A salute to the late Mickey Rooney, who audaciously tried taking a comic strip character's name for his own, but did not get away with it.
Below is an excerpt from one of the TOONERVILLE FOLKS comedy movie shorts, based on the
newspaper comic panel by Fontaine Fox (above). It stars a wee Mickey Rooney.
He's the tough ne'er do well tyke "Mickey 'Himself' McGuire" in MICKEY'S CIRCUS (1927). This was his film debut.
Sure, it's similar to the Our Gang shorts, and you don't need me to tell
you who Mickey is. He's the bossy one in the big black hat (see above
drawing), the one moving the plot along.
There were 55 live-action two-reelers made, straddling the silent and sound eras, from 1926 to 1936.
Mickey's real name was Joe Yule, Jr. In the early silent shorts, he was
billed as Mickey McBan and then Mickey Yule before settling on the same
name as the bully from the feature, Mickey "Himself" Mcguire. And that
was okay for a decade, while filming these movies.
By the 1930s, at the same time he was shooting the TOONERVILLE series,
he was in another series based on a cartoonist's creation. He was the
voice of OSWALD, THE LUCKY RABBIT for Disney,
With subsequent movie roles in bigger pictures, like A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and MANHATTAN MELODRAMA, it was
time to move on. Besides, he was getting a little big to play McGuire.
So, in 1936, he left these shorts to do other roles. The first Andy Hardy
movie, YOU'RE ONLY YOUNG ONCE, was a year away, and after that, in
1938, his scene-stealing role as Whitey Marsh with Spencer Tracy in
BOY'S TOWN.
But the syndicate threatened him with a legal suit. The name of "Mickey
'Himself' McGuire" was one of the characters in the Toonerville Folks
comic strip before he had it, of course, and he could not formally
appropriate it. And so he changed his name for good this time, from
Mickey McGuire to Mickey Rooney.
On an odd note, the popular panel was known by a couple of names too. In
some papers it was Toonerville Folks, and in others Toonerville
Trolley. The panel (it was always a panel, not a strip.) ran in up to
300 newspapers from 1913 through to 1955.
The Mickey Rooney live-action shorts were the "middle" movie series. The
live-action series was bracketed by animated films. The first time that
the Toonerville panel was brought to life in the movies was in a series
of silent animated shorts from the Betzwood Motion Picture Studio
between 1920 and 1921. The final time that the series was in the movies
was Van Beuren Studio's production of "Toonerville Trolley" in 1936.
Here's Mickey Rooney hamming it up in MICKEY'S CIRCUS:
One of the featured players in these live-action pictures was Billy Barty, who played Mickey's brother Billy McGuire. He was three years old when he appeared in his first one. He's about six or seven years old in this excerpt from MICKEY'S THRILL HUNTERS (1931), which takes off on the Harold Lloyd "thrill" comedies:
Related:
Child Star Delia Bogard Interview (1989) Via Barry Conrad.
Delia Bogard starred, along with Rooney and Barty, in the Mickey McGuire series:
1 comment:
Disney's Oswald cartoons were SILENT. Walter Lantz produced the sound-era version.
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