As I mentioned, I'm lecturing up at U.C.L.A. on Saturday (here are the details) about Li'l Abner. I'll be talking a little about the strip, a lot about the Broadway show and a little about the 1959 movie based on the Broadway show. I won't spend much time on the Li'l Abner animated cartoons…and I bet it'll surprise a lot of people to know that there even were Li'l Abner animated cartoons. They're among the most obscure cartoon shorts ever made, to the point where a lot of well-versed cartoon scholars have never seen one.
There were five of them: Sadie Hawkins Day, Amoozin' But Confoozin', A Pee-kool-yar Sit-chee-ay-shun, Porkuliar Piggy and Kickapoo Juice…all produced by the Columbia Cartoon Studio in or around 1944. The films made by that studio are rarely shown these days even though some of them were pretty good. Then again, a lot of them weren't much better than the Li'l Abner shorts, which were low on budgets and pretty much devoid of the wit that was so prevalent in Al Capp's newspaper strip. The folks who made these cartoons seem to have thought that Mammy Yokum was just Popeye in drag. (One of the directors was even Dave Fleischer, one of the men responsible for the classic Popeye shorts.)
The five cartoons have occasionally been available on videotape and have recently been in a syndicated package of Columbia cartoons that haven't been sold to any U.S. markets. Some of the prints that are around aren't very good and some are even "traced" cartoons. If you don't know what those are, I'll explain in the next paragraph. If you do know, you can skip it.
Over the years, there have occasionally been old black-and-white cartoons about which some studio head or other exec said, often wrongly, "You know, if these were in color, we could sell them to television." Back in the days before computer "colorization," this was done by having artists trace the entire black-and-white cartoon back onto paper…and then these drawings were colored and photographed like new animation. Usually, the work went to the lowest-paid artists overseas and the results looked it.
The Abner cartoons were made in color but at one point a few decades ago, the negatives were missing and no color prints were available…so black-and-white prints were traced into color, and when these made the rounds, they further diminished the reputation of these cartoons. Small wonder that most animation buffs know little about them. (Even the voice credits on these are mysterious. Frank Graham, who was in an awful lot of cartoons of the forties, is in these but I can't identify the other players.)
Here's two-fifths of the complete run of Li'l Abner cartoons. The first of these is Sadie Hawkins Day and it was released May 4, 1944…
And this one, which is a black-and-white print of what was originally a Technicolor cartoon, is Kickapoo Juice, which was released on January 12, 1945. It was the last one in the series…and I think it's pretty easy to see why these didn't catch on with the public…