In July 1938, while the rest of Lockheed was busy tooling up to build Hudson reconnaissance bombers to fill a British contract, a small group of engineers was assigned to fabricate the first prototype of what would become the P-38 Lightning. The musical has since become a perennial favorite of high school and amateur productions, due to its popular appeal and modest production requirements. From beginning to end, Capp was acid-tongued toward the targets of his wit, intolerant of hypocrisy, and always wickedly funny. She had married the inconsequential Pappy Yokum in 1902; they produced two strapping sons twice their own size. ", was a devastating satire of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's notorious exploitation by DC Comics over Superman (see above excerpt). "How to Read Li'l Abner Intelligently" from. Mencken credits the postwar mania for adding "-nik" to the ends of adjectives to create nouns as beginning not with beatnik or Sputnik, but earlier in the pages of Li'l Abner. Scripps Company, it was an immediate success. Fosdick battled a succession of archenemies with absurdly unlikely names like Rattop, Anyface, Bombface, Boldfinger, the Atom Bum, the Chippendale Chair, and Sidney the Crooked Parrot, as well as his own criminal mastermind father, "Fearful" Fosdick (aka "The Original"). No one was to discuss the project outside the small organization, and team members were warned to be careful of how they answered the phones. "He knew how to take an otherwise ordinary drawing and really make it pop. One month after the ATSC and Lockheed meeting, the young engineer Clarence L. Kelly Johnson and other associate engineers hand delivered the initial XP-80 proposal to the ATSC. The F-104 Starfighter, the first Mach 2 aircraft, was developed to compete against Soviet MiGs in the early 1950s. According to publisher Denis Kitchen, Capp's "hapless Dogpatchers hit a nerve in Depression-era America. Most notably, a majority of classified testing is thought to be conducted at sites such as the Nevada Test Site. In the comic, there was a hidden place deep in the woods called the "skonk works" which was where they brewed a strong alcoholic beverage. replied the voice at the other end. "[43] Capp has been compared, at various times, to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Rabelais. (also, "Wal, cuss mah bones!") Impossible missions always were, and continue to be, their particular area of expertise. [3] According to Ben Richs memoir, an engineer jokingly showed up to work one day wearing a Civil Defense gas mask. In the comic strip Li'l Abner, the "Skonk Works" makes oil from the ground up dead skunks for some unknown . After his lower wisdom teeth grew so long that they squeezed his cerebral Goodness Gland and emerged as forehead horns, he proved himself capable of evil. A rapidly growing German jet threat gave Lockheed an opportunity to develop an airframe around the most powerful jet engine that the allied forces had access to, the British Goblin. It was Kellys unconventional organizational approach that allowed the Skunk Works to streamline work and operate with unparalleled efficiency. Pappy Yokum: Born Lucifer Ornamental Yokum, pint-sized Pappy had the misfortune of being the patriarch in a family that didn't have one. Terrifically long hours. However, Gussman consulted closely with Capp on the storylines. In Capp's satirical and often complex plots, Abner was a country bumpkin Candidea paragon of innocence in a sardonically dark and cynical world. In 1976, the Skunk Works began production on a pair of stealth technology demonstrators for the U.S. Air Force named Have Blue in Building 82 at Burbank. The designation "skunk works" or "skunkworks" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, with the task of working on advanced or secret projects. Just look at Fearless Fosdick a brilliant parody of Dick Tracy with all those bullet holes and stuff. Unlike any other strip, and indeed unlike many other pieces of literature, Li'l Abner was more than a satire of the human condition. The name skunkworks came about by accident. During AirVenture 2003, for example, a 4-year-old girl took one look at a picture of an artists drawing of the Lockheed Martin Space plane with the distinctive skunk on the tail and asked if it was a ride at Disneyland because the mascot was obviously Flower from the movie Bambi.. 1,193,226 2. Al Capp was reportedly not pleased with the results, and the series was discontinued after five shorts. Slobbovia is an iceberg, which (as real icebergs do) continually capsizes as its lower portions melt. It even made the cover of Life magazine on March 31, 1952 illustrating an article by Capp titled "It's Hideously True!! Two days later the go-ahead was given to Lockheed to start development and the Skunk Works was born, with Kelly Johnson at the helm. The "Skonk Works" was a dilapidated factory located on the remote outskirts of Dogpatch, in the backwoods of Kentucky. Goldstein, Kalman, "Al Capp and Walt Kelly: Pioneers of Political and Social Satire in the Comics" from, Inge, M. Thomas, "Li'l Abner, Snuffy and Friends" from, This page was last edited on 25 February 2023, at 05:42. Conceived in 1943, the Skunk Works divisiona name inspired by a mysterious locale from the comic strip Li'L Abner was formed by Johnson to build America's first jet fighter. Skunk Works was responsible for several innovative aircraft designs, beginning with the P-38 Lightning in 1939, followed by the P-80 Shooting Star in 1943. The Skunk Works had predicted that the U-2 would have a limited operational life over the Soviet Union. Rounding out the cast were soap opera star Laurette Fillbrandt as Daisy Mae, Hazel Dopheide as Mammy Yokum, and Clarence Hartzell (who was also a prominent actor on Vic and Sade) as Pappy. "He had the touch," Frazetta said of Capp in 2008. Famous quotes containing the words supporting, characters and/or villains: " It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. An attack aircraft that rendered itself invisible to enemy radar. One day, Culver's phone rang and he answered it by saying "Skonk Works, inside man Culver speaking."
Skunk Works Wiki - everipedia.org [55] Kurtzman eventually did spoof Li'l Abner (as "Li'l Ab'r") in 1957, in his short-lived humor magazine, Trump.
About - SKONKWERKS.ORG With John Hodiak in the title role, the Li'l Abner radio serial ran weekdays on NBC from Chicago, from November 20, 1939, to December 6, 1940. Al Capp ended his comic strip with the final gesture of setting a date for Sadie Hawkins Day. Pappy was so lazy and ineffectual, he didn't even bathe himself. Although it lacks the political satire and Broadway polish of the 1959 version, this film gives a fairly accurate portrayal of the various Dogpatch characters up until that time. Ben Rich and "Kelly" Johnson set the origin as June 1943 in Burbank, California; they relate essentially the same chronology in their autobiographies. The term "Skunk Works" came from Al Capp's hillbilly comic strip Li'l Abner, which was popular in the 1940s and '50s. Several years later, the U.S. Air Force became interested in the design, and it ordered the SR-71 Blackbird, a two-seater version of the A-12. (Although it is also the approximate Northern European pronunciation of the name "Joachim".) But in 1947 Capp sued United Feature Syndicate for $14 million, publicly embarrassed UFS in Li'l Abner, and wrested ownership and control of his creation the following year."[51]. After a fatal mid-air collision on the fourth launch, the drones were re-built as D-21Bs, and launched with a rocket booster from B-52s. Beginning in 1944, Li'l Abner was adapted into a series of color theatrical cartoons by Screen Gems for Columbia Pictures, directed by Sid Marcus, Bob Wickersham and Howard Swift. ", "Wal, fry mah hide!"
Li'l Abner - Cast of Characters - Supporting Characters and Villains Lena the Hyena makes a brief animated appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). In 1946 Capp persuaded six of the most popular radio personalities (Frank Sinatra, Kate Smith, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope, Fred Waring and Smilin' Jack Smith) to broadcast a song he'd written for Daisy Mae: (Li'l Abner) Don't Marry That Girl!! Maverick Mach 10 - As Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell reaches Mach 10 in the Darkstara piloted jet powered by the Lockheed Martin Skunk Workscheck out the Lockheed Martin Skunk logo on the tail of the plane in the movie .. The following is a partial list of characteristic expressions that reappeared often in Li'l Abner: Li'l Abner had several toppers on the Sunday page, including[4]. Kurtzman carried that forward and passed it down to a whole new crop of cartoonists, myself included. When Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to tie the knot, it was a major media event. There was an engineer working on the XP-80 team named Irv Culver. Capp derived the family name "Yokum" as a combination of yokel and hokum. Other news is the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president on March 4, 1933 (although Mammy Yokum thinks the President is Teddy Roosevelt), and a picture of Germany's "new leader" Adolf Hitler who claims to love peace while reviewing 20,000 new planes (April 21, 1933). It didnt really matter, since he was firing me about twice a day anyways. [6] Early in the strip's history, Abner's primary goal in the storyline was evading the marital designs of Daisy Mae Scragg, the virtuous, voluptuous, barefoot Dogpatch damsel and scion of the Yokums' blood feud enemies the Scraggs, who were her character's bloodthirsty kinfolk. Li'l Abner made its debut on August 13, 1934, in eight North American newspapers, including the New York Mirror. More recently, Dark Horse Comics reprinted the limited series Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years, in four full-color volumes covering the Sunday pages from 1954 to 1961. By the time EC Comics published Mad #1, Capp had been doing Fearless Fosdick for nearly a decade. [4] It was originally distributed by United Feature Syndicate and, later by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate. Skunk Works history started with the P-38 Lightning in 1939[1][2] and the P-80 Shooting Star in 1943. This aircraft first flew in 1966 and remained in service until 1998. Li'l Abner's success also sparked a handful of comic strip imitators. Just four years later, amidst growing fears over a potential Soviet missile attack on the United States, Skunk Works engineerswho often worked ten hours a day, six days a weekcreated the U-2, the worlds first dedicated spy plane. Wed!! Frigid, faraway Lower Slobbovia was fashioned as a pointedly political satire of backward nations and foreign diplomacy, and remains a contemporary reference. Li'l Abner himself was a mattress tester, and most others were either moonshiners or bootleggers. Li'l Abner provided a whole new template for contemporary satire and personal expression in comics, paving the way for Pogo, Feiffer, Doonesbury and MAD. As the development was very secret, the employees were told to be careful even with how they answered phone calls. Over the years, the Skunk Works division in Palmdale, California, was given a more official moniker, Lockheeds Advanced Development Programs, but its mission remained unchanged: build the worlds most experimental aircraft and breakthrough technologies in abject secrecy at a pace impossible to rival. Besides being fearless, Fosdick was "pure, underpaid and purposeful", according to his creator. Sworn to secrecy, they went by the code name Skunk Works (named in jest after Lil'Abner's "Skonk Works" forest, where musty and rank concoctions were brewed). The formal contract for the XP-80 did not arrive at Lockheed until October 16, 1943; some four months after work had already begun. The secret facility was housed in a large tent at what is now Burbank Airport. Capp had a platoon of assistants in later years, who worked under his direct supervision. And virtually all cartoonists remain content with their diluted share of any merchandising revenue their syndicates arrange.