Alley Oop

Alley Oop is a syndicated comic strip created December 5, 1932, by American cartoonist V. T. Hamlin, who wrote and drew the strip through four decades for Newspaper Enterprise Association. Hamlin introduced a cast of colorful characters and his storylines entertained with a combination of adventure, fantasy, and humor. Alley Oop, the strip's title character, is a sturdy citizen in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo. He rides his pet dinosaur Dinny, carries a stone axe, and wears only a fur loincloth.
Alley Oop's name was most likely derived from the French phrase allez, hop! In the 1933 press release that accompanied the launching of the strip with its new distributor NEA, Hamlin was quoted as saying "I really can't recall just how I struck upon the name 'Alley Oop', although it might be from the fact that the name is a French term used by tumblers. Alley Oop really is a roughhouse tumbler." The name of Alley's girlfriend, Ooola, was a play on a different French phrase: oh là là.
The first stories took place in the fictional "Bone Age" (similar to the Stone Age) and centered on Alley Oop's dealings with his fellow cavemen in the kingdom of Moo. Oop and his pals had occasional skirmishes with the rival kingdom of Lem, ruled by King Tunk. The names Moo and Lem are references to the fabled lost continents of Mu and Lemuria.
On April 5, 1939, Hamlin introduced a new plot device which greatly expanded his choice of storylines: A time machine was invented by 20th-century scientist Dr. Elbert Wonmug; the name Wonmug was a pun on Albert Einstein, as "ein" is German for "one" and a "stein" is a type of drinking mug.
Oop was transported to the 20th century by an early test of the machine (in the daily strip of April 8 and the Sunday strip of April 9, 1939). He became Dr. Wonmug's man in the field, embarking on expeditions to various periods in history, such as Ancient Egypt, the England of Robin Hood, and the American frontier. Oop met historical or mythical figures such as Cleopatra, King Arthur, and Ulysses in his adventures. In addition to the time machine, other science-fiction devices were introduced. Oop once drove an experimental electric-powered race car, and he has space-traveled to Venus, the moon (twice), and "Earth-Two". During his adventures, he was often accompanied by his girlfriend Ooola and by the sometimes-villainous, sometimes-heroic George Oscar Boom (G. O. Boom). Laboratory assistant Ava Peckedge joined the cast in 1986.
Alley Oop was first distributed by the small syndicate Bonnet-Brown on December 5, 1932, but this run ended on April 26, 1933, when Bonnet-Brown became defunct. NEA picked up the strip and, starting on August 7, 1933, the earlier material was reworked for a larger readership. A full-page Sunday strip was added on September 9, 1934; the strip also appeared in half-page, tabloid, and half-tab formats, which were smaller and/or dropped panels. During World War II, newspapers eliminated full-page comics to save paper; starting on December 1, 1940, Alley Oop's Sunday comic was offered in a smaller format which could, at an editor's discretion, be further reconfigured to save space. Daily comics were first reduced in size on April 20, 1942, and have become smaller since then, but they have been appearing in color since September 15, 2008.
When Hamlin retired in 1971, his assistant Dave Graue took over. Graue had been assisting Hamlin since 1950 (starting as a letterer) and creating the daily solo since July 15, 1966, although co-signed by Hamlin. Hamlin's last signed daily strip appeared December 31, 1972, and his last signed Sunday was April 1, 1973. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Graue wrote and drew the strip from his North Carolina studio. In 1974 Graue retained an assistant, Dave Olson, to ink and letter the strips. Olson worked on the strip until his retirement at the end of 1990; starting in 1991, Graue hired Jack Bender to finish the daily strips and produce the Sundays.
Graue initially decided to retire at the end of 1991, and the syndicate selected Jack Bender as the strip's new creator. However, Bender was primarily interested in the art chores; he re-hired Graue to stay on as writer and recruited his wife Carole, a calligrapher. This team produced the strip from the last week of December 1991 through the end of August 2001; Graue wrote the strip and thumbnailed the art, from which Jack drew the strip and Carole lettered it. Graue finally retired in 2001, satisfied in having completed fifty years working on the strip. NEA then hired Carole as the new writer, based largely on the strength of an Alley Oop Christmas story that Carole had written and Jack had drawn, separately from the main Alley Oop strip, for the 1997 holiday season. Starting September 3, 2001, Alley Oop Sunday and daily strips were drawn entirely by Jack Bender and written, lettered, and colored by his wife Carole Bender. (On December 10, 2001, the 75-year-old Graue was killed in Flat Rock, North Carolina, when a dump truck hit his car.)
In January 2019, writer Joey Alison Sayers and artist Jonathan Lemon took over the comic.
At its peak, Alley Oop was carried by 800 newspapers. Today, it appears in more than 600 newspapers. The strip and collections of it were popular in Mexico (under the name Trucutú) and in Brazil (Brucutu). In 1995, Alley Oop was one of 20 strips showcased in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative United States postage stamps.
In 1978, Alley Oop was adapted to animation as a segment of Filmation's Saturday morning cartoon series Fabulous Funnies, appearing intermittently alongside other comic-strip favorites: The Captain and the Kids, Broom-Hilda, Emmy Lou, Tumbleweeds, and Nancy.
In 2002, Dark Horse Comics produced a limited-edition figure of the character in a brightly illustrated tin container. Alley Oop was issued as statue #28 — part of their line of Classic Comic Characters collectibles.
In 2008, to celebrate Alley Oop's 75th year, the Benders conducted a contest for "Dinosaur Drawings from Our Young Readers". The entry Tyrannosaurus rex holding a banner wishing "Happy Birthday" to Alley Oop, by 12 year-old Erin Holloway of Hammond, Louisiana, was published in the comic strip on January 17, 2009.
The long-running success of the strip made the character a pop culture icon referred to in fiction, pop music and dance:
A main character is one who is a fixture of a particular setting. For example, King Guz and Queen Umpa are always present in ancient Moo, even if they are not central to every storyline.
Although Ooola is "Alley Oop's girlfriend", and their jealousy of potential rivals has driven many storylines, they rarely showed each other affection prior to the Benders' run. (More often, Ooola did serious violence to Alley's cranium.) For the first 69 years of the strip's existence, the two kissed only twice: once on August 14, 1945, as a last goodbye when they believed they were going to be drowned, and again on September 28, 1999, when Ooola pecked Alley on the cheek as thank-you for a timely rescue. The Benders made the couple more physically affectionate and even brought them to the altar—but, when they reached that point, Alley and Ooola decided that they made better friends than spouses.
Doctor Wonmug was drawn to look identical to the Grand Wizer. By the end of Dave Graue's tenure, Wonmug and the Wizer had been in each other's company five times; in each instance, the story was told as though the two characters had never met before, and the characters' identical appearances were remarked upon (May 26, 1945; December 7, 1960; July 17, 1963; July 30, 1965; September 24, 1970). The Benders addressed the similarity twice (on October 6, 2006, and March 23, 2007) by subverting it; that is, the other characters exclaimed that the two looked the same, but both the Wizer and Wonmug scoffed and claimed not to see any resemblance. In the daily strip on June 21, 1969, Wonmug's birthdate is given as May 10, 1900 (which was also V.T. Hamlin's birthday).
Dinny, Alley Oop's pet dinosaur, was designed as an amalgam of different features and was not meant to resemble any known dinosaur. Dinny's species is identified as a "Cartoonosaurus" in the daily strip on April 12, 1968.
New stories typically introduced new characters, especially when those stories were set outside of Moo. Therefore, a "supporting character" is one who has been featured across multiple storylines.
Eeny, the dictator, was a transparent representation of Hitler. In her first story, in 1937, she recruited "hairshirts", taught them a familiar arm-raised salute, and installed herself as "dictator" while leaving Queen Umpa as a figurehead ruler. In her second story, in 1942, she and her "Moozys", headed by the armbanded "Moostapo", overran the country and herded its citizens into "concentration caves."
The Lemian King was inconsistent during Hamlin's run. King Tunk first appeared in 1934 as a bald man with a stubbled chin, and he remained so through 1938. In 1944, this same character was named Wur rather than Tunk, although Sawalla's King Wur had previously been featured in storylines alongside King Tunk. When Lem was re-introduced in 1954, its king was named Tunk but was clean-shaven and had a full head of hair; the Lemian king returned to his original design in 1959 but was again called Wur. He regained the name Tunk in 1961 (giving his full name as "Clab Tunk" on May 22, 1961) and from then on it stuck.
Dave Wowee, Wonmug's great-great-great-grandson, was named in honor of (and drawn to resemble) Dave Graue, who typically told people that his last name "rhymes with Wowee".
In addition to the magazines mentioned in the table below, Comics Revue has also reprinted Alley Oop daily and Sunday strips. The Menomonee Falls Guardian, published weekly, reprinted one week of daily strips in each issue. The Menomonee Falls Guardian Special #1–3 were sold separately; Special #4 was an insert included with issue #100.
Various strips have also been reprinted in comic-book form. The comic books tended to alter the original reading experience by colorizing the daily strips as well as rearranging, dropping, cropping or extending panels to fit the format. Recap and exposition panels, as well as strips that served as diversions from the perceived "main story" (such as an interlude of Alley and Foozy discovering how to drive a car while Dr. Wonmug fixed the time machine), were typically excised.
Famous Funnies and The Funnies re-lettered their Sunday-strip reprints, enlarging the text and simplifying the language, so that the comic would be more legible when reduced from tabloid to comic-book size. Although the first seven issues of Red Ryder Comics' Sunday-strip reprints were unaltered, in every subsequent issue the panels were enlarged, redrawn, rearranged or deleted.
The Antarctic Press series featured a combination of original material, direct reprints of newspaper comics, and redrawn adaptations of newspaper-strip stories. The reprints rearranged, resized, and sometimes omitted panels. These reprints and adaptations are noted in the list of storylines.
The following publications were original material, not newspaper reprints:
The following table is a list of storylines featured in the Sunday comic strips. The ending of a storyline frequently overlapped with the beginning of the next, and actual story titles were provided only on a few occasions (e.g., "Alley Oop at Crummystone Manor" or "The Perpetual Motion Machine"). The dates and story descriptions given here are, therefore, not official or definitive delineations but may serve as a rough index to the history of the strip. Most of the Sunday strips from November 1996 onward are available on gocomics.com.
The Sunday strips' continuity ran separately from the daily strips until 2006 (with two exceptions, as noted in the list). In the first few years following the time machine's introduction, Hamlin shifted the setting of the Sunday strip, sometimes abruptly, to match that of the daily storyline, but the Sunday and daily strips were entirely different stories, told in parallel, and they did not overlap. For example, when Oop was first brought to the 20th century, the Sunday storyline showed him doing little more than figuring out modern clothing and calmly running a few errands, whereas the daily strip had him roving all around the countryside in cars, trains, and planes, wreaking havoc and making headlines as the "Phantom Ape". If the same events did occur in both continuities, they were always told differently: before the first time-machine story, for example, Alley Oop acquired the Moovian royal jewels; however, in the Sunday strip, Guz voluntarily installed Alley as king (so he could take a vacation), while in the daily strip Alley took the throne by force (as revenge for Guz stealing and eating Dinny's egg).
After 1961, the Sunday strips featured no time travel but were set exclusively in Moo. It is possible that, from 1961 onward, the Sunday stories were meant to have taken place prior to Alley having met the time-machine crew because, in these strips, Alley was shown to be unaware of concepts he had already encountered in the time-travel storylines, such as shoes, or snow, or even the wheel.
Starting in January 2006, through the Benders' retirement in mid-2019, Sunday strips were not new stories but reprinted panels from the previous week's daily strips.
Since late 2019, the artistic team has made the Sunday strips "Little Oop", portraying a young Alley Oop. Little Oop was first set in a land of Moo that is anachronistic in a way similar to the Flintstones' "modern stone age", but he met a time-traveling child named Penelope who brought him to the modern era (on March 1, 2020).
Alley Oop's Sunday page had different toppers starting with the first strip and running through 1944:
The following is a list of storylines featured in the daily comic strips. Actual story titles were not provided in the strips; the dates and story descriptions given here are, therefore, not official or definitive delineations but may serve as a rough index to the history of the strip.
Although the Bonnet–Brown strips appeared in daily comics sections, their distribution was erratic, so that the strips' handwritten dates did not always match their actual publication dates. Consequently, after February 6, 1933, the strips were not dated but were instead given a sequential number (from 55 through 120), presumably so that editors could run them whenever they were received. The dates given here may, therefore, not be precisely accurate for every newspaper in which the strip appeared.
The slug creature in the January 17, 2020, strip is an homage to V.T. Hamlin's Venusian beast from December 30, 1950.