On Fontaine Fox, Toonerville, and The Trolley

Of all the major comic strips of the early 20th century, it seems to me none have been quite as forgotten as Toonerville Folks. I’m trying to think why. In its own time (1908-1955) there were screen adaptations, toys, children’s books, and other merch. Unlike other strips of which that can be said, Toonerville seems to have evaporated almost immediately after it was produced. No one took it over after its creator Fontaine Fox (1884-1964) put down his pen. Television did not show the old movie series based on it. There were no later adaptations into musicals. It was never revived as a cartoon, as was true of so many. The insults to its memory go deeper, but we’ll come back to that.

Another likely reason that the strip didn’t stick in the popular mind was that, unlike most comic strips, it didn’t revolve around just one or two or a half dozen main characters. The Toonerville ensemble consisted of an astounding 53 separate ones! Still, some of them were more popular than others and were celebrated in pop culture in their own time.

Fox was from the Louisville area. He began his career as an illustrator and comic artist at the Louisville Herald, and eventually made his way to the Chicago Evening Post. This is where he created his famous strip, based in part on his memories of Louisville, but also a particular trolley line he experienced in Pelham, New York (Westchester, just over the border from the Bronx). Central to Fox’s strip was the Toonerville Trolley, operated by a pipe-smoking geezer named the Skipper, who took his own sweet time about opening up the throttle on his rickety, second hand conveyance. He’d jabber with the passengers, and stop along the way for all sorts of inappropriate reasons, and the passengers would just have to be okay with it. This leads to another reason that the strip didn’t continue, and wasn’t revived — trolleys went the way of the dodo, at least for a while. In most cases they were replaced by local bus lines in the early post-war period. In recent times some scenic trolleys and light rail service have been restored in some cities, but for all practical purposes, the entire premise of the strip was extinct at the time Fontaine Fox passed from the scene.

Another interesting fact about Toonerville Folks is that it was a one-panel strip. It was just one big panel with all sorts of things going on in the same panoramic, aerial view, as one finds in kids books by Richard Scary, or Where’s Waldo? The fun of it was casting your eye around and seeing everything that was happening simultaneously. This was the format of the daily strip, that is. The Sunday version was more conventionally multi-paneled, and would have more narrative. Besides the Skipper, other popular characters included The Powerful Katrinka, a large battle-axe of a woman, the ornery Mr. Bang, and a rascally urchin named Mickey McGuire, who wound up having the longest reach of all.

The screen adaptations are how I initially learned about the strip. There was a series of silent comedy films based on Toonerville Folks made between 1920 and 1922. 17 Toonerville comedies were made, seven of which are said to survive. Dan Mason played the Skipper in the films; a 6’3″ actress named Vilna Hervey was The Powerful Katrinka.

I’d be shocked if the Harold Lloyd comedy Speedy (1928) wasn’t inspired in part by Toonerville. Though it’s set in New York City, the last horse-drawn trolley, operated by an old dude named “Pop” (Bert Woodruff) is central to the story.

From 1927 to 1936 there was another series of shorts based on the series, and this is the one that had the longest reach. These Our Gang-style films starred Fox’s character Mickey McGuire. The kid who played him in the films, Joe Yule, Jr, actually changed his named to Mickey McGuire in association with the role. He tweaked it one final time after the series ended — to Mickey Rooney. Rooney died in 2014, so you could say that he was the longest lasting Toonerville artifact, even if the public forgot where he had originally come from.

In 1936 there was also a series of three Toonerville animated cartoon shorts produced by Van Beuren Studios.

Now here’s a thing that put a bee in my bonnet this morning. Pelham now boasts a Toonerville Music Festival, which (as their website touts) was named after the “infamous Toonerville Trolley“. Mentioned nowhere on the site or in any of the promotional materials: the comic strip, or the man who created it. Okay, marketing people: I guess you’re doing your job if you sell tickets to this thing. My question for you is, why bother calling it that?

For more on silent comedy history please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook.