Monday, October 30, 2023
Toppers: Dream Land and The Quinn Quintuplets
While Ad Carter's Just Kids main topper was Nicodemus O'Malley for over twenty years, other ancillary toppers came and went more often. Let's talk about two of them today.
Dream Land offers a pretty simple concept -- what sort of dreams do the members of the Just Kids gang have? It was a simple idea but a fun one with a practically endless well of subjects to fill the space. The Dream Land panel ran from December 31 1933* to December 12 1937**, a very respectable four year run.
Dream Land ran with Just Kids in both full and tabloid formats, but our next topper, The Quinn Quintuplets, was used only in the tabloid format, and then only if the newspaper had a lot of unused vertical space. Most papers that ran tabloid sections had small ads or vignettes that ran along the page bottoms, and so there was often no room for The Quinn Quintuplets. It was also unusual in that other Hearst Sunday strips did not offer this sort of extra strip to run along the bottom of the main feature, so I think many newspapers didn't quite know what to make of it. These factors make this topper quite rarely seen. It's a bit of a mystery to me why Ad Carter even bothered with it.
The Quinn Quintuplets trades off the fame of the Dionne Quints, born in May 1934 to a poor French family in Ontario Canada. As the only surviving quintuplets up to that time, the kids became a worldwide sensation. Unfortunately the children were horribly mistreated as a result of their fame, but that wouldn't be generally known for many years. In 1935, with their fame in the ascendency, the whole world was in love with them and couldn't seem to get enough coverage of their young lives. Ad Carter was only one of many who traded off their fame in various ways.
The Quinn Quintuplets topper is rare enough that I do not have a definite start date. My earliest on hand, from the Chicago American, is the January 13 1935 episode. I suspect that the series did not start much before that. I do have a definite end date, though, which is June 9 1935. I know that because the next week the Chicago American ran Just Kids in an all-new tabloid format with no toppers at all. That new format would not last long, but by the time the other toppers were brought back The Quinn Quintuplets were just a memory, and perhaps that memory was confined to the readers of the Chicago American. Has anyone seen this topper running elsewhere?
* Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer.
** Source: Indianapolis Star.
Labels: Topper Features
