Toppers: Foozy Limericks

 

Alley Oop went through its fair share of toppers in the 1930s and 40s, several of them offering a starring role to Foozy, the Oop character who always spoke in rhyme. Depending on how you feel about that conceit, extra Foozy on Sundays might make your day or ruin it. 

Foozy Limericks was a panel feature and contest in which readers are invited to submit their ideas for the last line of a Foozy rhyme. You didn't have the leisure to mull it over, because V.T. Hamlin wanted your submissions by the end of the coming week. Production schedules for colour Sundays being six weeks or more, contest winners could not be announced in the strip itself, but were instead sent as press releases to NEA-subscribing newspapers. The quality of the submissions must have been plain awful, because those press releases always gave the names of the prize-winners but never the lines that they had submitted. 

Foozy Limericks didn't last very long. It debuted on February 21 1937, and the last contest was on May 16* of that same year. It was replaced by a cut-out feature that we'll cover here one of these days.

* Source: Ohio State University NEA archives.