When Did "L'il Abner" Bit the Dust?

[Lumpy]

@kunilou

Capp eventually got old and bitter and focused his outrage more and more on the young and the left. The strip went downhill in the 1960s. But his strips from the late 1940s and 1950s are classics.

A generation-gap thing hit quite a few classic comics in the early 70s. The comics’ authors were an older generation, and the Counter-Culture was at it’s peak. Perhaps even worse off than L’il Abner was Dick Tracy: a strip championing the forces of law and order in 1972?

@kaylasdad99

I recall when Mountain Dew was first introduced on a national level in the mid-Sixties (it appears to have existed regionally before that). The mascots were hillbillies drinking out of moonshine jugs. The tagline was “Yahoo! it’s Mountain Dew!” and the slogan was “It’ll tickle yore innards!”

I seem to recall that there was a brand of lemon-lime soft drink actually named “Kickapoo Joy Juice”, with the Abner characters as mascots.

[RealityChuck]

@Northern_Piper

and there were cross-over episodes between Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, if I remember correctly.

Probably. And Green Acres took place in Hooterville, which was the nearest town to Petticoat Junction. Sam Drucker appeared as a regular in both shows. And Paul Henning produced those shows and also Hillbillies, so he clearly knew he had a good thing with variations on a theme.

But both “fish out of water” and “country bumpkin” comedies had a long history before Abner.

Dick Tracy of the 60s did have issues with the counterculture, but managed to handle it straight. It didn’t particularly editorialize in the way it portrayed things. The hippies might be bad guys, but no more than any of Tracy’s other foes. It was similar to the 60s Dragnet (which many in the counterculture loved – as a comedy).

Capp not only hated hippies, but he was not particularly subtle or funny about it. Think Mallard Fillmore.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@RealityChuck

Capp not only hated hippies, but he was not particularly subtle or funny about it. Think Mallard Fillmore.

Think his prototypical hippie character, Joanie Phony.

[kenobi_65]

@RealityChuck

Probably. And Green Acres took place in Hooterville, which was the nearest town to Petticoat Junction. Sam Drucker appeared as a regular in both shows. And Paul Henning produced those shows and also Hillbillies, so he clearly knew he had a good thing with variations on a theme.

Also, Bea Benederet, who played Jed’s cousin (and Jethro’s mother) Pearl in early episodes of Beverly Hillbillies, then played Kate, the mother, on Petticoat Junction.

[BrainGlutton]

@Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew

What I remember hearing at the time was rather more sordid, but could have been just idle rumors.

What I remember hearing was that the bitch set him up. He got caught with his dick in a co-ed’s mouth. The scandal was not that she was married but that even accepting a bj constituted the crime of sodomy, then and there. She did it for political reasons, Capp by that time having turned against the whole set of student anti-war movements and youth/hippie counterculture.

Capp, who by all accounts was contrary and contentious by nature, was a maverick politically. He characteristically went against the grain. He was a liberal during the conservative 1950s, only to switch to conservative during the liberal, hippie-era 1960s.

Capp and his family lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard during the entire Vietnam protest era. The turmoil that Americans were watching on their TV sets was happening live - right in his own neighborhood. Campus radicals and “hippies” inevitably became one of Capp’s favorite targets in the sixties. Alongside his long-established caricatures of right-wing, big business types such as General Bullmoose and J. Roaringham Fatback, Capp began spoofing counterculture icons such as Joan Baez (in the character of Joanie Phoanie, a wealthy folksinger who offers an impoverished orphanage ten thousand dollars’ worth of “protest songs”.)[12] The sequence implicitly labeled Baez a limousine liberal, a charge she took to heart, as detailed years later in her 1987 autobiography, And A Voice To Sing With. Another target was Senator Ted Kennedy, parodied as Senator O. Noble McGesture, resident of “Hyideelsport.” The town name is a play on Hyannisport, Massachusetts, where a number of the Kennedy clan have lived.

He also satirized student political groups. The Youth International Party (Y.I.P.) and Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) emerged in Li’l Abner as S.W.I.N.E. (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything!) Capp became a popular public speaker on college campuses, where he reportedly relished hecklers. He attacked militant antiwar demonstrators, both in his personal appearances and in his strip. In an April 1969 letter to Time, Capp insisted, “The students I blast are not the dissenters, but the destroyers—the less than 4% who lock up deans in washrooms, who burn manuscripts of unpublished books, who make combination pigpens and playpens of their universities. The remaining 96% detest them as heartily as I do”.[13]

Capp’s increasingly controversial remarks at his campus speeches and during TV appearances cost him his semi-regular spot on the Tonight Show. His contentious public persona during this period was captured on a late sixties comedy LP called Al Capp On Campus. The album features his interaction with students at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) on such topics as “sensitivity training”, “humanitarianism”, “abstract art” (Capp hated it), and of course “student protest”. The cover features a cartoon drawing by Capp of wildly dressed, angry hippies carrying protest signs with slogans like “End Capp Brutality”, “Abner and Daisy Mae Smoke Pot”, “Capp Is Over [30, 40, 50- all crossed out] the Hill!!”, and “If You Like Crap, You’ll Like Capp!”

The cartoonist visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Bed-In for Peace, and their testy exchange later appeared in the documentary film Imagine. Introducing himself with the words “I’m a dreadful Neanderthal fascist. How do you do?”, Capp sardonically congratulated Lennon and Ono on their Two Virgins nude album cover: “I think that everybody owes it to the world to prove they have pubic hair. You’ve done it, and I tell you that I applaud you for it.” Lennon sang an impromptu version of his The Ballad of John and Yoko song with a slightly revised, but nonetheless prophetic lyric: "Christ, you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify Capp! "[14]

According to an apocryphal tale from this era, in a televised face-off, either Capp (on the Dick Cavett Show) or (more commonly) conservative talk show host Joe Pyne (on his own show) is supposed to have taunted iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa about his long hair, asking Zappa if he thought he was a girl. Zappa is said to have replied, “You have a wooden leg; does that make you a table?” (Both Capp and Pyne had wooden legs). The story is considered an urban legend.

[diku]

@Lumpy

A generation-gap thing hit quite a few classic comics in the early 70s. The comics’ authors were an older generation, and the Counter-Culture was at it’s peak. Perhaps even worse off than L’il Abner was Dick Tracy: a strip championing the forces of law and order in 1972?

I seem to recall that there was a brand of lemon-lime soft drink actually named “Kickapoo Joy Juice”, with the Abner characters as mascots.

Yep, here 'tis: http://www.drsoda.com/kijoyju.html. Can’t remember if I’ve had it, but I do see it from time to time in shops with a lot of different sodas.

[Siam_Sam]

@Koxinga

I wonder what the deal was with representations of hillbilly culture in the mid-60s. Were the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Mayberry RFD and others all entirely derivative of Lil’ Abner, or was there something else going on that there zeitgeist?

And let’s not forget the mother of them all: Lum and Abner.

As for Kickapoo Joy Juice, It was simply Mountain Dew at the Dogpatch park. I don’t recall seeing it anywhere else outside of there. Perhaps it was regional?

[Ellis_Aponte_Jr]

@Koxinga

I wonder what the deal was with representations of hillbilly culture in the mid-60s. Were the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Mayberry RFD and others all entirely derivative of Lil’ Abner, or was there something else going on that there zeitgeist?

1961 to 1965 was also the centennial of the US Civil War, which probably fed into it… Elvis Presley was in Kissin’ Cousins in '64… the Deep South was constantly in the news because of the black Civil Rights battles… President Johnson was trying to eliminate poverty in Appalachia…

[Johnny_L.A]

I vaguely remember reading Li’l Abner in the early-70s. I didn’t get into it at the time. A while ago it occurred to me that cartoons were a popular motif for nose art in WWII, and Li’l Abner characters made their appearances; so I decided to see if I could get into the Zeitgeist of the series. I picked up several volumes of Li’l Abner Dailies, collections of the comic strips by year. I haven’t read all of them yet (there are 27 volumes, and I have fewer than half).

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@ralph124c

As I recall, it was a fairly inscrutable strip, featuring hillbillies running around in rags, eating fish sanwiches, and drinking moonshine.

I don’t remember the fish sandwiches, but I do remember a mid-60s story arc centered around something like 5,280 ham sandwiches.

[Kent_Clark]

@Ellis_Aponte_Jr

1961 to 1965 was also the centennial of the US Civil War, which probably fed into it… Elvis Presley was in Kissin’ Cousins in '64… the Deep South was constantly in the news because of the black Civil Rights battles… President Johnson was trying to eliminate poverty in Appalachia…

Don’t overthink it. Paul Henning had the plots for both Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres back when he was writing for radio. If there was a proximate cause itr was Andy Griffith, whose comedy was a big hit in the 1950s, which led to several successful movies, which led to The Andy Griffith Show, which proved that Americans would laugh with slow-talkin’ rural folk, not just at them.

[BrainGlutton]

@Koxinga

I wonder what the deal was with representations of hillbilly culture in the mid-60s. Were the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Mayberry RFD and others all entirely derivative of Lil’ Abner, or was there something else going on that there zeitgeist?

Li’l Abner ran from 1934 to 1977. But I do recall reading a commentary on The Beverly Hillbillies to the effect that it reflected something about the American zeitgeist, to wit, that the unprecedented broadly shared prosperity of the 1950s, and the spread of mass communication, brought a lot of hillbillies or equivalents – Americans who had lived culturally isolated in backwaters, and were not very sophisticated – to a new level of prosperity and cultural contact with the mainstream, causing a sense of dislocation and culture shock. Li’l Abner is not about that, but TBH is.

This happened all over the country, but especially in the South, which after WWII was thoroughly electrified, air-conditioned, industrialized, and heavily colonized by Yankees.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Pogo was a bit like Abner, with a cast of funny animals.

[DocCathode]

Just wanted to chime in and say I love Lil Abner. It was fast paced, funny and(in the good years) sweet.

I also have Capp’s Hardhat’s Story Book. The man was filled with at least as much hate as Fred Phelps.

ETA

Is the OP confusing Abner with Snuffy Smith? In Abner, there were well developed characters and actual story arcs. Smith is just various jokes about being hillbillies.