Buck O'Rue might well be completely forgotten today if it weren't for the names of the creators who worked on it. Dick Huemer, writer, was a legendary animator and writer whose credits extend as far back as the primordial days of the cartoon short in 1916. He created Bonzo the dog for the Fleisher brothers, and his main claim to fame is his animation and writing work on many of the classic Disney animated shorts and features.
Paul Murry, artist on Buck O'Rue, is a fan-favorite cartoonist whose credits include appearances in nearly 400 issues of the Walt Disney's Comics & Stories comic book.
Is the strip up to the high expectations a Disney aficionado might bring to it? Well, in my humble opinion this western comedy strip is rather pedestrian and the humor is lowest common denominator. Nice art, though. But I criticize secure in the knowledge that nothing I could say about the strip would dampen the zeal of the Disney completist one little bit.
Buck O'Rue started on 1/15/1951 and ran until sometime in 1953 (but I've never actually seen any that postdate late 1952). Even if the quality of the strip were great, it would have had an uphill road to success since it was syndicated by Lafave Newspaper Features, a syndicate whose only major success was Clifford McBride's Napoleon.
Can anyone supply an end date for Buck O'Rue?
Hello, Allan---Just for the record, Bonzo the Dog was a British creation, by G.E.Studdy. For Fleischer, Huemer created Koko the Clown's sidekick Dog "Fitz", and for Charles Mintz he created "Toby the Pup", as well as the more successful "Scrappy" cartoons. ---Cole Johnson.
ReplyDeleteHi Cole -
ReplyDeleteSay, that post is three years old. Pretty long for such an egregious error to hang around without comment or correction! I don't recall after all these eons where I picked up the tidbit about the dog -- wouldn't it more likely be Betty Boop's dog Bimbo, which name is a heck of a lot closer to Bonzo than this Fitz or Toby that you mention? Or is Fitz the same dog renamed? I'm not fool enough to cast aspersions on your encyclopedic animation knowledge -- I seek only to learn oh cel master!
--Allan
Hello, Allan---Actually, "Bimbo" came to be after Huemor left the Fleischer studios, in early 1930. He [re-dates Betty Boop, she appearing first in one of his cartoons. He was a psuedo=fake Mickey Mouse at first, as all the other studios were wont to do.----Cole Johnson
ReplyDelete