Little Orphan Annie

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Little Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie, America's most popular hapless waif for over three score and ten years, first showed up in U.S. newspaper comic sections in 1924. The brainchild of cartoonist Harold Gray, Annie was inspired in part by the sort of feisty orphans America's Sweetheart Mary Pickford had been playing on silent movie screens for over a decade as well as by the pluck-and-luck lads Horatio Alger, Jr.had introduced in his novels in the previous century. The conservative and eccentric Gray sent his redheaded, blank-eyed, little orphan on a relentless odyssey through America, commencing in the Roaring Twenties, continuing through the Great Depression of the 1930s, into the grim years of World War II, through the Cold War, and into the restless 1960s. Along the way he created scores of memorable characters, all drawn in his bleak, shadowy, and highly individual cartoon style. Chief among them were the avuncular Daddy Warbucks, the almost supernatural Punjab, and Sandy, one of the most faithful and long-lived dogs in comics history. Sandy's frequent "Arf" became a national catchword and was even quoted in a song about Annie.

A former assistant to Sydney Smith on the popular The Gumps, Gray had learned a good deal about melodrama and suspense. Gray began his own strip in the traditional style for that sort of tale, showing the plucky Annie leaving a bleak orphanage when she was adopted by a wealthy business tycoon named Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks. As Dickens helped establish nearly a hundred years earlier, an orphan's lot is often not a happy or stable one, and Annie didn't remain happily secure in the Warbucks household for very long. Soon she was on the road, unjustly separated from her benefactor and accompanied by the loyal Sandy. The pair roamed the country, encountering both kindly souls who took them in and consummate scoundrels who set them on the run again. During the Depression of the 1930s, Gray was one of the few comic strip artists who dealt directly with life among those who were hard hit by the economic woes of the period. Despite his long-term dislike for President Roosevelt, Gray was not the sort of conservative who blamed the poor and homeless for their plight. Annie spent considerable time in the lower depths, never losing her belief that hard work and honesty would win the day. Unlike most of the unemployed and homeless she encountered, the admirable orphan was frequently rescued and returned to upper class comfort by Daddy Warbucks. One of Gray's greatest challenges was to come up with new and plausible ways for the moppet to become parted once more from her surrogate parent.

During World War II, Daddy Warbucks turned his factory over to the government and became a lieutenant colonel in, for some reason, the British Army. On the home front Annie organized the Junior Commandos, who kept an eye out for spies and saboteurs but also, more practically, collected waste paper and scrap metal. "This is war, kids," Annie told her young colleagues, " our war, just as much, or more maybe, than anybody else's—we're givin' all we can to help those who are givin' ever'thing for us!"

Little Orphan Annie branched out into other media soon after its inception. The Cupples & Leon Company began issuing hardcover reprint books of the strip in 1926. In the 1930s came Big Little Books and various comic book appearances. A kids' daily radio serial took to the air in the spring of 1931, broadcast initially out of NBC's Blue Network studios in Chicago. Ovaltine sponsored the show for nearly a decade and sold many thousand shakeup mugs for just a dime and the aluminum seal from inside a tin of their product. There were several styles of mugs, but all had a decal of Annie, usually accompanied by Sandy, on the side. Annie hit the movies in 1932, when RKO made Little Orphan Annie with Mitzi Green in the title role and slow burn comedian Edgar Kennedy as Daddy Warbucks. In all these venues Annie frequently uttered her favorite, and famous, exclamation—"Leapin' lizards!" 1977 saw the unsinkable orphan on Broadway in the hit musical Annie, which was later turned into a movie.

Gray died in 1968, thus never getting to see his little monster, as he often called her, sing and dance on the stage. His longtime assistant, Bob Leffingwell, carried on the strip for a short time and was then replaced by a series of others. Longest on the job were artist Tex Blaisdell and writer Elliot Caplin. In 1974 reprints of old Gray continuities began running. Finally at the end of 1979, and due to the popularity of the musical, Leonard Starr was brought in to write and draw a new version. Now titled simply Annie, it continued to run at the end of the twentieth century, although not as many newspapers carry the strip as when Harold Gray was in his prime.

—Ron Goulart