Barney Google and Snuffy Smith


Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, originally Take Barney Google, F'rinstance, is an American comic strip created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. Since its debut on June 17, 1919, the strip has gained a large international readership, appearing in 900 newspapers in 21 countries. The initial appeal of the strip led to its adaptation to film, animation, popular song, and television. It added several terms and phrases to the English language and inspired the 1923 hit tune "Barney Google " with lyrics by Billy Rose, as well as the 1923 record, "Come On, Spark Plug!"
Barney Google himself, once the star of the strip and a very popular character in his own right, has been almost entirely phased out of the feature. An increasingly peripheral player in his own strip beginning in the late 1930s, Google was officially "written out" in 1954, although he occasionally returned for cameo appearances, often years apart. From a period between 1997 and 2012, Barney Google was not seen in the strip at all. Google was reintroduced to the strip in 2012, and has been seen occasionally since, making several week-long appearances per year.
Snuffy Smith, who was initially introduced as a supporting player in 1934, has now been the comic strip's central character for over 60 years. Nevertheless, the feature is still titled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.
As of June 17, 2019, Barney Google has run for an entire century, making it the third-longest running and uninterrupted comics series of all time, after Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids and Frank O. King's Gasoline Alley. After Gasoline Alley, it is the second-longest running newspaper comic still in syndication and producing new episodes as of 2019.

Characters and story

Barney Google

Like Mutt and Jeff, Barney Google started out on the sports page. First appearing as a daily strip in the sports sections of the Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1919, it was originally titled Take Barney Google, F'rinstance. The title character, a little fellow with big "banjo" eyes, was an avid sportsman and ne'er-do-well involved in poker, horse racing, and prize fights.
The "goggle-eyed, moustached, gloved and top-hatted, bulbous-nosed, cigar-chomping shrimp" was relentlessly henpecked by "a wife three times his size". The formidable Mrs. Lizzie Google, or "the sweet woman", sued Barney for divorce and thereafter virtually disappeared from the strip. By October 1919, the strip was distributed by King Features Syndicate and was published in newspapers across the country.

Spark Plug

Beginning on July 17, 1922, the strip took a momentous turn in popularity with the seemingly innocuous introduction of an endearing race horse named "Spark Plug". Barney's beloved "brown-eyed baby" was a bow-legged nag that seldom raced, and was typically seen almost totally covered by his trademark patched blanket with his name scrawled on the side. Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz was known to his friends as Sparky, a lifelong nickname given to him by his uncle as a diminutive of Barney Google's Spark Plug. Comics historian Don Markstein noted:
In deference to his enormous popularity during this period, the strip was retitled Barney Google and Spark Plug. DeBeck's strip hit its peak of popularity with Spark Plug about the same time the song "Barney Google " by Billy Rose and Con Conrad was sweeping the country. It became one of the best known, most iconic novelty records of the 1920s, and has been recorded by such famous artists as Eddie Cantor and The Happiness Boys, The Andrews Sisters, and Spike Jones:
Other popular characters and concepts introduced in the strip about this time include "Sunshine", Barney's black jockey, a troublesome ostrich named "Rudy", "Sully", a monocled champion wrestler, and the mysterious hooded fraternity "The Order of the Brotherhood of Billy Goats", a parody of mystic secret societies. Their password was "O-K-M-N-X" which, deciphered, stood for a standard breakfast order. Barney was elected "Exalted Angora" in 1928.

Snuffy Smith

In 1934, an even greater change took place when Barney and his horse visited the North Carolina mountains and met a volatile, equally diminutive moonshiner named Snuffy Smith. Hillbilly humor was extremely popular at the time. The strip increasingly focused on the southern Appalachian hamlet of "Hootin' Holler", with Snuffy as the main character. The mountaineer locals are extremely suspicious of any outsiders, referred to as "flatlanders" or even worse, "revenooers".
Snuffy was so popular that his name was added to the strip's title in the late 1930s. Eventually, Barney Google himself left Hootin' Holler in 1954 to return to the city, and was essentially written out of the strip except as a very occasional visitor. Google has appeared extremely rarely in the feature since the mid-1950s, but returned to Hootin' Holler for a visit in a series of strips beginning on February 19, 2012, with occasional visits since. Prior to 2012, Google had not appeared in the strip since January 5, 1997, over 15 years.
Snuffy Smith is an ornery little cuss, sawed-off and shiftless. He lives in a shack, mangles the English language, and has a propensity to shoot at those who displease him. He makes "corn-likker" moonshine in a homemade still and is in constant trouble with the sheriff. He wears a broad-brimmed felt hat almost as tall as he is, has a scraggly mustache and a pair of tattered, poorly patched overalls. He constantly cheats at poker and checkers. He also has some proclivity toward stealing chickens, which led to a brief but effective use of his character in a marketing campaign by the Tyson Foods corporation in the early 1980s. In 1937, he held the post of "Royal Doodle Bug" in the "Varmints" lodge; during this period, the strip heavily employed the catchphrase, "What did the Doodle-Bug say?", an apparent homage to "What did the Woggle-Bug say?" in L. Frank Baum and Walt McDougall's Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz strip of 1904–1905.
Almost all of the characters in the strip are exaggerated hillbillies in the classic burlesque tradition: sharp-tongued gossipy women such as Snuffy's wife "Loweezy"; his baby "Tater"; his nephew "Jughaid"; his neighbors Elviney and "Lukey" ; the sanctimonious Parson; Silas, the owner of the General Store; the ostentatiously-badged Sheriff Tait, and others. Vehicles are rundown jalopies of a seeming 1920s vintage, even in the 1970s and beyond. The characters are drawn so that they appear to be talking out of the sides of their mouths.

Topper strips

''Bughouse Fables''

On December 24, 1920, DeBeck began a gag panel called Bughouse Fables, featuring his observations of ordinary people doing foolish things, which he signed "Barney Google". This daily panel ran until November 13, 1937. DeBeck added Bughouse Fables as an accompanying topper strip to run with Barney Google on Sundays, from January 17 to May 9, 1926.

''Bunky''

On May 16, 1926, DeBeck began another topper strip, originally called Parlor, Bedroom and Sink—but better known as Bunky. Parlor Bedroom and Sink—which evolved into Parlor Bedroom and Sink Starring Bunky, and eventually simply Bunky—is an over-the-top parody of stage melodramas and movie and radio serials that were popular at the time. The title character "" was a hapless waif whose penniless parents, Bunker Hill, Sr. and Bibsy, had given birth to the strangely erudite newborn with the enormous nose on November 13, 1927. The irresponsible Bunker Sr. eventually disappeared from the strip. From then on, pint-sized Bunky was the star, protector, and benefactor of the family. His vocabulary rivaled that of any educated adult.
Arch-nemesis Fagin, introduced in 1928, was as vile and despicable a villain as any Charles Dickens antagonist. He "would steal pennies from a blind man's cup and kick dogs that weren't even in his way. Robbing widows and orphans... was routine for him", according to comics historian Don Markstein, who said the strip popularized the phrase, "Youse is a viper!"
Fantasy author and Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, a big fan of Bunky, was fond of quoting from the strip, as noted by his friend, Tevis Clyde Smith. After DeBeck's death in 1942, Bunky continued for a time under Joe Musial and Fred Lasswell. The series ended on July 18, 1948.

Other toppers

Other toppers featured above Barney Google included: Who's Who, Youse Is a Viper, I Learnt This Trick from the Prince, Knee-Hi-Knoodles, Hill-Billy Ba-Looney, What Did the Doodle Bug Say? and Write a Caption for This Cartoon.

Fred Lasswell

When Barney Google began to lose popularity during the Great Depression, DeBeck introduced a simpler style through artist Fred Lasswell after seeing a poster by Lasswell, then in high school, at a golf tournament at Palma Cia Country Club in Tampa, Florida. Lasswell, who drew cartoons and posters at the McCarthy Ad Agency and for the Tampa Daily Times, was brought in create the Snuffy characters, which by 1934, surpassed Barney Google in popularity.
Lasswell took over the strip, now named Barney Google and Snuffy Smith after DeBeck died in 1942. In 1944 and 1945, Lasswell began featuring Snuffy in guest appearances in Laswell's own Sargent Hashmark comic strip that appeared in the U.S. Marines' Leatherneck Magazine. After the war, Lasswell gained steady increases in distribution, with the strip eventually appearing in more than 1,000 newspapers throughout the world.
In 1962, Lasswell received the Silver Lady Award, and two years later won the Reuben Award and the Best Humor Strip Award from the National Cartoonist's Society. In both 1984 and 1994, he won the Elzie Segar Award, being the only cartoonist who received this award more than once.
Lasswell died in 2001, 16 weeks ahead on the strip, leaving a digital archive containing 35,000 original comic panels and sketches, including over 20,000 daily and 4,000 Sunday strips and about 24,000 original gags.

John R. Rose

In mid-1998, editorial cartoonist John R. Rose began as Lasswell's inking assistant, and he became the strip's cartoonist after Lasswell's death. In addition to being the artist on the strip, Rose is the editorial cartoonist for Ogden Newspapers of Virginia and creates Kids' Home Newspaper, a weekly syndicated puzzle feature for Creators Syndicate. His books including The Bodacious Best of Snuffy Smith, Balls of Fire! More Snuffy Smith Comics, and Snuffy Smith In His Sunday Best. Rose restored Barney Google as a semiregular character; in 2015, Rose won with the Lum and Abner Memorial Award by the National Lum and Abner Society for his contributions to rural humor. In September 2017, Rose was honored with an award at Walt Disney's Hometown Toonfest in Marceline, Missouri, for his contributions to cartooning. John Rose was awarded First Place from the Tennessee Press Association in 2018 for Best Use Of Humor In An Ad for a series wildfire prevention public service newspaper ads featuring Snuffy Smith. He created these "Snuff Out Wildfires Before They Start" ads for the Knoxville News-Sentinel and the Tennessee Press Association after devastating wildfires hit eastern Tennessee. In June 2019, Rose featured Barney Google in a special 100th-birthday series that lasted several weeks. Barney got lost in the funny papers trying to find Hootin' Holler and ended up visiting Dagwood, Popeye, Beetle Bailey, and more on his way to a birthday party that featured many characters from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith who had not been seen in decades. And tribute panels to cartoonists Billy DeBeck and Fred Lasswell.

Origin of "Google"

Following "The Goo-Goo Song", the word "Google" was introduced in 1913 in Vincent Cartwright Vickers' The Google Book, a children's book about the Google and other fanciful creatures who live in Googleland:
Aware of the word's appeal, DeBeck launched his comic strip six years later, and the "goo-goo-googly" lyrics in the 1923 song "Barney Google" focused attention on the novelty of the word.
When mathematician and Columbia University professor Edward Kasner was challenged in the late 1930s to devise a name for a very large number, he asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to suggest a word. Sirotta suggested the word “googol”, and in 1940, Kasner introduced the words "googol" and "googolplex" in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination. Milton Sirotta died in 1980, but author Bunny Crumpacker has speculated that the boy might have been thinking of Google the comic character. This is the term that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in mind when they named their company in 1998, but their fellow graduate student Sean Anderson misspelled "googol" as "google". In 2002, when Page set up a scanning device at Google to test how fast books could be scanned, the first book he scanned was Vickers' The Google Book.

Legacy

DeBeck, who had a gift for coining colorful terms, is credited with introducing several Jazz Age slang words and phrases into the English language—including "sweet mama", "horsefeathers", "heebie-jeebies", "hotsy-totsy", and "Who has seen the doodle bug?" Snuffy's catchphrases "great balls o' fire" and "time's a-wastin'" remain popular to this day.
In DeBeck's memory, the National Cartoonists Society in 1946 introduced the Billy DeBeck Award. In 1963, Lasswell won both the NCS Humor Comic Strip Award and Reuben Award. That same year, he won the society's plaque for Best Humor Strip. In 1984, the society gave him its Elzie Segar Award for outstanding contributions to his profession.
Snuffy Smith currently appears in 21 countries and 11 languages. In 1995, the strip was honored by the U.S. Postal Service; it was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative USPS postage stamps.

Licensing

Snuffy Smith makes a brief appearance in Clifford D. Simak's Out of Their Minds.

Toys and merchandise

Spark Plug captured the nation's hearts and imagination during the 1920s, and became a merchandising bonanza for King Features and Billy DeBeck. "Spark Plug, I am happy to say, has caught on," wrote DeBeck in 1924. "All over the United States you find stuffed Spark Plugs and Spark Plug games and Spark Plug drums and Spark Plug balloons and Spark Plug tin pails. And there is a Spark Plug play on the road. The only thing that is lacking is a Spark Plug grand opera.".
During the mid-1950s, the Louis Marx Toy Company sold four vinyl character figures, two-and-a-half-to-three inches tall, representing Snuffy Smith, Loweezie, Jug Haid and Sut Tattersail.. In 1960, King Features made plans to have Snuffy Smith serving hot dogs and chili at Snuffy's Shantys across the country, the plan of a Columbus, Georgia, franchiser who had hoped to have 700 shanties operating by 1970.
In July 2004, Dark Horse Comics issued a limited-edition figure of Barney Google in a colorful collector tin as statue number 47 in their line of Classic Comic Character figures.

Sheet music

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith each had a spotty history in comic books, starting with the first issue of David McKay's Ace Comics. They appeared in their own comics as well—three issues from Dell Comics in the 1940s, four from Toby Press in the 1950s, one from Gold Key Comics in the 1960s, and six from Charlton Comics in the 1970s. In December, 2015, Snuffy Smith returned to comic books. John Rose wrote and illustrated the comic book story "Hopalong Jughaid" for Charlton Spotlight #9.

Book collections and reprints

Live-action – 1920s

Beginning in 1928, Barney Hellum portrayed Barney Google in a series of silent live-action short films for F.B.O. Pictures, also featuring Philip Davis as Sunshine.
Two low-budget, live-action B-movie features based on the strip were produced at Monogram Pictures in 1942: Private Snuffy Smith and Hillbilly Blitzkrieg. Diminutive actor Bud Duncan portrayed Snuffy in both films, with Cliff Nazarro appearing as Barney in Hillbilly Blitzkrieg.

Animation – 1930s

An animated cartoon Barney Google series in the mid-1930s was produced by the Charles Mintz Screen Gems Studio. Mintz made only four Barney Google cartoons, all released theatrically through Columbia Pictures.
Spree for All is an animated Noveltoon produced by Famous Studios, distributed through Paramount Pictures. It was produced in color, but currently only exists in a French black and white print.

Animation – 1960s

In 1962, King Features Syndicate released 50 six-minute Snuffy Smith cartoons for television, produced by Paramount Cartoon Studios in New York.
The opening credits included a catchy theme song that was specifically composed for the cartoon:
Other King Features properties, such as Beetle Bailey and Krazy Kat, also appeared as rotating segments under the collective title: King Features Trilogy. The series was widely shown in TV syndication, with prolific voice actor Paul Frees providing the voices of both Snuffy and Barney. Ge Ge Pearson also doubled as Loweezy and Jughaid. A number of episodes feature animation by famed animator Jim Tyer.
All shorts directed by Seymour Kneitel except where indicated.
1962
1963
1964