01:04:58]  Armed with a slingshot on a park bench, Dennis asks his mom, Hey, do you know how to cook a pigeon?
[01:05:03]  Um, a teacher tells Dennis's mom, Your Dennis is a happy child.
[01:05:07]  He hits Sammy with a sand shovel, and I thought he'd die laughing.
[01:05:11]  Um, there's another cartoon where Dennis constructs a crude sap, filling a sock with sand to beat people with again.
[01:05:19]  This is kind of based.
[01:05:22]  This is actually great.
[01:05:23]  I'm not gonna lie, he's pretty good.
[01:05:25]  Um, it does get creepier, especially when you think of the real world dimensions here.
[01:05:29]  Because here's a description of another cartoon: holding his embarrassed mom's hand, Dennis stops a friend on the sidewalk.
[01:05:34]  Billy, this is my mother, some looker, huh?
[01:05:37]  He walks in on another cartoon on his mother while she bathes, and she covers her nude body in horrified modesty.
[01:05:43]  He tells another friend, This is my mom, Tommy.
[01:05:45]  Isn't she pretty?
[01:05:46]  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 friends.
[01:05:54]  Weird joke to make about your wife and kid, Hank.
[01:05:58]  Yeah, weird joke to make about your wife and kid.
[01:06:01]  That is uncomfortable as like a cartoonist and a parent.
[01:06:04]  I just don't think I could do that.
[01:06:06]  Look, any kid would be glad to be portrayed as making a crude sap to beat people with in the street.
[01:06:12]  No kid wants to be in a cartoon calling their mom hot.
[01:06:15]  That's not okay, Hank.
[01:06:17]  You shouldn't do that to the cartoon founded in the image of your son.
[01:06:22]  A little odd.
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:24]  Like, I know she was your wife, but not his.
[01:06:27]  That's a therapy session.
[01:06:30]  He will say later, I think Dennis was more based on me than my son, but still, man, a little fucked up, buddy.
[01:06:37]  So that's good.
[01:06:38]  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.
[01:06:45]  In one interview, he described how he empathized with the put-upon father in his cartoon.
[01:06:50]  He comes home tired, full of other thoughts, and it's hard to come back and relax enough to enjoy your family, he says.
[01:06:56]  The young Ketchum saw children, in particular his son Dennis, as part of the problem.
[01:07:01]  They always seemed to be in the way of what you wanted to do, he remembers.
[01:07:05]  I just wonder if this is when his ghost artists and ghost writers start taking over.
[01:07:09]  Not quite.
[01:07:09]  This is right at the start.
[01:07:11]  They haven't done this yet.
[01:07:12]  Yeah, this is 59.
[01:07:13]  So Weiser's not drawing, and I can't remember the name of the artist, the writer.
[01:07:17]  No.
[01:07:17]  No, not quite yet.
[01:07:19]  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.
[01:07:28]  And as a result, his marriage deteriorates quickly for reasons that should be obvious.
[01:07:34]  In the winter of 1959, Alice leaves him and he simply writes, It was a bummer.
[01:07:39]  We had been on a collision course and nobody cared.
[01:07:43]  Jesus.
[01:07:44]  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.
[01:07:53]  And we're getting into, you know, the real, the very worst bastardry of the Hank Ketchum story.
[01:07:59]  But first, that's the episode.
[01:08:02]  We're done for right now.
[01:08:03]  So come back to me.
[01:08:03]  Did I cause it to be a two-parter?
[01:08:05]  I didn't mean that.
[01:08:05]  No, I caused this to be a two-parter because I wrote 20 pages on the Dennis the Menace guy for reasons that no one will ever be able to explain.
[01:08:15]  This was not my initial intention.
[01:08:17]  I did not.
[01:08:18]  Oh my Jesus.
[01:08:20]  Well, you know, obviously not like compared to you, I'm not knowledgeable or nerdy about animation, but like I really love cartoons.
[01:08:27]  Well, I think they run to be a pages worth of rage to have it.
[01:08:30]  Hank Ketchum.
[01:08:31]  That's why I'm just.
[01:08:32]  There's so much to talk about, like the Disney animator strike and shit.
[01:08:36]  I just couldn't, I couldn't help myself.
[01:08:39]  You could do a whole episode on Disney in the 40s, especially the strike.
[01:08:43]  I think we will at some point.
[01:08:45]  But first, let's do an episode on your pluggables.
[01:08:48]  Oh, oh, well, my name is Randy Milholland, and I do an online comic called Something Positive.
[01:08:57]  I've been doing it since the year 2001.
[01:09:02]  Let's see, what else do I do?
[01:09:03]  I do a few things.
[01:09:04]  God, I'm so tired.
[01:09:05]  Now, Randy, 2001, The War on Terror started, and it hasn't really ended.
[01:09:11]  Is it possible that your cartoon caused the war on terror?
[01:09:16]  Technically, my comic started after the war on terror began.
[01:09:20]  Okay, okay.
[01:09:21]  I have a few months' grace period, thankfully.
[01:09:25]  I can tell you where I was when all that started.
[01:09:28]  I guess it will remain a mystery why the war on terror started then.
[01:09:31]  At least until you do the behind the bastards episode on me next year.
[01:09:36]  Randy Milholland.
[01:09:39]  The 14th hijacker.
[01:09:41]  I forget how many hijackers there were, folks.
[01:09:43]  I did live in Boston.
[01:09:45]  Well, I live not far from that, from Logan.
[01:09:47]  And I'm amazing that allowed all that to happen.
[01:09:52]  So I do somethingposit, somethingpositive.net.
[01:09:55]  I also draw the Sunday Popeye strips, comicskingdom.com/slash Popeye.
[01:10:00]  I also do a Tuesday, Thursday comic with a woman, sorry, a being named Emmy Burke.
[01:10:09]  That's Olive and Popeye.
[01:10:10]  Tuesdays are focused on Olive.
[01:10:12]  That's what Emmy draws.
[01:10:14]  I do the Thursday strips that focus on Popeye and his family.
[01:10:17]  And I started a couple of months ago a comic called Mousetrapped.
[01:10:21]  It is my sequel to the comic or the cartoon Lestean Boat Willie, but I bring in other public domain comic characters from like Universal and Walter Lance.
[01:10:29]  Hell yeah.
[01:10:30]  So it's basically my excuse to pull out really old, forgotten cartoon characters and figure out how they would fit together.

=== Coolzone Media Substack Writing (03:21) ===

[01:10:37]  Well, that sounds fucking dope.
[01:10:39]  Thank you.
[01:10:40]  Yeah, I don't have a cartoon, but I do have a podcast and you're listening to it.
[01:10:48]  So why would I need to say anymore?
[01:10:49]  Written novels?
[01:10:50]  I have written a novel.
[01:10:51]  It's called After the Revolution, and you can find it on the internet at ATRBook.com or any place that lets you buy books.
[01:10:59]  You know, don't you have one of the stacked things that writers have?
[01:11:03]  A substitute.
[01:11:04]  Nah, I don't really do that anymore.
[01:11:06]  Oh, okay.
[01:11:06]  Sorry.
[01:11:06]  I mean, I want to get some sort of regular writing thing up again, but Substack, there's this whole thing over Nazis.
[01:11:12]  And like, I'm mixed because where aren't there Nazis on social media?
[01:11:16]  Why would we get bit out of shape about one or the other?
[01:11:19]  But also, like, I don't know.
[01:11:20]  I don't want to go to bat for Substack over whatever, all of this.
[01:11:25]  So I'm just not doing anything right now, aside from these podcasts.
[01:11:29]  Fair enough.
[01:11:30]  Yeah.
[01:11:32]  Well, don't forget CoolZone Media and the app.
[01:11:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:11:35]  Don't forget that, but forget everything else you've ever heard in your life.
[01:11:39]  Remember only us.
[01:11:43]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:11:47]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:12:00]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:12:10]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[01:12:16]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[01:12:25]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:12:31]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:12:41]  I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
[01:12:51]  Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
[01:12:58]  Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
[01:13:03]  I'm talking to people like Julie Kay Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
[01:13:09]  The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
[01:13:16]  Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:22]  Will Farrell's big money players and iHeart podcasts presents soccer bombs.
[01:13:27]  So I'm Leanne.
[01:13:28]  This is my best friend Janet.
[01:13:29]  Hey.
[01:13:29]  And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
[01:13:32]  Absolutely.
[01:13:32]  A redacted amount of years later.
[01:13:35]  We're still joined at the hip.
[01:13:36]  Just a little bit bigger hips.
[01:13:37]  This is a podcast.
[01:13:38]  We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[01:13:45]  Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
[01:13:47]  Oh, they had a BOGO.
[01:13:48]  Well, then you got.
[01:13:49]  Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:55]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:13:57]  Guaranteed human.