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An attack aircraft that rendered itself invisible to enemy radar. After this, Capp simply expanded Li'l Abner by another row, and filled the rest of the space with a page-wide title panel and a small panel called Advice fo' Chillun. The Creator of Li'l Abner Tells Why His Hero Is (SOB!) A much more successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip, also entitled Li'l Abner, opened on Broadway at the St. James Theater on November 15, 1956, and had a long run of 693 performances,[68] followed by a nationwide tour. [4] The "Skonk Works" was a dilapidated factory located on the remote outskirts of Dogpatch, in the backwoods of Kentucky. The logo, which features a skunk standing on its hind feet with its front legs folded on his chest and smiling confidently, has generated some confusion for generations born well after LilAbner was pulled from the comic pages. The name skunkworks originates from a cartoon series called " Li'l Abner " by Al Capp. Like the Coconino County depicted in George Herriman's Krazy Kat and the Okefenokee Swamp of Walt Kelly's Pogo, and, most recently and famously, The Simpsons' "Springfield", Dogpatch's distinctive cartoon landscape became as identified with the strip as any of its characters. The razor-jawed title character (Li'l Abner's "ideel") was perpetually ventilated by flying bullets until he resembled a slice of Swiss cheese. Comic dialects were also devised for offbeat British characters like H'Inspector Blugstone of Scotland Yard (who had a Cockney accent) and Sir Cecil Cesspool (whose speech was a clipped, uppercrust King's English). On paper, the specifications read like works of pure fantasy: a spy plane capable of taking crystal-clear photographs from 70,000 feet. His appearances on NBC's The Tonight Show spanned three emcees; Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. A customer would go to the Skunk Works with a request, and on a handshake the project would begin no contracts in place, no official submittal process. As the development was very secret, the employees were told to be careful even with how they answered phone calls. Li'l Abner Yokum was a hillbilly who lived in Dogpatch somewhere in the mountains. Slipping past Iraqi radar on the morning of January 17, 1991, Lockheeds Nighthawk bombed thirty-seven critical targets across Baghdad, a surgical strike that led, in just forty-three days, to the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm. In 1976, the Skunk Works began production on a pair of stealth technology demonstrators for the U.S. Air Force named Have Blue in Building 82 at Burbank. I'll never knock his talent."[56]. "He had the touch," Frazetta said of Capp in 2008. They included Andy Amato, Harvey Curtis, Walter Johnson and, notably, a young Frank Frazetta, who penciled the Sunday continuity from studio roughs from 1954 to the end of 1961 before his fame as a fantasy artist. A total of six Collier trophies, the most prestigious award in the aeronautics industry, have been collected by the Skunk Works division since 1943, but its quite possible the divisions most impressive legacy has yet to be written. Li'l Abner featured a whole menagerie of allegorical animals over the years each one was designed to satirically showcase another disturbing aspect of human nature. A lifelong chain-smoker, he happily plugged Chesterfield cigarettes; he appeared in Schaeffer fountain pen ads with his friends Milton Caniff and Walt Kelly; pitched the Famous Artists School (in which he had a financial interest) along with Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Virgil Partch, Willard Mullin and Whitney Darrow, Jr; and, though a professed teetotaler, he personally endorsed Rheingold Beer, among other products. Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}343653N 1180707W / 34.614734N 118.118676W / 34.614734; -118.118676. Li'l Abner: Al Capp, Skunk Works, Dogpatch USA, Shmoo, The designation "skunk works" or "skunkworks" is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and. A rich guy falls in love with Daisy Mae. In late 1959, Skunk Works received a contract to build five A-12 aircraft at a cost of $96 million. However, due to its enormous popularity and the numerous fan letters he received, Capp made it a tradition in the strip every November, lasting four decades. [13] The first YP-38 was built there before the team moved back to Lockheed's main factory a year later. Capp, a lifelong chain smoker, died from emphysema two years later at age 70, at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire, on November 5, 1979. Two days later the go-ahead was given to Lockheed to start development and the Skunk Works was born, with Kelly Johnson at the helm. Kitchen is currently[when?] When Kelly Johnson formed his team of engineers and manufacturing experts to rapidly and secretly complete the XP-80, the war effort was in full swing and there was no available space at the Lockheed facility for the project. Unlike any other strip, and indeed unlike many other pieces of literature, Li'l Abner was more than a satire of the human condition. Al Capp's life and career are the subjects of a new life-sized mural commemorating his 100th birthday, displayed in downtown Amesbury, Massachusetts. More recently, Dark Horse Comics reprinted the limited series Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years, in four full-color volumes covering the Sunday pages from 1954 to 1961. There was not much industry in Dogpatch. In one storyline Dogpatch's "Cannonball Express" train, after 1,563 tries, finally delivers its "cargo" to Dogpatch citizens on October 12, 1946, Receiving a 13-year stack of newspapers, Li'l Abner's family realizes that the Great Depression is on and that banks should close; they race to take their money out of the bank before realizing they have no money to begin with. The story concerns Daisy Mae's efforts to catch Li'l Abner on Sadie Hawkins Day. The next comic frame says: HIDE FRIED, "Neither the strip's shifting political leanings nor the slide of its final few years had any bearing on its status as a classic; and in 1995, it was recognized as such by the, "ABNER" was the name given to the first codebreaking computer used by the, The original Dogpatch is a historical part of San Francisco dating back to the 1860s that escaped the, Li'l Abner, Daisy Mae, Wolf Gal, Earthquake McGoon, Lonesome Polecat, Hairless Joe, Sadie Hawkins, Silent Yokum and Fearless Fosdick all found their way onto the, Al Capp always claimed to have effectively created the, Li'l Abner has one odd design quirk that has puzzled readers for decades: the part in his hair always faces the viewer, no matter which direction Abner is facing. Since this movie predates their comic strip marriage, Abner makes a last-minute escape (natcherly!). Today, the Skunk Works appears to be working on another unconventional project to build a (likely unmanned) hypersonic spy/bomber jet unofficially dubbed the SR-72. (Titanium supply was largely dominated by the Soviet Union, so the CIA set up a dummy corporation to acquire source material.) Her moniker was a pun on both salami and Salome. Skunk Works - Wikipedia As a result, the XP-38 was the first 400mph fighter in the world. Ironically, this highly irregular policy has led to the misconception that his strip was "ghosted" by other hands. ), In the late 1940s, newspaper syndicates typically owned the copyrights, trademarks and licensing rights to comic strips. It all turned out to be a collaborative hoax, however cooked up by Capp and his longtime pal Saunders as an elaborate publicity stunt. Capp introduced Tiny to fill the bachelor role played reliably for nearly two decades by Li'l Abner himself, until his fateful 1952 marriage threw the carefully orchestrated dynamic of the strip out of whack for a period. When Capp created the event, it wasn't his intention to have it occur annually on a specific date, because it inhibited his freewheeling plotting. (Upon his retirement in 1977, Capp declared Mammy to be his personal favorite of all his characters.) In his essay "The Decline of the Comics", (Canadian Forum, January 1954) literary critic Hugh MacLean classified American comic strips into four types: daily gag, adventure, soap opera, and "an almost lost comic ideal: the disinterested comment on life's pattern and meaning." "Capp had always advocated a more activist agenda for the Society, and he had begun in December 1949 to make his case in the Newsletter as well as at the meetings," wrote comics historian R. C. Kelly Johnson set them apart from the rest of the factory in a walled-off section of one building, off limits to all but those involved directly. The term "Skunk Works" came from Al Capp's hillbilly comic strip Li'l Abner, which was popular in the 1940s and '50s. The comic strip had 60 million readers in over 900 American newspapers and 100 foreign papers in 28 countries. For the game featuring the. Sworn to secrecy, they went by the code name Skunk Works (named in jest after Lil'Abner's "Skonk Works" forest, where musty and rank concoctions were brewed). Capp turned that world upside-down by routinely injecting politics and social commentary into Li'l Abner," wrote comics historian Rick Marschall in America's Great Comic Strip Artists (1989). During AirVenture 2003, for example, a 4-year-old girl took one look at a picture of an artists drawing of the Lockheed Martin Space plane with the distinctive skunk on the tail and asked if it was a ride at Disneyland because the mascot was obviously Flower from the movie Bambi.. Ironing Pappy's trousers fell under her wifely duties as well, although she didn't bother with preliminaries like waiting for Pappy to remove them first. And virtually all cartoonists remain content with their diluted share of any merchandising revenue their syndicates arrange. [6] The range modifications were performed in Lockheed's Building 304, starting with 100 P-38F models on April 15, 1942. Frigid, faraway Lower Slobbovia was fashioned as a pointedly political satire of backward nations and foreign diplomacy, and remains a contemporary reference. Aquatech | Will Sarni on why we need a Skunk Works in water Capp also excelled at product endorsement, and Li'l Abner characters were often featured in mid-century American advertising campaigns. [18] The company also holds several registrations of it with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. His philosophy is spelled out in his 14 Rules and Practices. One month after the ATSC and Lockheed meeting, the young engineer Clarence L. Kelly Johnson and other associate engineers hand delivered the initial XP-80 proposal to the ATSC. [57] "When he retired Li'l Abner, newspapers ran expansive articles and television commentators talked about the passing of an era. Like Mammy Yokum and the other "wimmenfolk" in Dogpatch, Daisy Mae did all the work, domestic and otherwise while the menfolk generally did nothing whatsoever. Others include double whammy, skunk works and Lower Slobbovia. Lockheed was chosen to develop the jet because of its past interest in jet development and its previous contracts with the Air Force. During the entirety of the Cold War, the Skunk Works was located in Burbank, California, on the eastern side of Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport (341203N 1182107W / 34.200768N 118.351826W / 34.200768; -118.351826). He hosted at least five television programs between 1952 and 1972 three different talk shows called The Al Capp Show (twice), Al Capp, Al Capp's America (a live "chalk talk", with Capp providing a barbed commentary while sketching cartoons), and a game show called Anyone Can Win. Famous quotes containing the words supporting, characters and/or villains: " It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. Not taking anything away from Kurtzman, who was brilliant himself, but Capp was the source for that whole sense of satire in comics. Schertz, TX | Official Website Brown, Rodger, "Dogpatch USA: The Road to Hokum" article, Last edited on 25 February 2023, at 05:42, explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, 418 Search and Rescue Operational Training Squadron, "This Day in Jewish History / Al Capp, Choleric Creator of Li'l Abner, Dies an Embittered Man", Li'l Abner "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Daisy Mae "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Mammy Yokum "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Pappy Yokum "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Honest Abe "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Tiny Yokum "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Marryin' Sam "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Kickapoo Joy Juice page at deniskitchen.com, Joe Btfsplk "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary Michael Schumacher, Denis Kitchen Google Books, General Bullmoose "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Earthquake McGoon "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Evil-Eye Fleegle "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Sadie Hawkins "biography" at deniskitchen.com, Fearless Fosdick "biography" at deniskitchen.com, The Shmoo "biography" at deniskitchen.com. [28] In Al Capp's own words, Dogpatch was "an average stone-age community nestled in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills somewhere." I am proud to see the classic logo - my father worked for more than 30 years at Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Projects, known as Skunk Works. Through Li'l Abner, the American comic strip achieved unprecedented relevance in the postwar years, attracting new readers who were more intellectual, more informed on current events, and less likely to read the comics (according to Coulton Waugh, author of The Comics, 1947). "It's Jack Jawbreaker!" Contest (1951), the Roger the Lodger Contest (1964) and many others. Trusted to solve critical national needs for our warfighters, the Skunk Works never shies away from seemingly unsolvable challenges and has a reputation for solving hard problems quickly, quietly and affordably.