In the cartoons of the 1930s, Big Bad Wolf was portrayed as a master of disguises and his attempts to capture the three pigs quite frequently involved female impersonations as well. In the last pigs vs wolf cartoon, titled Practical Pig (1939), he would even cross-dress as a mermaid... A four-page illustrated story adaptation of this cartoon was published in vol. 4 no. 8 of Mickey Mouse Magazine in May 1939 and the mermaid scene made its cover (*):
Below are scans of the wolf-ish illustrations from this story:
It should also be noted that the plot (and title) of the same cartoon had also formed the basis of a Sunday newspaper comics continuity serialized in 1938 before the cartoon's release. In the Sunday comics version, Big Bad Wolf cross-dresses as a female gypsy rather than a mermaid and that scene had made the cover of an Italian comics album in the same year:
Below are scans of the wolf-ish illustrations from this story:
It should also be noted that the plot (and title) of the same cartoon had also formed the basis of a Sunday newspaper comics continuity serialized in 1938 before the cartoon's release. In the Sunday comics version, Big Bad Wolf cross-dresses as a female gypsy rather than a mermaid and that scene had made the cover of an Italian comics album in the same year:
And below is the cover of a 1939 French edition of Practical Pig:
In the US, there also appeared three different editions of Practical Pig books in 1939-40, none which I have seen myself so far, but one (according to A. Beccatini) appears to be based on the comics version and hence presumably replaces the mermaid scene with the gypsy scene.
(*) I am sorry for the poor condition of the cover I had scanned, but MMM issues are very expensive items in the collectors market and I could afford only a "fair-condition" copy of this issue.. :-(
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3 comments:
I would love to see more scans of the illustrated story from Mickey Mouse Magazine. I have been trying to track that down for years with no luck! I wanted to see if it were like the version from the old storybook version I used to have, now long gone sadly...
Hi.
For you, I've temporarily uploaded the complete set of scans from that story to here: http://taramadeposu.blogspot.com/
as for the book, actually I now realize that there were 3 different editions of PRACTICAL PIG (and will asap revise the last para of this post accordingly):
http://www.immaginariofiorentino.com/albertopage/books.htm.
the last one is currently on sale at ebay (search in Books > Antiquarian & Collectible category)
Wow! Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! (^o^/)
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