LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE: TIN BOX (1934)

When I was very young, for reasons I still cannot explain, I was enamored with Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie.  The fact that I could not explain how Annie was able to see without pupil in her eyes bothered me, but did not put me off from the plucky little 10-year-old redhead.  I eventually grew out of that stage -- perhaps later than I should have.

Little Orphan Annie, the comic strip created by Harold Gray, debuted in the Daily News of New York on August 5, 1924, and continued until June 13, 2010.  the strip followed Annie, her dog Sandy ("Arf!"}, her benefactor "Daddy" Warbucks, and Warbucks' cohorts, Punjab and the Asp, as well as  Mr. Am ("a bearded sage, millions of years old, whose supernatural powerss included bringing the dead back to life") in a thinly veiled  right-wing landscape that excoriated labor unions, the New Deal (damn that government interference in private enterprise,, anyway!), and communism and socialism.  (At one time, Daddy Warbucks died briefly from despair at the 1944 election of FDR; the story was retrofitted in 1945 (at the time of Roosevelt's death) to bring Daddy Warbucks back from a "coma.")

Annie became extremely popular.  a 1937 poll raced her as the most popular comic strip character of her time.  Annie appeared in a radio series and in two films in the 1930s, a noted Broadway musical with two sequel musicals and a "junior" stage version, three film adaptations of the Broadway musical, two direct-to-video films, an animated Christmas film, various book collections beginning in 1926 and continuing to multivolume reprints of The Complete Little Orphan Annie, beginning in 2008.  And there have been ties-ins, toys, premiums, and other merchandising of the character over the years, as well as various Big Little Books and other children's volumes.  Annie was even honored with a US stamp.

Although the strip ended in 2010 with an unresolved cliff-hanger, Annie still lives on.  Annie and the gang have made a series of guest appearances in the Dick Tracy comic strip since 2013, the last appearance (for now) being in 2019.

The Little Orphan Annie radio show began on Chicago's WGN in 1930 (exact date uncertain) and moved to the NBC Blue Network on April 6, 1931, airing until April 26, 1943 as a fifteen-minute late afternoon show.   In 1931, coast-to-coast networks had not been established, so the program used two different casts -- one in Chicago and one in San Francisco.  Shirley bell played Annie in Chicago and Floy Margaret Hughes played her on the West Coast; when coast-to-coast networking became available in 1933, the Chicago cast was used.

The show was the first radio early afternoon children's series \, and proved to be extremely po;uar with the younger set.  The show took place in the rural community of Tompkin's Corners, where Annie had been adopted by the Silo Family.  Annie, aided by Sandy and her young friend Joe Corntassle (played in later episodes by Mel Torme), took on the evildoers n her small town.. Later, she expanded her reach by fighting evil throughout the world, aided by other crime-fighting children.

Brought to you by Ovaltine.  The familiar theme song was sung, variously, by Pierre Andre (who was also the show's announcer) or Lawrence Salerno (a WGN staff baritone).  Leonard Slavo played the organ.  Among the writers for the show were crime novelist, pulp writer, and scriptwriter "Day Keene" (Gunard Hjertstedt), the head writer for Little Orphan Annie and Kitty Keene, Inc., and Ferrin Fraser, who co-wrote five books with noted animal hunter and collector Frank Buck.

Enjoy this little fifteen-minute snippet from the adventures of Little Orphan Annie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw3sSoM63eQ