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Orphan Annie
Jun. 14th, 2010 08:32 amSo, long running comic Annie ended with this strip yesterday. (Warning: site does not like to load in Chrome, probably because of an excess of pop-up adds. It's one of the few sites I've found that doesn't seem to like Chrome, and I can't muster up enough interest in the strip to open up Explorer or Firefox to test the strip there. So, warning given.) The real surprise, as I noted over on Twitter, was that the strip was still in existence: even by the 1980s, when the strip was running in the Chicago Tribune (or maybe the Sun-Times; I don't remember which), my friends and I didn't like it and thought it was totally outdated and not in a good way - and we were the same set of kids who liked the movie and would happily burst out with "TOMORROW - TOMORROW - I'D LOVE YOU, TO BORROW, SOME MONEY FOR US TODAY, OR AT LEAST, SOME JEANS, TOMORROW, THE DESIGNER ONES, OK!!!!!!!!!"" (Accurate lyrics weren't our thing.) That the strip continued on despite this level of indifference means....something.
So yeah, I can't exactly say that this formed a huge part of my childhood or childhood consciousness, aside from maybe the song. I was, however, vaguely interested to learn that the original 1920s/1930s comic, aside from having annoying grammar in its dialogue, was often explicitly political, arguing against the New Deal and labor unions. As I've noted, this hatred of New Deal legislation seems to have been a surprisingly common theme in children's literature of the 1930s and early 1940s.
Anyway, the strip is ending with Annie kidnapped yet again, left in limbo, which seems oddly appropriate. And also expressive of just why the strip failed: you can only read about the same character getting kidnapped over and over and over again so many times. In my case it may have been all of twice.
So yeah, I can't exactly say that this formed a huge part of my childhood or childhood consciousness, aside from maybe the song. I was, however, vaguely interested to learn that the original 1920s/1930s comic, aside from having annoying grammar in its dialogue, was often explicitly political, arguing against the New Deal and labor unions. As I've noted, this hatred of New Deal legislation seems to have been a surprisingly common theme in children's literature of the 1930s and early 1940s.
Anyway, the strip is ending with Annie kidnapped yet again, left in limbo, which seems oddly appropriate. And also expressive of just why the strip failed: you can only read about the same character getting kidnapped over and over and over again so many times. In my case it may have been all of twice.