Readers of a certain age -- I'm looking at you, whippersnappers! -- may not recognize or remember Robert Ripley, the cartoonist and amateur anthropologist who created the newspaper panel series Believe It or Not!, which collected odd facts aboout history, personalities, various cultures, and whathaveyou. The Believe It or Not! cartoon began in December 1918 and grew in popularity to have over 80 million readers and eventually encompassed a radio show, films, television shows, comic books, onlive games, a host of museums and atrracrions, as well as a number of best-selling books. (There was even a short-lived series of Believe It or Not! mystery novels written by Stephen Marlowe under the pseudonym "Jason Ridgway.") With Ripley, you gor everything from oddly-shaped vegetables to quirky tribal customs, and from linguistic oddities to strange historical facts. Supposedly everything that Ripley covered had been verified as being true, believe it or not. I tend to believe that most of it was true, in a ho-hum way, but muc had been hyoped up to make a good story.
Here's a compilation of Ripley's cartoons, along with articles and photographs of him around the world checking out odd facts. (Many of the photographs are with him among natives of Papau, New Guineau.) So there's a photo with Ripley holding the 24-foot long tail of a Chinese rooster and also a comment that the Nazi swastika is femalle and means "death and destruction" and so much other stuff you can believe or not.
The compilation was prepared by General Household Utilites as a promotional device, basically hawking their line of Grumow radios, so every few pages we are told, "For Superb World Wide Reception Use Grumow All Wave Radio," and from 13 to 18 we get text on everything you never needed to know about short wave radio. But, hang on, kids, Grumow is not done with us yet. Following an article where Ripley claims to have discovered the Garden of Eden (where there are no apple of fig trees, believe it or not!), we are subjected to detailed product descriptions of eight -- count'em. eight! -- Grumow radios, each super nifty in their own right. Then, because the world does not survive on Grumow radios alone, there is a full page describing the "Grumow Super-Safe Refrigerator"! Are we living in a great time, or what?
When I was a kid, I was one of the 80,000,000 who were fascinated by Believe It or Not! but when I got older I became more of a Believe It or So What sort of person. Now that I am in my dotage, it was fun to relieve a ittle bit of the old Robert Ripley magic -- even if I had to ignore a pile of Grunow radio publicity.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=96931&comicpage=&b=i
I had the oversized paperback collection of the strips published in 1976, by Warner Books. My bullshit detector was triggered even at the age of 11yo or so. https://www.ebay.com/itm/296021549015?gQT=2
ReplyDeleteDepending on which state we were in in the '70s, the Sunday newspaper comics included either Ripley's Believe It or Don't (koff) or Wrigley's Fun Facts (similarly unreliable, but with a blatant chewing gum ad appended).
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