Skippy (minor spoiler if you've never read GR)

[Paul Mackin]

I remember Skippy as a  comic strip character in its Hearst
King Features days--long after Life--but of course any political
commentary if still present by that  time (the thirties) would have gone
right over my youthfully innocent head. But the comic strip was the least
of it. There were Skippy brands of everything-you-could-think-of from
lunchpails to sandpails. There was even a Skippy movie I think. A
completely ubiquitous character in daily American life. Ironic in a way to
think of it as anti-corporate because it was the Disney and Starwars of
it's day as far as product licensing was concerned. Disney was doing
the same thing with Mickey Mouse even back then of course. Skippy still
may well have been a staunch crusader against the evils of the day.  

				P.
P.S. When Life magazine began appearing again in about 1937 (Henry Luce) 
to the best of my memory it was completely sans Skippy. Life became
if anything even more ubiquitous than Skippy and Mickey Mouse.


	 

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Gary Thompson wrote:

> 
> I saw this on a mailing from "Focus on the Corporation" [address for 
> FC at end of post]and thought it might make a good post in anticipation 
> of the many accounts of multinational corporations in GR, e.g., the 
> Rathenau seance (163-67). Sorry to be early but I'm leaving town again
> soon. 
> 
> "Skippy peanut butter. Made by the New Jersey corporate giant,
> Bestfoods.
> The same people who bring you Hellman's mayonnaise, Entenmann's baked
> goods, Mueller's pasta, Mazola corn oil, and Thomas' english muffins. 
> 
> "Now, if you are older, there is a chance you will remember a comic
> strip
> character named Skippy. Skippy was the creation of Percy Crosby. 
> 
> "Through Skippy and his other characters, Crosby lampooned politicians
> and
> crusaded against corporate crime, Al Capone, the Ku Klux Klan, and for
> civil rights, child labor laws and freedom of the press. 
> 
> "In the early 1920s, Life magazine began running the Skippy strip, and
> Skippy was syndicated in newspapers worldwide from 1926 to 1945. Crosby
> became a wealthy man. In 1925, he obtained a federal trademark
> registration for Skippy. 
> 
> "Enter Rosefield Packing Co,. which in 1933 began selling Skippy peanut
> butter, without getting permission from Crosby. On the peanut butter
> label, Rosefield used the same Skippy lettering, picket fence, and paint
> bucket made famous by Crosby in his comic strip. Rosefield was later
> bought out by the Corn Products Corporation (CPC, Inc.) which changed
> its
> name in 1997 to Bestfoods. 
> 
> "Percy Crosby's daughter Joan Crosby Tibbetts believes that her father
> was
> wronged by Bestfoods and her predecessors and she is determined to tell
> her father's story to the world. Earlier this year, she put up a web
> site
> (www.skippy.com, also at www.rjriley.com/skippy) detailing her father's
> fight with the powers that be."
> 
> There's a lot more at that site (the first one includes a visual image; 
> the second seems to be just text), but I'll leave the FC post at this
> point.
> 
> The most relevant P passage is of course the bit in the Byron the Bulb
> sequence
> (640-55), including . . . 
> 
> 	"A ‘37 Ford, exempt from the K.H. [Karmic Hammer]? C'mon quit fooling.
> They'll all end up in junkyards same as th' rest!
> 	"Oh, _will they_, Skippy? Why are there so many on the roads, then?
> 	"W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th' War, I mean there's no new
> cars being built right now so we all have to keep our Old Reliable in
> tiptop shape cause there's not too many mechanics left here on the home
> front, a-and we shouldn't hoard gas, and we should keep that A-sticker
> prominently displayed in the lower right--
> 	"Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and
> retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the
> paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His
> shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it
> because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the
> pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes
> the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or ‘Der
> Leid-Stadt,' that's what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about
> the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read
> it, because _we_ are going to Happyville." (644)
> 
> More here on the War as the set of points, which takes us back to
> GRGR(6). 
> And of course there's material here on our friend Pointsman from
> GRGR(7), who has
> just now sent Slothrop to Happyville . . . 
> 
> I think that this passage's account of the movement from individuals
> selling 
> stuff to impersonal and (in theory) immortal corporations which plunder 
> every little corner in search of profit [pages of illustrations] is 
> _GR_'s equivalent to _V._'s drift toward the inanimate / entropy. The 
> reason it's more convincing (to me, at least), is that it removes the 
> threat from the domain of the abstract and inexplicable to the domain 
> of institutions, thus giving us a more familiar set of agencies to
> explain 
> how it's happening. (This is work that's probably been done
> already--refs
> anyone?--so I won't work at it now.) 
> 
> Previously I commented on _GR_'s indeterminacy, but this anticorporate 
> theme is very consistent, it seems to me. 
> 
> Gary Thompson, off for a bit to cool, refreshing Dallas . . .
> 
> 
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